Bringing Godzilla to the Village and Other Devastations: Translating the Poetry of Víctor Cabrera
by James Richie
In these poems, poet Víctor Cabrera explores the complexities and challenges found in interpersonal relationships, mainly friendships and romantic relationships.
The short collection Una aldea devastada por Godzilla was originally published in the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Periodico de posía in 2023. In these poems, poet Víctor Cabrera explores the complexities and challenges found in interpersonal relationships, mainly friendships and romantic relationships. The poems put the daunting questions of relating to other people in dialogue with a variety of references to works of high art, popular culture, and religious and psychological concepts including hip-hop music, contemporary poetry, the paintings of Pablo Picasso, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and (of course) Kaiju films. Moreover, Cabrera’s poems are inspired by deeply personal experiences, his own accounts of friendships and relationships, as well as the feelings of jealousy, betrayal, and sadness that can accompany them. During my translation of Una aldea devastada por Godzilla, I collaborated frequently with Cabrera, and his feedback often led me to choose words, phrases, and formal devices more suited to the instances that inspired these poems. I will not recount any personal details of anyone involved in this piece, but rather, I will discuss my own efforts to balance the themes, encyclopedic references, and formal devices found in Cabrera’s poetry while creating my own English translation.
My translation of Cabrera’s collection A Village Devastated by Godzilla was published as part of the Triple Series in which Ravenna Press releases three chapbooks by different authors as a single volume. I began translating the poems in the collection as a parallel project while working on my doctoral dissertation, a project which involved translating Cabrera’s poetry collection WIDE SCREEN (2009). One major similarity between the two works was their engagement with film. While Una aldea devastada por Godzilla draws on the imagery of the icon of Japanese science fiction from which it draws its name, WIDE SCREEN contains five sections, each of which is inspired by one of the works in the filmography of American director Jim Jarmusch (WIDE SCREEN 67). Engagement with art and media is consistent across Cabrera’s works, as his book-length poem Un jardín arrasado de cenizas [A Garden Razed to Ashes] (2014) comments on the music of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk (Un jardín 7). Bearing in mind my similar experiences translating Cabrera’s other works, understanding and recreating his encyclopedic references to other works and the thematic core of this collection, my translation attempts to balance these elements with an attention to the formal elements of his poetry including rhyme and rhythm.
For the title of the poem “Goyira!,” I did not want to use the transliteration of the name of the Japanese character, as this called to mind the obnoxious mock Japanese in which the screaming characters from Honda’s original film were impersonated by English speakers. Therefore, I used the kanji: ゴジラ as the title for my translation. This decision added a foreignizing element to my translation (as readers who do not speak Japanese would need to infer the meaning of the poem’s title from the Spanish version and the final verse of the poem), while also highlighting the transnational element of Cabrera’s poetry, being a poem written in Spanish that takes its central imagery from Japanese film.
In the same poem, I also encountered issues of versification. The use of rhyme and imagery in the second stanza posed a challenge for recreating these elements in translation. The stanza and isolated verse that follows it read:
Debajo del disfraz del absoluto
el luto oficia demoradas ceremonias:
un millón de velas encendidas
naufragan frente a Cabo Zetsuboo…
un millar de banderas calcinadas
(Cabrera A Village 17)
I had originally changed the order of the verses to create rhyme, as there are two instances of asonant rhyme [rima asonante], in which the vowels after the stressed syllables in words at the ends of verses match, in this stanza. My original translation changed the order of the verses, moving the second verse to the isolated position, in order to create two sets of rhyming couplets. My rewording yielded the following:
Under the guise of the absolute
a million-candle salute
in Cabo Zetsuboo drowning
a thousand flags burning
Grief officiates delayed ceremonies
However, while he and I were discussing the revisions, Cabrera informed me that this affected the imagery of the phrases and that my change altered the role of grief within the passage. After hearing this feedback, I changed my translation to match the order of verses in the source poem:
Under the guise of the absolute
Grief officiates delayed ceremonies:
a million-candle salute
in Cabo Zetsuboo drowning
a thousand flags burning
(Cabrera A Village 15).
This translation preserved the agency of grief within the poem that Cabrera had intended. The rhymes between “absolute” and “salute” are still present, and the slant rhymes between “burning” and “drowning” are maybe even more pronounced than they had been in my earlier iteration of the translation.
Translating the epigraph for “Dar” provided a challenge, as it is a quotation attributed to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that reads “[Dar] … lo que no se tiene a quien no es” (Cabrera A Village 21). When I searched for a version of this quotation in English, I could not find one that matched this exact phrasing. The closest was in Cormac Gallagher’s translation of Seminar XII: “love is to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it” (Lacan 165). Upon further research, I found that the phrase, as it appears in the epigraph to Cabrera’s poem, is a very popular aphorism from Lacan in the Spanish-speaking world, but its translation is debated among Spanish-language scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Sauval 26). I considered that including a literal translation of the popular version of Lacan’s phrase, “love is giving something one does not have to one who is not it,” as it is used in the Spanish-speaking world might give Anglophone readers a cultural insight into the use of this saying. However, I ultimately decided to include Gallegher’s translation, so that readers could see how different practices and translations (in English and Spanish) can alter our readings of complex writers like Lacan.
Other epigraphs provided challenges for translation as well. In the poems “Dos versiones” [Two Versions], Cabrera uses a quotation from the Mexican poet Ángel Ortuño as the epigraph: “con este signo vences, con el otro, te acuchillan” [with this sign, you triumph / with the other, they backstab you] (A Village 13). There was no extant English translation for this passage from Ortuño, so I provided my own translation. My rendering of “te acuchillan” as “they backstab you” was not necessarily literal, but it fit with the themes of mistrust and betrayal present throughout the collection. For the poem “New Age,” Cabrera quotes from Mexican poet María Rivera for the epigraph: “Estábamos en eso para salvarnos” [We were in this to save ourselves] (A Village 26). There was no English for this epigraph either. The passage from Rivera was also more challenging for translation due to its ambiguous use of a reflexive pronoun, wherein “salvarnos” could be rendered as “to save us,” “to save each other,” or “to save ourselves.” I originally opted to leave the quotation in Spanish to preserve this ambiguity, but after discussing the passage with Cabrera, he and I decided that the wording “to save ourselves” made the most sense within the context of “New Age.” The poem describes the self-centered explorations of spiritualism that a toxic couple uses to justify their unwillingness to change.
There were other challenges in translating “New Age” due to its numerous religious, psychological, and cultural references, which I also attempted to balance with the formal elements of Cabrera’s writing. I originally mistook the term “Padrino” (Cabrera A Village 28) for an allusion to The Godfather (1972), but Cabrera explained to me that this is the term equivalent to the English word “sponsor” as it is used for recovery programs in Spanish. While rendering this stanza: “Mi analista recomienda / un mix de fluoxetina y bromazepam / después de la merienda” [My psychiatrist recommends / after lunch, a Fluoxetine and Bromazepam blend] (Cabrera A Village 28), I realized I could create a rhyme by moving the word “blend” to the end of the phrase. For the stanza “Dice mi oráculo: ‘Necesitas recobrar tu centro, volver a tu balance’ [You have to center yourself / to reach your pinnacle / says my Oracle” (Cabrera A Village 28), I eschewed a literal translation in order to create a rhyme. Cabrera approved of this deviation from the source.
To conclude these reflections, I will mention that translating A Village Devastated by Godzilla was an opportunity to make an important and engaging work available to a new audience. Isolation and loneliness are increasingly discussed topics in our world of atomization through technology and social media. Popular psychology mentions a so-called ‘male loneliness epidemic,’ as a result of these conditions. Cabrera’s poems in this collection offer a way of not only grappling with the challenges of friendship and romantic relationships, but also for coming to terms with solitude. I know from my conversations with Cabrera that Octavio Paz and Juan José Tablada are major influences on his poetry. Like Cabrera, Paz and Tablada were also inspired by Japanese culture, specifically Zen Buddhism (Paz 263; Elguera and Saravia 224-225). In his engagement with distinctly Japanese and Zen imagery throughout A Village Devastated by Godzilla, Cabrera posits detachment as a means of resolving interpersonal conflict. In his poem inspired by Godzilla, Cabrera urges us to “anata ga aisuru mono o hakai suru” [kill what you love] (A Village 15). In more gentle terms, in a poem that directly engages with Buddhist philosophy, “The Laughing Buddha Explains a Notion of Detachment to Me” [El Buda de la Risa me explica una noción del desapego], Cabrera offers us this paradox: “If you love something / Free yourself from what you love” [Si amas algo / libérate de eso que amas] (A Village 29-30). Cabrera’s poem echoes the Third Noble Truth as Siddartha Gautama originally told his followers: “For this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of pain without a remainder of a craving, the abandonment, forsaking, release, non-attachment” (Burtt 6). Cabrera’s poetry, through its dialogue between Buddha, Lacan, Ortuño, Rivera, and the films of the Godzilla franchise, offer us the chance to disengage and to choose peace over conflict. When we are confronted with the hostility of those around us, we can find solace in reading poetry.
Works cited
Burtt, E. A. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha. NAL Books, 2001.
Cabrera, Víctor. A Village Devastated by Godzilla: Triple Series No. 26. Translated by James Richie, Edited by Kathryn Rantala, First edition, Ravenna Press, 2025.
—. “Una aldea devestada por Godzilla.” Periódico de poesía, UNAM. 2023. https://periodicodepoesia.unam.mx/texto/una-aldea-devastada-por-gozilla/ Accessed 8 August 2023.
—. Un jardín arrasado de cenizas. Bonobos Editores, 2014.
—. WIDE SCREEN. Toluca, Bonobos Editores, 2009.
Elguera, Christian, and Daisy Saravia. “Octavio Paz, Thinker of Translation: Versioning Matsuo Bashō and Fernando Pessoa.” The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation. Edited by Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper, Routledge, 2023. 222-240.
Lacan, Jacques. Crucial Problems in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Cormac Gallegher. Lacan in Ireland, 2025.
Paz, Octavio. Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. Translated by Helen R. Lane, 1st ed, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Sauval, Michael. “El amor es dar lo que no se tiene … ¿a quién no lo es?” Acheronta. no.25, 2008. pp. 1-28.
James Richie is an instructor, researcher, and literary translator. His translations have been featured in a variety of journals including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Latin American Literature Today, and Anomaly. He holds a PhD in Humanities from the University of Louisville, and he teaches coursework on literature, film, and philosophy at the University of Louisville and at Carthage College.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
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