Доминикан-американдық ақын Рина Эспайят: Өмір және шығармашылық жолы

Dominican American poet

Rhina Polonia Espaillat (born January 20, 1932, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) is a bilingual Dominican American poet and translator who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. She has published eleven collections of poetry. Her work has been included in many popular anthologies, including The Heath Introduction to Poetry (Heath 2000); The Muse Strikes Back (Story Line Press 1997); and In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the U. S. (Arte Publico Press 1994). Born in Santo Domingo into an upper class family of mixed Afro Dominican, Spanish, French, and Arawak descent, Espaillat grew up during World War II in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City after her family became refugees from the Dominican Government of caudillo Rafael Trujillo. She had her first poetry published by the Ladies' Home Journal in November 1947. At the age of 16, she became the youngest ever member of the Poetry Society of America, which altered its rules to admit her. Following her 1952 interracial marriage to sculptor and labor union organizer Alfred Moskowitz, however, Espaillat drifted away from contributing to American poetry until their children had grown up and left home. Her original poetry contains many sonnets describing her family in domestic settings, which she calls "snapshots". She is also well known for writing poetry that captures the beauty of daily routine, as well as poems which ironically and humorously retell stories from both the Christian Bible and Classical mythology. Furthermore, even though Espaillat grew up in a time when, "the expectation that one should overcome any non British ancestral origins, still held sway as a prerequisite to entering the sphere of genuine Americanness", Espaillat's poetry also expresses pride in being a Latina, in her identity as a feminist who is also a loving and happy wife and mother, and in American patriotism rooted in gratitude for her status as a political refugee who has built a family and a successful and rewarding life for herself in the United States. and for similarly translating the greatest works from the literary canon of both Spanish and Latin American poetry. Espaillat has also published acclaimed translations from American English into Spanish of the poems of both Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur. Espaillat's renderings of the poetry of Robert Frost have particularly been praised for her ability to find completely accurate Spanish equivalents for the Yankee poet's many uses of rural New England slang terms. In 2023, Espaillat's translations of the Christian poetry by the Archpriest of Hita, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Marko Marulić, Bedřich Bridel, and Gaspar Aquino de Belén were edited and published for the first time by Burl Horniachek in the poetry anthology To Heaven's Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry. Espaillat's translation of a Middle Welsh poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym for the book was made in collaboration with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Following the 2020 Presidential Election, President elect of the United States Joe Biden received a joint open letter and petition signed by more than 70 eminent American poets, who urged him to select Espaillat to read her poetry at Biden's Presidential Inauguration. Biden ultimately chose Amanda Gorman instead.

When she was only fifteen, Espaillat's high school English teacher, Catherine Haydon Jacobs, took an interest in her poetry and, without Espaillat's knowledge, submitted them to The Ladies Home Journal. To Espaillat's shock, she received a letter from the magazine's editor saying that three of her poems had been accepted for publication. Espaillat later recalled that, as she read the editor's letter, she thought, "This can't be happening! This only happens to poets!" Following her November 1947 debut, Espaillat's poetry regularly appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal and, eventually, in a British magazine as well. The resulting exposure caused her to receive a large number of fan letters. Catherine Jacobs also sent Espaillat's poems to the Poetry Society of America, which changed its rules to accept Espaillat, who was then only 16 years old, as the Poetry Society's youngest ever member. When she was seventeen, Espaillat received a fan letter from Shabani, in Southern Rhodesia, from an admirer who had translated one of her poems into Afrikaans and who was requesting permission to publish the translation. Espaillat received similar fan letters from poetry lovers throughout the United States, as well as in Manila, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and London. During the same era, Espaillat also acted as a literary mentor to a young girl who had written to her from the American Zone of Occupied Germany, where the girl's father was serving with the United States military. This ultimately led, according to Espaillat's biographers, "to a close and enduring friendship." Following the CIA backed assassination of Rafael Trujillo on May 30, 1961, and U. S. President John F. Kennedy's use of coercive diplomacy to effect regime change in the Dominican Republic on November 19, 1961, Espaillat's relatives at last felt able to safely travel to the United States and visit Espaillat, her husband, and their two sons in Flushing, Queens. Espaillat's visiting cousins charmed her many local friends and neighbors, as she later described in the poem Translation. Also following Trujillo's assassination, Espaillat's great uncle, Rafael Brache, his wife, and several of their sons returned permanently to the Dominican Republic. Espaillat's parents, though, did not. Espaillat later recalled, "I was married with children and my parents didn't want to leave us. They'd also made many close friends in the United States; and, of course, many of the people back home had already died, including both of my grandmothers. I believe that it's very common in immigrant communities to have powerful longings for home, but by 1961, my parents' lives were centered in the U. S."

Espaillat attended the first West Chester University Poetry Conference, which was founded by New Formalist poets Michael Peich and Dana Gioia, in 1995 and later recalled, "I was the only Hispanic there, but I realized that these people were open to everything, that their one interest was the craft. If you could bring something from another culture, they were open to it." Espaillat subsequently took charge of, "teaching the French Forms and the forms of repetition," but also made sure to teach classes in, "the Spanish and Hispanic examples of the forms" such as the décima and the ovillejo." Since her return to American poetry, Espaillat's work has appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, and many other journals. She is a two time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and she judged the 2012 Contest. Her second poetry collection, Where Horizons Go, was published by Truman State University Press in conjunction with her selection for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her 2001 collection, Rehearsing Absence, was published by University of Evansville Press after she won the Richard Wilbur Award.

Of her interracial marriage to Alfred Moskowitz, Espaillat once said, "I met him at the wedding of my best friend, Mimi, and his best friend, Harry. I was still at Hunter College, in my junior year, and we ended up sitting at the same table at the wedding on Thanksgiving Day in 1951. And we started talking, then dancing, and – I know this sounds like madness – he proposed five weeks later on New Year's Eve, and we were married in June of 1952." At the time of their wedding, Rhina Espaillat was only 21 years old. The son of Romanian Jewish immigrants with left wing views, Moskowitz was an industrial arts teacher, labor union organizer, and sculptor. He had grown up in The Bronx while speaking Yiddish in the home and had fought as a 19 year old G. I. during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. According to Esaillat's biographers Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres Saillant, "Moskowitz brought to the household a sense of stark realism as experienced by U. S. military personnel during World War II. This was a time when many young Americans took to the front
with a profound desire to fight for freedom and justice against regimes that endorsed tyranny and oppression." Following their wedding, Alfred and Rhina Moskowitz moved into an apartment in the racially mixed neighborhood of Flushing, Queens. Both continued teaching in New York City's public school system. Espaillat later recalled, "Our house was strike headquarters in our district more than once. The experience left both of us feeling strongly loyal to the labor movement everywhere, to workers in every field and across racial, ethnic, gender, and all other lines, as necessary to justice and the protection of workers' rights." Alfred Moskowitz deferred to his wife's fame within American poetry by allowing her to continue publishing under her maiden name in literary magazines. In legal paperwork, however, Espaillat would always sign her name as Mrs. Alfred Moskowitz. The Moskowitzes also participated in the American Civil Rights Movement and in protests against U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War. They remained together until Moskowitz died in February 2016; the couple had three sons.

While being interviewed by New Formalist poet and literary critic William Baer, Espaillat expressed an intense dislike of political poetry, "I don't think poetry should be asked to change political systems or rectify the economy, even though poets can certainly express how they feel about such things. Poets can, of course, write about their fears and hopes and wishes, but I don't think that poetry should be used for political sloganeering. I personally don't care for that kind of poetry, regardless of which side of the political spectrum it comes from." According to Leslie Monsour, "If an issue of social injustice is encountered, she approaches it through ironic observation, clever conceit, or worldly disillusionment, in keeping with her lifelong attraction to the Baroque and Metaphysical poets." In a 2017 interview, Espaillat sharply criticized sitting U. S. President Donald Trump on the one hand, and the excesses of both identity politics and Intersectionality on the other, for causing the political polarization of the American people. Espaillat commented, "There are a lot of rights to defend that other people have not yet been given, that are their rights by nature. And I think that if we isolate ourselves into little groups fighting for mine, and for yours, and for yours and for yours, we’re not going to make it. I think we need to become a whole tapestry of people who are fighting for all rights, including the rights for White working class people who are being underpaid and overworked and who have not been taught what they should have been taught. I don’t think we can afford to throw rocks at anybody, even the people who look like the enemy right now, because they’re not the enemy. They’re just other people." In the same interview, Espaillat expressed hope that the political polarization of the American people can be overcome, "This is a country that is full of good people who have welcomed immigrants like me in the past. I feel like I was born here, even though I wasn't and this is the story of many, many people who have been saved by coming here. I believe in the Statue of Liberty, I believe in the torch."