There's something at once self-indulgent and self-consciously naïve about this piece. One might almost think a child had written it, except a child would be less pretentious. The piece embodies everything I dislike about so much contemporary poetry – lack of craftsmanship, of clarity, of having anything meaningful to say.

I thought of Williams also. And I should disclose, I'm not a big fan of his either.

I apologize that I haven't commented on the translation per se. It's hard to do so with any enthusiasm when the poem leaves me cold.

I love both the poem and your feminist rant insights, Julie!

At first I thought this was just a whimsical little poem about a pair of butterfly-print panties swirling around and around in the wash. (I don't mean "just" in a dismissive way; a poem can be a small, pleasing thing, and that's certainly better than what a lot of poems are.) Then I thought some more about that word "fading." That made me think of the endangered monarch butterflies - but like you said, it's not pinned down (sorry!) to one interpretation.

Gender aside, the undies are tiny, which I assumed meant they were an adult's sexy undies (though you're right, they could be a child's). For me, sexy undies + the title suggests it's about the narrator's relationship history (a repetitive cycle of short-lived relationships). Or it could be about fading beauty, or lost innocence. Maybe the poem is about all these things. It works on a purely superficial level, too.

p.s. Ann, I'm still thinking about that "of color," too. Like you said, it's repeated, it seems to be significant. Maybe the point of that line is to differentiate that particular garment from the others, to show that it stands out in the crowd, while at the same time giving us a fuller picture of a load of colored wash. The relationship is fading, this lover is beginning to blend in with all the rest... I don't know, just a thought.

p.p.s. Roger, Google Translate tells me that "estampa" means stamping, stamp, print, or imprint. In English, fabric with butterflies printed all over it would be called a butterfly print or a butterfly pattern. But even if you're using, say, a rubber stamp to create one lone image at a time, there's still the implication that the individual print is not a unique creation, but one of a series of identical images, i.e. part of a pattern.

Now, in the light of day, I see I was a bit of a grump last night, for which I apologize.

I'm still not crazy about the poem. But, paying closer attention to the original, I see there is something in the sound, in the open vowel sounds and feminine endings that gives it a feeling of motion, of turning, that is inextricably connected to the meaning of the poem. It's hard to capture the openness and flow of Spanish into English, I know, but I feel that whatever is sonically happening in the original, is completely lost in the translation.

For example, the translation begins "round and round" which does not capture the smooth movement of “gira y gira,” which has more of that open sound I was talking about. Why not "turning and turning" which is more true to the sense, and captures more that feeling of motion. (And does not convey that unfortunate association of "round and round the mulberry bush,” which I heard in my head as soon as I started reading the poem!)

Perhaps it's virtually impossible to capture the music of lines like:

entre agua y espuma
(Suds? No!)

or

con estampas de mariposas

It almost doesn't make sense to give examples, as the success of the whole poem depends on its music, which, in my opinion, is completely lost in the translation.

"Turning and turning . . ." for me would suggest Yeats's "Second Coming" (which, incidentally, I once turned into a washing machine joke to write a tailgater).

Just out of curiosity, I put the poem into Google Translate, and Google rendered the first line exactly the same way our translator did, i.e., "Round and round in the washing machine"

Well, Bob, it doesn't have to be "turning and turning". I know it's already took. But something like that. Anyway, evoking Yeats might be preferable to a nursery rhyme! :)

P.S. I remember your tailgater! It was a good one!

This looks like a nostalgic piece about either a parent remembering its little child's faded past, or, a grown child thinking of its own. The "butterflies" have flown away, at any rate and won't fly back in all their vivid glory, no matter what, as Omar Khayyam himself probably would have concurred. Nice wistful imagery. It is what it is.

never mind.

Tailgater, indeed.

There are some poems that require a context if one is to fully appreciate them. Something that may be quite clear in a specific political or cultural context often sails over the heads of the uninitiated. This poem may be one instance of that.

I am going way out on the proverbial limb, which I have often had sawed off while I sat on the far end, but it seems to me that this poem harks back to the Chile of Salvador Allende.

There is a Latin American expression "hablar a calzón quitado" which means "to talk frankly or openly", roughly "to put one's cards on the table". That, I think, is what this poem is really about: the "washing" of the post-Allende government, the still dirty laundry of the Pinochet dictatorship.

More neck-out-sticking. I wonder if the butterflies might not have their origin in the anti-Fascist poem by Montale, "Hitler Spring". In translation by George Kay, the first stanza goes thus:

Dense the white cloud of the moths going mad
whirls about faint globes and on the embankment,
streches along the ground a coverlet on which
the foot crackles as on sugar; the coming summer frees
the nightly chill that tll now was enclosed in the secret pits of the dead season,
in orchards that from Maiano clamber down to these sands.

from the second stanza:

(...) the rite of mild executioners who do not yet know blood
has turned to a foul reeling of shattered wings,
of wraiths at the river-edge, and the water goes on gnawing
the banks and no one now is guiltless.

And ends;

with the breathing of a dawn that tomorrow for everyone
may show again, white but without wings
of horror, on burnt wadis of the south . . .

The equivalents translated by Jonathan Gallasi :

The thick white cloud of mad moths whirl
around the pale lights and the parapets,
spreading a blanket on the earth that snaps
like sugar underfoot; the coming summer
frees the night frost locked in the dead season's secret cellars
cellars and the gardens
that scale down from Maino to these sands.

(...) the feast
of the mild murders still innocent of blood
has turned into a foul Virginia reel of shattered wings,
larvae on the sandbars, and the water rushes in
to eat the shore and no one's blameless anymore.

**

with the breath of a dawn that may break tomorrow for all,
white, but without wings of terror,
over the scorched rockbeds of the south . . .

Having followed up this hunch, I started to investigate the poet and found this encouraging text at http://romancelanguages.missouri.edu/people/leal.shtml

I'd like to add that "mariposa" translates to both "butterfly" and "moth".

Just a note to say that the panties in question cannot whirl, spin or tumble in the water-and-suds cycle. They may whirl or spin in the spin cycle, and later, tumble in the dryer. But I'm just an old housewife out of Wilkes-Barre, PA. What do I know ;) ?