For Mexican poet Guadalupe “Pita” Amor, God’s invisibility was his undeniable superpower. She took it personally. His absence assaulted, confounded, abused, and offended her. She blamed herself (“Maybe I prefer you obscure, the reason I lack a witness…”). She blamed Him (“Tell me, what is this game you play with your silence and your absence…). She raged (“God-demon, the time is decisive for you to finally appear…”). She begged (“With all my heart I implore, a yearning down to my sinew…”). She bargained (“Deliver this rare prize and reveal yourself in vision…”). She repented (“God, I know my transgression is in hoping for transparency…”). She hoped (“We have a pending rendezvous, an unprecedented, private meeting….”). She berated (“Clandestine, inattentive, empty, incommunicative, unalterable, suffocating, impenetrable, demanding, indifferent and chilly…”). She resigned (“I know you are inexpressible, that defining you is idiocy…”). She doubted (“You, I don’t believe in, but adore. What an idiotic statement!...”). Exactly once, it seems, she obtained (“Today, God finally visited me, he entered through each pore…”).

Born on May 30, 1919, in Mexico City, Pita first gained attention as an actress and model, sitting for the likes of Diego Rivera. She grew up in a large family, the youngest of seven children, born to an aristocratic line that suffered financially after the revolution. Shaped by overflowing portions of intelligence, willpower, religious passion, and physical beauty, she appears, from this distance, to have been purpose-built for bursting brittle early-20 th-century gender and religious norms. She was a single mother. She posed nude. She wondered publicly whether God was her only hope, a sick joke or just a sickness. She published her first book of poems in 1946, at the age of 25, titled Yo soy mi casa (I am my house). In 1953, she published Decimas a Dios, perhaps her most popular work, the one from which these translations are made. Her style was direct, forceful, lyrical and tuned to the ear of a wide audience. For a time, she was the most popular poet in Mexico. She spent the latter part of her life in partial obscurity after the tragic drowning death of her young son, which nearly silenced her. She died on May 8, 2000. Pita’s main heresy seems to have been yelling at God, out loud. For her, the insult in His invisibility was the way it forever settled the question: Who would surrender to whom? She wanted a war and the possibility of victory. She received mostly silence or, worse, an echo of her own anguish. Victory would have been a meeting of some kind, but she also clearly wanted annihilation (“Rather, open the heart with violence and all your guts evacuate, when you finally bleed dry, wait, forgetting everything you knew. One should ultimately pursue such that God must abdicate”). A straightforward yielding on her part was beyond reach. This is, at worst, endearing. One loves Pita partly for her willingness and ability to throw an outburst with lovely clarity and style.

The following thought is not explicit in Pita’s poems, but I believe she would approve. If one’s relationship with God is entirely devoid of anger, it is worth wondering if one actually believes in Him. A corollary: If one is angry with God, it is worth wondering if one will ever stop believing in Him. Most of Pita’s monologue with God can be understood as originating somewhere between those thoughts. Perhaps that is why I find these poems so belief affirming. They are, at times, simply complaints hurled at the speed of rage and scorn (“Inexplicable Eternal Father, how mysterious is your empire!”). Collectively, however, they reveal something essential and sometimes obscured about the playing field. They broadcast an urgency that can seem superficial, archaic and even embarrassing. Yet, her need, in its collective, repeated intensity, can also feel entirely proper, at least to anyone remotely sympathetic to the religious impulse. Pita’s decimas do not answer the question of whether God exists, far from it. They do resolve, however, any doubts about whether it matters. This may seem like a small success. I would disagree.

A word on the decima and my translation. A Spanish tradition, the decima consists of ten-line stanzas, each line built from eight syllables. The rhyme is ABBAACCDDC. The strict scheme inevitably requires some violence from the translator, hopefully minimized but never avoided. I prioritized the rhyme. In her intro, Pita wrote that she worked carefully to keep the form pure. Dropping the rhyme would have allowed for more literal translations, however, it seemed a violation of something fundamental in Pita’s intent. From there, it was a constant effort to check the boxes of meaning and meter, with variable success. I take some comfort in the fact that even Pita often missed the 8-syllable-per-line ideal of traditional decimas.