Craft

For Zsazsa Karl

The messenger paints solid brushstrokes
then cleans the tools with her saliva.
We like to watch her sketch landscapes
similar to her own,
lights submerged in shallows
of medicines and distant songs.

Inside it rains in a different language.
She sketches the translation in her notebook
then returns to work.

The messenger walks on tiptoe
from reef to reef, lest
she wake her frightful creatures.
Afterward she returns to her paint,
two or three whales under her arm.
And smiles at me. 

Phanopoeia

If in my chest flutters
a thrush perched on a wire
it will automatically waken
the morose cicada
of the poem.

To trap a few ideas
in an attempt at describing
a sound memory. To slow it down
until my hand holds,
very carefully,
the bird of silence
and frees it of language
and substance.

Lists

You feed the ghost,
pray without knowing a line,
spit light to see how our waists
open to the design of another sea
and affection lies wounded,
agonizing on a beach.

Other voices
say more precisely
what we wish we had—
the moment so sensitive,
pivotal and spectral. 

It was just a question of learning
to listen to them—don’t you see them?
The voices are there, they’re coming.
Maybe it doesn’t matter much,
your face fades on its own,
and affection is still agonizing
on the beach.

Fish

You moved underwater
among the diamonds and crowns
of buried bottles.
I want to say that I tried to call you,
or at least find you, who knows where,
in the street, by chance,
like trying to fish in the river
with two grams of bait and a kilo
of one-eyed jasmines stuffed in my mouth.

It wants to bite. Churns up water. Tugs on the line.
But the rod goes still again.

The water flows, it flows and undoes
these little dramas, this inclination
of dogs towards the river,
lest one of them remain, eternally
waiting, with horizontal
persistence and the illusion
of a straight line. 

Translated by Sarah Moses

Images from Ejercicios respiratorios by Fermín Vilela.

and in the vast grounds of a school
that is no longer there.
Of those structures, I retain the fragments
that sometimes appear in my dreams,
the isolated cabins of absent ships.
Our houses were eyes through which we scanned the city
Its ways as yet untrodden.
My childhood slipped away through their windows,
balconies and terraces, under a sky
that always assailed us with the question
of why we lived there and not in some other place
with similar buildings to ours.
Going to school was like disembarking
from one ship and embarking on another
Unmoored from the adjacent streets.
There were other children there,
watching the city of their asylum drift past their windows.
It was out there, indifferent,
as unattainable as those cities
lost by our parents and grandparents.
To explore its streets and confront its silence
was a secret desire that sustained us,
never longing then to travel farther.
After lunch, it bestowed upon us
a silence of men paused
in different parts of the street;
For as long as they looked upwards,
the trees, the lampposts, and the houses would file past.
At six in the evening, everything came back to life,
a torrent of maids headed for the bakery.
They giggled as they guided us
because they were watched from afar.
We didn’t understand; following without thinking
the natural run of those seams.

Catalan

When I was a child, my parents
buried it from moment to moment.
Or wore it like their indoor clothes.
My grandmother, on the other hand,
lived out every day
leaning on her mother tongue.
Her Catalan grew there, too,
in that arid ground
where I had two names,
the one my parents called me
and that of my wild and marginal self
which lived in my grandmother’s mouth.
I no longer have that language
or that name,
only the memory of the harsh climate
from which my grandmother spoke.
There was an excess of noise
that prevented me from knowing
what my parents
were not saying when I lost it.
But I can still hear
its elusive music,
it gives me what I need to feel my way
through the darkness.
I can’t settle
as my grandmother used to do,
for imagining that words arise
only to give shape to thought.
I need them to make me stumble,
to make me notice, abruptly, that I cannot see
and to force me to pause, to stop.

My brother

I had to take more care of him than of myself.
We were shy, like our mother,
who, whenever she smiled, would look away
and seem to be somewhere else.
We built a barrier of silence
so that hardly anyone would come close;
he knew how to keep quiet and listen, storing everything deep inside.
I only imitated his reserve,
but it was impossible for me to escape the strangeness
of not being able to be a child,
of thinking he was judging me, just like my parents
who were never children because of the war.
I remember us in the music room of our nursery school,
very scared at having arrived early and from far away,
carrying our coats and our lunch
as if bound for another exile,
as if that enormous school were a train
that would carry us off to who knows where.

They never taught us to be children,

my siblings and I.
Mum barely got to be one.
She never played,
though in her youth
she did a bit of theatre.
Dad was a boy who drew pictures
and lived in the cinema.
Because of the war, they didn’t know how
to be with other children;
and although our childhood amused them,
it also astounded them.
With us, in front of us, all they could do
was talk too much, and overact.
For years, their performance
unfolded a world for us
which they themselves,
as exiles do,
were forever discovering, and inventing, too.

In our teenage years,
their friends,
and ours too,
came to marvel at
that strange milieu:
like a theatre company,
with a grandmother, a girl,
and sometimes a cat.

I have drifted along,
bearing the weight of that stage,
trying to look
at its unhappy ending.
Even now, with some distance,
I cannot do it.

It was the first thing I walked on.
It is the floor beneath these steps
that I keep taking, half up in the air,
as if living in a dream
from which I never fully awaken.

My Two Grandfathers

For Ana

At the end of the Spanish Civil War,
Mum’s father and Dad’s father
ended up in France
on the beach at Argèles-sur-Mer,
then a concentration camp.
Mum’s father had left Spain as a fighter,
Dad’s father evacuating the school in Ibiza
where he was headmaster.
In the end, both of them, without knowing each other
because they came from different parts
of Aragon and Catalonia,
found themselves in the same sand,
their lives, like those of so many others,
reduced to that desert
on the edge of that sea.
I read about the depression
brought on by this sand,
and how those whom currents had once divided
and adversity had brought together
tried to alleviate it with talks and magazines,
and by circulating what books they had.
The same happened in other spaces
where their exile continued.
Words and drawings creating home
even in the middle of the sea.
I never met my Dad’s father,
he died when Dad was twelve,
but he remained so alive in him
that he would draw and describe
all the films he had seen
as if they were a refuge
and at times a truer home.
Dad absorbed all that sadness
of endless sand,
imprinted by that camp on his father,
a sensitive and well-read man,
his hopes and his humour, too.
Dad oscillated between an absurd sadness
and an indescribable joy,
the world was sand in which nothing would grow,
and that is how he taught us to imagine it.
But he also loved our Mum’s father,
who was not affected by the sand of the camp
in the same way
and was not melancholic: he was a travelling salesman
and would go happily to work in Mexico
even in the worst of times.
With him, Dad laughed
because Mum’s dad had known him as a child
in the Dominican Republic when he still had his father.
His positive attitude to life freed him
from the burden that he, the son of a widow
and separated from his sister, had to bear.

Translated by Jules Whicker

Insights from the Translator

Alicia’s poems are so simple in appearance that they seem like they would be easy to translate. They don’t present the usual challenges of rhyme or meter. The language, moreover, seems plain. One might think that it is simply a matter of translating word-for-word et voilà. But it doesn’t work that way. There are structures within the poems that one must be alert to: repetitions, patterns, and, more importantly, the impression created by the poem’s intricate rhythms, where the line ends, and how the weight of sound or meaning falls at the beginning and the end.

These poems are about memory and reflection. One must think of memory here as things commemorated: stories told, phrases used, fragments preserved. Then there is reflection: thinking about the process of memory, reflecting on its strangeness, and how things are left behind, abandoned by those who went into exile, or remaining as relics in their places of refuge. Not just how some things are left behind, but how everything is left behind, especially people: specifically, by exile, and more universally, by the passage of our lives. What Alicia does is, paradoxically, mitigate loss by recalling and recording its indelible impacts in her poems. The particular character of her writing, therefore, is the interaction between the remembered artifact and the processes of memory.

When translating, you have to find a way to capture those processes. The poems have structure, but it lies there quietly, waiting to be found. If you bring it out too far in translation—as I fear I have done at times—the poem risks becoming merely an artefact, a printed text, rather than a path to explore, and the reader risks losing the sense of entering into a mind that is actively piecing the past together. Even before we read a word of the poems, we notice their unprogrammatic quality: poems and lines alike are of uneven lengths. Their form and extent are not arbitrary, however. Instead, the words map the organic formation of thoughts, and each one, in its place, is filled with meaning. When translating, therefore, I’m trying to find English words that preserve not just the literal meaning, but also the shape and impact of the thought. This requires an attentiveness to pace and timing: tuning your ear to the cadences; finding the pauses, the interfaces between objects, memories, reactions and reflections… sometimes all it takes is ending the line in a different place. I think about my role as translator, too. Often the translator is imagined as a stand-in for the writer, but I think the translator is really an avatar for the reader. As their translator, I read the source material with intricate care, weighing every word, seeking a deep and detailed understanding of intent and effect before searching for the means to share the experience of reading Alicia’s poems in another language.

Another reason I’m not a stand-in for Alicia is that translation doesn’t replace the poems as she wrote them. No one who can read the original text turns to the translation except out of curiosity. What translation does is enable the reader to open a door to a world that would otherwise be closed to them. The translator is also seeking to give the reader just the right amount of assistance. It is as much a mistake to explain a text plainly as to make it too strange. Without a sense of exploration and discovery reading is impoverished. As for how to read the poems—translated or otherwise—I think this should mostly be done slowly. Some passages are self-accelerating, but often its best to read as though you’re lifting something up to the light to discover its true colours. Something else you might do as a reader, and that translators do a lot, is to read them aloud, discovering, as you choose where to pause in each line and where to set down its weight, how this affects its sense and impact. These are my thoughts about translating Alicia’s poems. I hope they help you to enjoy them.

Jules Whicker
Department of Modern Languages
University of Birmingham

Selection of poems from Sea of Shadows / Mar de sombras, edited by Mónica Jato and Marta Simó-Comas, for the exhibition hosted by the Instituto Cervantes (Manchester), June 14-July 19, 2024.

Photo: Gilley Aguilar, Unsplash.

Grandfather has the world covered in splendor
in accordance with the new man
Grandfather has the world covered in accordances
on the edges of his river
heads of garlic grow
What did you do, Grandfather,
when you saw the ocean for the first time?
Did you play with the sand and with buckets of sand?
Grandfather caresses me
and sprouts beautiful wings
those beautiful wings
should be mine.

Mom and Dad

Any man in spectacles
is my dad
and any woman in spectacles
is my dad
that’s why I appreciate men
and approach women
because there’s nothing like a person
who’s both mom and dad
at the same time
and who lulls me to sleep and wakes me up
at the same time
and who kisses and shakes me
and gives me candy
and hits me
the spectacles must
have plastic frames.

Cemí

We’ve seen you babbling
In utero.
Turning somersaults,
A beautiful contortionist.

We’ve watched you closely.
How to explain
That you have two mothers
Instead of one.

That science defines you
As a boy
And I needed
No science
To know it.

That the weeks
Fly past
And your name has been yours
Since week nine.

How to explain your name
Atop a pile of discarded
Names
And know that your name
Represents you
Before the world
As it does
Before the two of us.

Give me the strength to explain it all
And let me understand
At least the basics.

The Belly

Facing the Mississippi River
My belly didn’t show.

In the 75-dollar-a-night motel
My belly didn’t show.

Beside the statue of José Martí
We bumped into by accident
My belly didn’t show.

At William Faulkner’s house
Where I went cold and stiff
My belly was nothing.

At 45 degrees Fahrenheit
It’s like the belly hides.

The only soup I could eat
Was crab soup
And my belly didn’t notice.

Dipping a warm beignet
Into a cup at Café du Monde
My belly stuck out a little
But no one saw.

Sitting in the grass in the park
Savoring a grapefruit great as a soccer ball
I heard a murmur from on high.

It was Mahalia Jackson
Gossiping with the trumpet player:
“See that, Louis?
The girl who just walked by
Has two hearts, not one.”

Press Your Hands Together at Chest-Height, Bow Your Head Slightly, Close Your Eyes, Open Your Mouth

Our Lady of La Caridad del Cobre
Holy Mary of Charity
who came to us
over the waters
with water in your ears
with thorns of hope
you’re my mother
the mother of all
of us together
I have a candle
in my throat.
We turn to you
to honor the platter
you broke
as simple and broken
as it is divine
my love is the love
of an orphaned child.
Your mother’s heart
is all we want
we received
a heart transplant.
Neither angst nor hope
neither zeal nor pleas
we turn to you
to make you understand
that you’re my mother
the mother of all
of us together.
You’re more woman than man
and more man than woman
your mother’s balls
birthed children free as birds.
Your children’s homeland
welcomes you
if we’re left without a homeland
then return to the sea
and constitute it.
My family
welcomes you
don’t let a family
shatter into pieces
the family’s children
have stopped growing.
They’ll never be young
or probably
will never be anything
ever again
we received
a heart transplant.
Disease and marginalization
belong to the present
and we don’t exist
my heart
is called the future.
The church
your children attend
has a priest
with two hundred
happy faces
his last message
was a colon
followed by a semicolon
it means he was winking
at us.
Bless my church
holy mother.
Justice without victory
doesn’t secure existence either
make me victorious
and friendly with all peoples.
I have tons
of brothers scattered
across all the peoples of the world.
They’re your children too
you were very fertile, mamá.
Bless you
for already you rise
over the surf
of a furious sea
kill us, mother
at the slightest
opportunity
the need for a heart
may strike us at any moment.
Glory and power
unto us.

Translated by Robin Myers

Photo: Muaz AJ, Unsplash.

Ilya Kaminsky

The Onion Offering

Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.

…

It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Carol Ann Duffy, “Valentine”

Don’t give me the rose
Don’t give me the marsh, the streets.
Don’t give me the chiming of the tree,
Don’t give me the water and its chest of crystals.
Don’t give the thorns of what is beautiful,
Give me the onion
One of those that grow in Coclé or in other lands
Where its skin is white,
Fair like the chest of a wolf cub
Russet like the plumage of a red turtle dove
Draped over the still leaf.
Don’t give it to me from the watery lip
or the petrified forest that you carry inside
Like an unruly glass of wine
The terrestrial and celestial gifts
That creation went on to bestow upon you
With the crumbled ears of wheat,
Better than the nocturnal crater
The pale cherry
The molten stag lifting its antlers
In the bedroom feasts
Fragrant like cinnamon wafting in the desert
Sex in the beak of the bird
Dripping liquid arousal
Or the greatness of the mysticism in the seed.
I prefer to flee from your kingdoms
And leave the table set,
The utensils, the cold food
the communion of your body upon peeling you
Upon removing the skin and becoming the wielder of
the knife
And discovering your flesh in curved pieces
That open slowly like a miracle
Or a pact between God and the lambs.
Don’t give me anything,
Just plant an onion here in my land
May the stalk grow until it reaches
The enormity of the sky and the trial of the confines.
I leave you a rose
I leave you the winds, the seas, the homes
All that is felt, heard, tasted, seen and smelled.
Don’t give me the gifts, don’t give me the flesh.
Don’t give me the seasons
don’t give me the coat, nor the umbrella
Grab all of the vegetables of the world for me
But don’t leave me orphaned
Without the onion.

The Burial Site of El Ciprián

In this burial site we all have an epitaph
A dark song that chases after us from the past to the present
Like a garland of poor vegetables
The dead that dwell in me at times, such a weight
I correct them in their posture, in their gestures, in their
habits
They run behind me like a child chasing after the bitter
cry of the water
They go sailing alongside my blood
As the winter escapes in its vessel.
Where did the clothing of our first grandparents go
And my grandmother’s crazy beggar costume
With its summer letters after passing through the scorched
Looms of the wind, so they say that madness enters
through the air,
Through the wind, where we must go with the first ring
of the bell
Native of this luck, of being orphaned in the light,
In the territoriality and in the dust?
Where is she and the cruel grandfather
Who dispersed his children throughout the land
(Vitervo, Bredio, Janeth)
Like the fugitive beads of a necklace
That we pull with the rage of time, with that shaking
Of the animals that return from the spasm
When the night is upon us
Like a giant amaranth or like an octopus
That has composed a score with the stony orgasm of its ink?
Oh, my first deceased people that the downpour of
winter
Brings me in disorderly images
Where they contemplate the bestiary of the muses
If I haven’t been able to contemplate the yeast of their bones
Where is her tomb, the long-standing grandmother
made of corn and clay
Marcaria Espinoza who left without a coffin
Only with the shroud of tears of her absent children
In her humility and in her madness?
We will abandon these bodies, we will inhabit these bubbles
That the winter spits out.
There will be tombs from the sky to the vessel,
We will stay in your house and we will all be so real and
unknown.
This is your burial site of El Ciprián, where we will all
have an epitaph.

Marcaria Espinoza

And in her womb we gather in a contained weeping
Eugenio Montejo

To Mom

Everyone placed in the same scene.
The grandchildren in the corners
And her children to the sides
(shrouded like a bride).
I am in the bottom of her chest
Emerging from her neck like a tumor
Or like a prismatic vein.
We poets are born from the strangest torrents.
They say that oblivion will pull the trigger.
We will all emerge from this new Lumix: the family that
we never were.
The one that broke like a mirror and scattered itself
Like a river of larvae, memory.
Here each one shows their best smile
And others their veiled happiness, hiding the most
notable decadence.
We are going to go missing one after another.
Here we pose with its only portrait, unbeknownst to us.
Who traced the steps of the crazy woman?
Who determined the births in the air
Where the atoms of her maternal madness clotted together?
Where did that perverse grandfather pull out
The weeping, the hunger and the opaque laughter of his
children?
She flits through the skies of Las Minas
Like a clay-colored thrush at rest,
Like a steam of crystal in the arc of sound.
In all the waters she seeks them without finding
All the theories that die in the eyes.
Where did she live? Where did she go? Where was she?
She walked with a stick and carried
The figures molded by dust,
She led with a clean gown and with long braids
Woven by the midrib of the night.
The smoke never entered her eyes
And one could hear her sing from far away.
Grandma: I will go on molding you with every step
throughout these lands
With a cord of fury
Where I have no nose or eyes or hands in the opacity of
stroking you
To be like the rice that grows like a hand in the mortar
that absorbs the screams
A tallow of the calves that tremble
A crouched-down dance in space until the cold is defeated.
If I were to picture you between the shadows
Carrying the shroud of dawn in the asylum
Tracing a fable by that guy Matías Hernández where I
hear you cry
Like a girl smothered by dolls
Where there is suffocation and moss, or deaf bells
choked by the silt.
By a dry wash basin that bursts in the puberty of the pit
They are inverse seasons that I find
In your whirlwind fervor.
The black nurse really frightens you.
I am not a rabbit. I don’t eat so many leaves.
I shouldn’t be here, I should be in a house of clay
With a hot meal and the infancy of my children,
Poor but radiant and biting the tubers of the land.
Look at me psychiatric patient
With a missing record.
Who can decipher or imagine the pain
That lies in the brain of the insane?
Here she was and she used to sit and cry for them in the
sickness and feverishness of the day.
She never imagined the beard of her children or the first
menstruations of my mother.
We want to imagine her as she was
Tall and beautiful like the sphynx
Or like a goddess of Olympus or a flower of the Holy
Spirit with a skirt.
She went sliding away like in an agrarian moan.
She ended up at El Ciprián and we don’t know
The secret of her tomb.
Let’s all pose. She is here.
Her womb is full, very full.
We have returned to her.
We have returned to her womb.
With a contained weeping.

There Is a Small Village Made With the Poems of Ledo Ivo

Ledo Ivo is an old man that lives in Brazil and he appears in
the anthologies with a crazy face.
Juan Carlos Mestre

The crabs now walk over Ledo Ivo
Over the houses and the dreams
Or the highlands in the land of Maceió,
He turned into the sea under the boats
And untied his words like seagulls on the dock
Whistling this time that funereal chord to
the flesh of Hermengarda
For this intoxication that passes through the pursed lips
of bats and the cigarette butts
In the darkest cave where the souls jingle like bear cubs
Where darkness is stained with the iridescence of your
constellations
Rebuking the resurrection of the rooster,
The stellar milk of the spurs
And the unredeemed feathering building up courage
between the yards and between the sea houses
Where the boys sit on the back of the snail
And the girls focus their beauty on the virtuous marks of
the shells.
This is your home where a boy called Ledo began to
write his poems in the sand
On the sugar cane petals and in the mills where the
people sweat
The immemorial juice of the cane
The equinoctial juice of the cane
The demented juice of the cane
The sexual juice of the cane
Next to the infinite aroma of cocoa, by the cocoa flowers,
by the cocoa seeds,
Where
This time you illuminate the stones, over the will of a
black woman dancing samba
She whistles and whistles the funereal waltz
To the flesh of Hermengarda
And it’s you, walking like a mulata along the wavering
napes of the crabs
Over an enraged fire of water, over the flustered piles of
wood
By the reigning foam,
Opening with your word like a bed of leaves,
Like a pillow of trees over those golden dreams
That go to the memory of the path and end up in the feet
Of the infants and they begin to run
And grate like bees or butterflies taking care of deep snow,
Of the invented snow and of the sun that milks the
miracles of the goats
Where there are witches and women explaining the
roundness of the earth
With rituals drawn on the monastic spheres of the coconut
And young women extracting shoals of fish from their
hearts
Now the crabs walk over Ledo Ivo in the land of Maceió.
There, in Brazil, is a village
Where he learned to write poetry
A little boy anthologized with a crazy face,
Separating the homelands from the languages,
Emigrant and immigrant of the Portuguese language
Turning it into soil,
Turning it into the juice of the cane,
Turning it into cocoa,
Turning it into a crab on the beaches of Maceió.
There, in Brazil, is a village made of the poems of
Ledo Ivo.

Dora Diamant

Only he who knows Dora knows what love is
Robert Klosptock

Everything had been postponed—since the flight and
that long pilgrimage—
Towards the prison next to her daughter in the Isle of
Man, for being a “foreign enemy”
And for making strange coalitions with the fire. She also
formed an alliance with the sea,
Once at a bathhouse she met a writer.
Franz Kafka had seen her through different eyes.
Her fear of tying her bathing suit again and again
—the beach—was full
Of locals and tourists and she remained in that search
For the legendary phrase of the last paragraphs
To finish his masterpiece,
Always somber
Always unsatisfied,
In front of his typewriter and before the inconclusive loves
That once populated the isles of God
In pages adrift.
Indeed, he found her in the “unworthy task” of scaling fish,
“Such delicate hands for such a cruel job”
And both laughed and set out to walk at dusk.
This Dora Diamant said that there was another father
Inside of Kafka’s father
Who hid behind his negotiator’s table
To listen to the prose of that son with little desire
An even then his critique
Made him breathe in deeply the vastness of the frozen
morning
And although he did not speak with his mother at all
He kept on waiting for the men of black
Perpetually rooted in the routine
Of the kitchen or the living room
Or in the flapping of the bats in the attic
There is no longer a job nor a boss
Only taking care of the cough and of the crises, of her,
the last love of Kafka
The actress from the stages of Moscow, in the theaters of
Germany;
Now in this winter, from the windy storm of anywhere.
To this tomb
In the United Synagogue Cemetery of Marlowe Road, in
East Ham,
When we took on the haze
“Only he who knows Dora knows what love is”
Wrote Robert Klopstock
When the fevers of England attack us
Smoking contraband cigarettes;
When nothing is exempt from seizing the days
When a candle takes control of the cathedrals
And everything becomes inflamed like in the memory of
the ravens.
Those chirps that belong to the neighborhood and the
beauty
Of retaining the word “distance” on a table cloth
Set for the afternoon offering, then ending
With the silence of the whistle and the money
Now that I am here corresponding with a rose
To the body, this last testimony that it is possible to love
Despite the negativity of the parents
Returning time and again to the cemetery of Prague
Where the Jews killed in the war rest,
From a ghostly exhaustion, after the battering of the
holocaust
Or of tired lungs from tuberculosis,
That cacophonic expectoration
That chases Dora Diamant,
Enjoying each day by his side more than his masterpiece
And ending in that puzzle of Kafka
When she saw him cough
For the last time.

Translated by Joanne Britland and Lina Rincón

Photo: Rosie Kerr, Unsplash.

At Bauhaus, the night is as long as a dream.
I dance amid a dark forest.
My steps sound like palms on a drum,
my movements replicate distant dances
although no one suspects it.

In the distance, the light of a cigarette signals someone is near.
Quickly, my body transforms into wings and air.
I have become light and invisible
and my presence irritates
like a dust particle in the eye
or a puff of air in the ear.

I insert myself in secrets,
I perch on the young faces,
on lips kissing,
but no one has felt the heat
or the crackle
of a tiny spark on their lips.

Music surrounds me again
and I keep dancing
dantesquely
alone,
happily,
in the thicket and the darkness. 

Music Remains

Arms gliding
beyond the rhythm,
undulating
and short steps
spinning toward the origin.

The cutter turns
intermittently
with eyes,
rays of sun
feeling the gaze.

Booming,
strike from below
in storms
and the ax
on the trunk.

Far away,
wine is poured out
a waterfall springs up
and the sparks
recognize the face.

The chair
is a raft
moving
with the muddy
waves of the river.

The music
is now
trills,
shrieks
and howling wind.

Just Another Bovary

The light barely enters the kitchen window.
Two women look at one another,
amid the knife’s white noise
and the scent of recently roasted garlic.

While one woman speaks,
the other sees her words spinning
in a steady rhythm
and her gaze is lost.

The child who held her skirts
and cried has vanished.
She hears soft music
and a suitcase beside her.

Then come the boutiques
the scene full of
a slight fragrance,
a slice of summer.

The light bleeds through
the immense windows in unexpected curves,
while the ticket vibrates
and the skirt flies.

The parasol tassels tremor.
She runs to the edge,
the sea skims her feet
and she feels a shiver up her spine.

All at once,
the teakettle whistles
slashing eardrums
like a raptor’s shriek.

Now her gaze
recalls Emma’s
before clinging to the bottle
that hastened her departure.

Angular Imbalance

Eyes narrow
the meadow is greener
and the wind blows
in time with jasmine and roses.

I run at half speed:
time has stopped.

But,
opening my eyes
I perceive
once again
the storm
that pierces,
drop by drop,
in hexatonic scale
my warm stone
of understanding.

Camille Claudel

Anarchic bangs,
snaking locks.
Frank, melancholy gaze
that brushes against
unknown
marble and clay edges.

Camille,
I am beside your bathers,
under this great wave you sculpted.
The laughter, after diving in,
and the tumbling
have stopped.

My ghosts are on the summit
and they look at me lovingly,
but the kind sand
is so far away.

It is true, we are three
and we are holding hands.
Nonetheless,
the strength and direction
of the currents
move our dreams or nightmares
separately. 

I have found balance in the chaos and
life continues along its orbit
because of a delicate gravitational pull.
But the resonance of past shipwrecks
and a gentle dissonance on fingertips
have made my mouth dry
and it is hard to adapt to a wave
that expands internally
and tries to thwart
every molecule of dew.

Nonetheless,
I see The Waltz, your figure
in this couple dancing on the edge of the abyss:
consonance of
movement
nostalgia,
magic
and insanity.

Then,
I remember it is possible
to lean into nothingness
not sensing the whisper
of a flower crouching between the rocks,
just its scent.

I see my face
submerged
in the deep mist
but I do not hear the song of the earth
only its pulsing.

Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

1 A famous dance club in Lima in the 1990s.

Photo: Clark Van Der Beken, Unsplash. 

I look at the stone:

                                              My gaze makes an incision
in its clean mineral crust.

I open it with other hands
                                                     like a fruit.

Inside:
                       familiar landscapes,

remote, familiar worlds,
                                                                 hidden kinships.

There are ancestors here:
                                                            and I don’t see them:

I sense them.
                                                           Elements of Love are within this stone.

I close it
                           cicatrizing it with another gaze.

This has occurred:

                                         a blink of an eye:
just a fleeting bridge of gazes.

I look at the stone again.
Feel its weight.
                                         I hurl it among the rocks in the garden.

It dazzles the lofty day. 

Colloquy with the Great Mother

I trace an inscription with burnt lime over the earth

and I ask her things

Mother, I tell her, now that no one can hear us

listen to me and answer me

I’m alone and inside my mouth I caress 

these questions smooth like river stones

I utter them aloud as if they were more than doubts

as if they were diamonds or sapphires or enormous rubies

or magnificent emeralds sparkling in sunlight

What am I?

                  What is my origin?

                                  Why     if I grew in your womb     did you toss me into Nothingness?

                                                  What is my destiny?

And you look at me and teach me lessons:

in stones     in trees     in mollusks     and in fish

in seashells and the petrified bones

of glyptodonts and mammoths

in the prints of birds and mammals

that rocks preserved

in niches within your womb for all eternity. 

And I smell you     touch you     watch you respond     savor you

and hear your voice that no one can hear

except the ear of the soul:

You come from me

               I birthed you with help from the Ages

                           You are a part of me

                                   And you’ll return to me

                                                    : I am your destiny

Learn

             meanwhile:

Mine is the mystery: yours the knowledge

Mine is eternity and yours time

Mine the slow changes in the landscape

but tombs and catastrophes too

Mine cataclysms and disasters

The kiss of water the air’s caress

and wind’s violent embrace and its abrasion

The rivers’ transparent veins 

moss and desert 

chasm and mountain

geyser and volcano

cavern and crystal

amber and mine

and the slope of jungle covering me

and the rock that alters time’s patience

making eternity laugh

Yours the sudden changes

The questions

And the risk

And my soul knows:

generations come     generations go

and our Holy Mother is never the same

because each generation’s eyes have never been the same

although one generation and another generation and another

are nothing 

but invisible layers of fallen human leaves

beautifully scorched: neatly extinguished: fiercely pressed

between hard layers of earth

And I venture to say

in a voice softer than silence:

I am your loftiest creation

Born in your bosom

In your fertile womb that cradles the sea 

where the lesser womb of the seed throbs

I eat the brilliant verdure of the ages

Devour my siblings

Feed on flesh and wonder

But

I always knew

once and again and again

I must turn to original dust

to be born again in the face of the sun

until the sun grows cold

and another question mark

of tremulous stars

lights up the sky.

Abysses

Look at the stone: Earth will speak to you.

The stone’s the mirror enclosing, out of view,

human history: what was and has passed on,

what must come to be, what is gone.

You’ll see convulsions, gashes, seisms,

a lake of sweet waters and landscapes,

the slow distancing and outrages

that produced insidious cataclysms.

Look at craters, plains and crevices.

Look at the sea, the mountain, the illusion

drawn by time and space.

You’ll hear your heart race.

And you’ll see the face of the Abyss.

And you’ll fall silent, in slow descension

into yourself, your own precipice.

Translated by Sarah Pollack

Author’s Note: These poems are featured prominently at the Museum of Geology of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Photo: Linda Meisinger, Unsplash.

Casalta

I’ve got to survive you
in amongst the dogs at dawn
who sing the songs of hate.
Under bullets over city
day after day Casalta I’ve got to survive you.

But I bear you with me Casalta come what may
with diapers on the balcony and sidewalks
your feigned joy and the sound teeth make in the cold
or could it be in fear of closing the door
and the dog pack the gunshots and merengue
infiltrating through the cracks
as if you did not mind being forevermore deforested
and turning on the government-handout light bulbs
to forget.

I want to leave you here Casalta in the poem
brick you up in childhood rubble.

Me—my brother and I—guessing
the color of the cars in which my father was not coming
making up songs for the blackout
surviving you miraculously
behind the bars.

Song for Bolívar ¹

Now that everything has your name on it, Bolívar,
and that’s no metaphor,
let’s put things in their place.

Miranda did not die of bochinche—you killed him.
And Colombia grew greater gorged on misery.
And the Olympus we raised up
in praise that you might reign atop it
is one endless slum.

And now
you’re into coming back to life or reincarnating
not one soul is unallergic
to your name and that, Bolívar,
is no hyperbole.

Your name is an alibi,
a bill plucked from the mud, worthless,
yet another busted square,
a corner.

Your name is a landlocked country,
the highest peak of the poorest range / on earth.

The only glory in your name, Liberator,
is a street of clacking heels
size twelve.

03-02

for Guillermo Vargas

Across the hallway lives a witch
who has spent her life wondering
which heaven sends the sax down on Sundays
so much baffling jazz to set the scene
for conjuring such blues such Satchmo
gritty in the clacking of the fingers
summoning death.
Heaven is audible from hell.

It finds its way to you as well transparent from
her door the obscenity of ash
from candles lit to who knows which
virgin suicides.

There is no better description of our homeland
than the five infinite feet between your
door and hers: in my country
heaven and hell are neighbors
infecting each other like on the third floor.

III

for Gerardo Rosales

Daddy, when I grow up
I want to be a pansy.
They might like the cold, but look how colorful
they are! Look how they take the shapes
of hearts and faces, and how gracefully
they wither as the earth dries up.

Daddy, when I grow up
I want to be a fairy,
flitting winged
on a diet of dust
until the last believer
loses faith in me.

Daddy, when I grow up
I want to be a queen:
to reign supreme
until a blade takes off my head.

I want to be something pretty and dead
from the last storybook I’ll ever read.

VI

I will feel this poem up.
I will lick it, lie to it, lose
my head over this poem like it was
a man.
I will stare at its feet,
check out this poem’s package as
if it were flesh.
I will ignore the warning signs, won’t know
if it is love or lust or boredom
bringing me down to my knees before this poem.
And I will not look up at its heart:
I like this poem waist-down.
This poem has no heart and mine belongs
for now to the boy at the orange stand
juicing.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

1 This poem’s reference to “bochinche” alludes to a famous statement by Francisco de Miranda, the father of Venezuelan independence, upon his arrest by Simón Bolívar and other revolutionaries who considered him a traitor to their cause.

Photo: Residencias Junín on the west side of Caracas, Venezuela, by Jonathan Mendez, Unsplash.

Time was the way
David Huerta

What are three daughters doing
with their father
in the scarce sun
of this Catalan forest?
What is he doing
with this useless pout
to hold them—his
three women warriors—
swiftly
in full swing?
What is Time doing
fleeing emphatically
between the feet
between the high poplars
and descending
without concessions
into our shadows?

Not that I disliked the cretonnes
or the petunias
or the carnations
or the almost shy mallows
much less the bold daisies along the fence
My mother spoke to them with unequal patience
or so I think
for in the distance I could see her lips move
as her earth-black fingers
caressed the rough leaves of a lonely geranium
or pointed out the curving path of the gladioli
along the edge of a stone flowerbed
It was a blossoming childhood
the wished-for boyhood of plants
and faint scents that are no more
But as her afternoon monologue
fell before her creatures nailed to the ground
or in faded pots without memories
I thought of words
in the grace of language and invention:
Indian cress
snapdragon
hollyhock
polka dot plant
climbing fig
In our own way, we shared the garden
and a fear as unreal as it could be
that twilight would catch us
talking to ourselves
perplexed or stunned
She in her long vegetable conversation
me in an eternal murmur of voices

like the beating of a heart
that ignores almost everything
except love
Vicente Aleixandre

Death is so deceptive
its spectacle of foam
so obvious
even when it is
your
hand
clenched
on
my
throat
or this pigeon
that is no longer a bird
at the stone fence
Its simulacrum fails
each time this damp patina
of the afternoon in love
envelops us
Its mask falls
every time you tell me
what you wouldn’t give
to fill the time
with four hands

Buffalos

May writing too become an immense
crystal balloon and burst
Osvaldo Lamborghini

The words slide
down the page
like a slow
buffalo trail
through the savannah

They go to water
at the great lakes
the holy water
watering place

The word buffalo
seems so foreign here

Here is Montevideo
the very center
of the city
crushed by the light
of the incandescent
African morning

Not without effort
consciousness
listens to
the trot of language
in its animal slip

A yellow humming
cracks
and now the herd
is just
a cloud of dust
heading towards the poem

Translated by Teresa Korondi and Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: View of Girona, by Dovile Ramoskaite, Unsplash.

futile body
I could say skin hands feet flesh flesh
sex body history

you enjoy the other in two
absent revolted unexplored dry
valley smell of desire

incessant impulse or I take you
love me at the precise edge of your flank
inside or outside

feminine figure ding men celebration
delight sacred skin
or profane existence

without you
nothing

The 36^th Day

I am not from this tribe

my paisanos, those of my ancestors,
they knew about this minuscule fragment
that launches us to the miracles
of fresh aromo and warming waters

from our women, our
grandparents, liberated the sorcerer
of the body in battle
that enjoys this little moment without limits

the paisanos of my ancestors
forgot the “you” that is lost when
the lizard of desire invades me

its pleasure doesn’t seem to be
part of this world

I don’t have anything
or anyone
to bite

Disco 13

If I write thirteen teenagers: Life is worthless,
they killed us or if I put
the police intervened or if I note that the women
didn’t have masks or if I describe how I helped them
in the road or I left them on the dance floor
perhaps no one remembers anything.

It is worthless. I have no strength, help me papi.
He’s dead.
Make room, sit down, fear that lives
in the arrest or the fine, the guilt with no mask.

Life. They come out one by one, they take out
injured bodies, they go back and take out corpses
they’ve closed the doors.
Everyone has died
suffocated. I am still drinking. Carajo,
it is worthless. Get me out!

 I reanimate you but you no longer respond, the tono is cool.
Life, carajo, is worthless, tears like bullets
pisco beer damp cigar wet
all the bodies are wet

Life is worthless.
Life life life.
Life.

Besieged

I am outside the ruined tumult
you don’t feel the maro that circles the border
I review the frail blink of my vaporous life.

I move the soft finger. You lay me
you lay here

you said I am yours I said I am yours
and we never knew
of the silent island of the noon
that invaded our landscape

it waits at the borders
at the limits of disdain
and it still thinks of you

it walks
without rumba
it stops

Translated by Christian Elguera

Photo: Joe Green, Unsplash.

I am from the rainforest, from its wetlands.
All year long I live through rainy seasons.
My days are liquid ropes expanding
and nourishing fallen leaves full of unfamiliar insects.

With the ants I build labyrinths,
gather mushrooms and roots spreading themselves
into sandy microcosms.
The rains make swamps of the flatlands.
Day is quick and slow like a dispersing sun.

A refuge of logs, a water phantom, surrounds me.
On my way home, I walk on a path between two rivers.
A rowboat waits for me at makeshift ports.
A never-ending downpour runs through me.

Gravity makes clouds full of droplets fall on my body.
The water does not withhold itself from its many storms.
Even though I don’t have an umbrella, I miss the steady drizzle.
“Weather is the rain’s concern,” my mother says.

Saint Rose and her Wind

In August, one waits for a wind stripped of its power
without the excesses of lifting waves and untethering canoes.

Although the news forecasts unprecedented winds,
there is no sign of Saint Rose of Lima’s presence.

For some reason the lupunas’ canopies
are the first ones to hear her hoarse and agitated voice.

The winds in the tropics speak to the inhabitants
and summon stories of riverside dwellers in floating houses.

Many have seen roofs fly off cardboard homes
and have ridden the waves in their topa rafts to avoid sinking.

She is the chief of national police who comes and goes without a trace.
Where is the howling we have been expecting and dread?

Years ago, we heard her break branches, destroy plastic sheet roofs.
By the end of August, we expect her to pass calmly through the city.

It is probable the Saint of Lima’s legend
will prolong the mysteries of future hurricanes.

Translated by Yaccaira Salvatierra

Photo: Khamkéo Vilaysing, Unsplash.