For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the awe and dread of winter are at once historical and timeless in these selections by Spanish poet, translator, and scholar Juan Andrés García Román. In “The Hour,” a looming sense of nostalgia-fuelled Weltschmerz—allegorized here as passing seasons—prompts our speaker to recognize the fleeting joy of life and youth, while also imploring the importance of “staying” in the face of melancholy. In “For the First Time, You Feel Sad (Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees),” our speaker deploys allusions and anachronisms—everything from Byzantium military history to Roman mythology to contemporary French children’s literature—to illustrate the love and longing of a winter-born absence. The cerebral maximalism of García Román’s verse is done justice here by Nick Rattner’s adroit translation of the poet’s layered metaphors and embedded historical/literary references. A learned take on the season-change poem which warrants a careful, meditative read.
The Hour
for Antonio Mochón
Who, after tossing and turning a winter
night while snow
covered the peaks, honored the refrain,
the brave old songs,
and the postcards of mountains
displayed in mountain lodges,
who, I say, did not this way pass
through a cemetery and, feeling a quaver
in their legs, partly from
fatigue of another world,
and partly to shield against wind and lightning,
did not slip themselves into an empty niche
to wait out the storm, and from this feel
suddenly tired of the path,
the path that rises, falls, and roams
through its cantons—softness of others’
lives, skies quickly snuffing, sun with the shriek
of midday, predisposition
toward sarcasm, and dense forests
that realize that you have penetrated
them and flower into a familiar
palm of Chinese firecrackers to which
you are a dazzled witness, alone, and decidedly,
decidedly mortal;
but what are flowers,
what is the shining between branches, what
is anything save the accordion of a single fatigue,
shared by all things, skyward
or earthbound, the one that signs
the swallow white on one side, black on the other, but yellow, too, nacre, crimson . . .
for who. Who in this world, worn down by spring,
has not desired the other, who has not set spinning
with their imagination the mill-
wheels until halting them
in a cross forceful as the sunbeam
that shakes the church tower,
lighting in the Lord’s body stigmata
healed already, torpid residue
of a flower in its fruit. And how finally
not to feel a grave, a nearly terminal
melancholy for the climate of childhood,
the tongues of mules
and the fountain’s mother-full water,
or that saying—“Stay with us,
that the afternoon . . .”—pleading, now
—“Won’t you stay, stay with us,
please?”—so the heart’s blood
ties a final double knot for purity
and a voice gathered from all forests, peaks,
and skies responds again
with a candle-snuffing whisper gives
its answer, then on, never before, the same: “Yes.”
For the First Time, You Feel Sad
(Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees)
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
bird in twilight singing:
flight of two bodies.
Light comes into the breeze,
blows the wind, wheels the wheel.
With his bird underside, his ancient axils,
the nightingale brushes the night.
You feel sad. I don’t.
It’s just that your hair got tangled around bumble bees.
The wind is a bellows. Grey and bellows-faced,
with cat whiskers, a king’s ringlets, and a nose red
as Martin Pebble’s.
You’re the blonde girl who all morning long turns her desk like a sunflower.
You’re the blonde girl training a bird with her left arm.
Yet in winter you don’t exist. You’re snatched by the ugly old lady
–she snatches Proserpine so winter may exist!
Listen: the Tuscan roe deer with a single horn
said to have started the unicorn
myth, goes and hides once more in the grove,
headed into to a new Dark Age;
before going into it, he turns his head
and your blown-out candle gaze is lit once more.
Look! The swallows’ migration to
less democratic nations has begun.
Proserpine, child who brings the gardens with her
like a birthday cake,
let the gardens be!
Don’t do it.
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Rattner
Juan Andrés García Román has published numerous books of poetry in Spanish, including El fósforo astilado (2008, DVD Ediciones), La adoración (2011, DVD Ediciones), Fruta para el pajarillo de la superstición (2017, Pre-Textos), and Poesía Fantástica (2020, Pre-Textos). His poems were included in the European Poetry Anthology (Carl Hanser Verlag) and have been widely anthologized. As a translator, García Román focuses on German and English literature, and has brought the work of Rilke, Hölderlin, Carl Einstein, H.P. Lovecraft, and Kafka into Spanish. His own work has been translated into Italian, German, and English. He lives in Germany.
Nick Rattner is Editor of Gulf Coast. He is a former basketball journalist and Editor for Ugly Duckling Presse. New poems and translations can be found in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, Grist, Midwest Review, and GASHER. With Marta del Pozo, he has translated the work of poets Yván Yauri and Czar Gutiérrez.
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