Memories of a family outing are preserved for posterity in Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán’s “Oyster Pond,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Our speaker’s second-person address captures the intimacy and awe of a parent-child relationship, here a one-sided epistolary written for a hypothetical being (the future adult) recording the experiences of an actual being (the present child). The recurring images of wetness—foam, rain, saliva, the sea—evoke images of nascent life and mimic the ebb and flow of a child’s mind (e.g., the “life or death” urgency of collecting beads). At the metapoetic level, the gift our speaker offers the child is placed into the interim care of the reader—we are witnesses and keepers of a private and cherished memory.
Oyster Pond
To Nora, barely two years old
You are not going to remember this moment,
that is why I am writing it down for you.
You do not know either that you have
all your memory to celebrate
while you bring us
more beads for a necklace
as if your life depended on them.
Now you look around and take some time
before noticing something new.
Once you hear us, you call it
with the same word you use
when asking for the moon
by your bed to be switched on.
The foam also shines
when you name it, can you see it?,
while slipping through your fingers
back to the sea.
When I swallow saliva I can feel
how it rained the afternoon I first knew about you.
I hold your hand still wet
and close my eyes to sense together
the beat of a shell shivering under the sun.
Written and translated from the Asturian by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán
Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán is a Spanish/Asturian scientist and writer born in Avilés in 1969 and author of three books of poetry: Países (“Countries,” 2005), Diversa memoria (“Diverse memory,” 2011) and Un ciertu desorde (“A certain disorder,” 2012), winners of the two most prestigious poetry prizes in Asturian, “Teodoro Cuesta” (2004 ex-aequo with Marta Mori and 2008) and “Xuan María Acebal” (2011). He has translated into that romance language poems by Billy Collins and Ted Kooser for the first volume of the magazine Campo de los Patos dedicated to American poetry (2012). Xosé Anxelu G. Morán received his PhD in Biology from the University of Oviedo/Uviéu in 1999 and is currently Senior Researcher at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) in Gijón/Xixón. He was also Associate Professor of Marine Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, where he still serves as adjunct professor.
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