This Translation Tuesday, sail to the Galápagos with the poetry of the Mexican poet, Malva Flores, winner of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize in 1999. In five elusive and potent fragments, Flores fires up the islands of imagination that make up the tropical locale’s “intoxication”. On this Archipelago, a fascinating intertextuality is weaved throughout as we encounter literary figures from Victor Hugo to Salvador Elizondo. These poems, rendered in J Buentello Benavides’s marvellous translation, shine through with an allusive power that can only be described as “an excess of sun”.
Terraces
You must always climb. That is banishment,
a slope, even if it’s in the desert.
María Zambrano
Lose a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump; stay standing on the terrace. Yes. Like that. Alone on the terrace, among hanging clothes like bloodless bodies and all the old things from which you detach because you don’t want to see what happened, but you save them, you stick them in chests, in boxes, even in plastic bags. You save them.
What happened became simple. You were wrong. You lost a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump and you came to a stop on this island suspended in the whitest blue of a brilliant afternoon: this eternal terrace.
Droplets
I had ignored the prudent advice of the goddess and
desired with all of my soul to descend there.
Salvador Elizondo
There’s a drop of water on the head. Drop that slides slowly through the skull. It’s not a drop of sweat: it’s a message. Brief, miniscule sparkle that is not water or shadow. Imaginary sweat you wipe off a thousand times and there is nothing: it’s a liquid spark of guilt, but it’s dry. A warning.
Various forms of intoxication flourish here in the Archipelago. At contact of the palm and the forehead, the hypothetical drop evaporates. It’s an excess of sun over your hand.
It’s stress
“Rodolfo, does power not scare you?”
“I’ll tell you what Arsenio Lupin said in
regards to Kaiser Wilhelm II: ‘An emperor’s
hand does not have more than five fingers!’”
Rodolfo Usigli, in an interview with Cristina Pacheco
All of my body hurts. And here, and there and like this, in the strained muscle. It’s stress, they tell me. And instead, I check the windows, the edge it gives to the streets, looking for that salt I already know: the trickle of salt some hand must have scattered at night, while I slept.
Everyone has a tyrannical side, but the evil is there, with so many varied nicknames and only one true name.
Cartoons on Island 26
No one is at fault for making this rock cry
Gonzalo Rojas
Let’s continue calling them doves, little doves. Tossed into the sea. Rosy beaks tossed into the sea, because there is no place here for doves. But we sing, yes: doves, little doves. Thrown into the sea.
Waves disrupt. The sea is also a cemetery: that lukewarm hammock we dream of. Rosy beaks, pink little feet and it would be funny to see them die this way, tied to the rock, with a big coat. They would be cartoons.
Pink.
Everything’s alright
This exile doesn’t complain about anything. He has worked. He has reconstructed his life for him and his loved ones. Everything’s alright, beloved Victor Hugo.
A chorus of mist emerges from the Archipelago. Dawn breaks in Galápagos.
Translated from the Spanish by J Buentello Benavides
Malva Flores is author, among others, of the following books: Galápagos (Era, 2016); La culpa es por cantar. Apuntes sobre poesía y poetas de hoy [The fault is for singing. Notes on poetry and poets today] (Literal Publishing / Conaculta, 2014); Aparece un instante, Nevermore [Appears for an instant, Nevermore] (Bonobos / UNAM, 2012), Viaje de Vuelta. Estampas de una revista [Journey of Return. Prints from a magazine] (FCE, 2011), Luz de la Materia [Light of Matter] (ERA, 2010), Passage of the Tree (Literal Publishing, 2006), Malparaíso [Bad paradise] (Eldorado, 2003), Casa nómada [Nomadic house] (Joaquín Mortiz, 1999), Ladera de las cosas vivas [Hillside of living things] (CNCA, 1997), Pasión de caza [Passion of hunting] (Gob. Del Estado de Jalisco, 1993). In 2006, Flores won the José Revueltas National Essay Prize with her book El ocaso de los poetas intelectuales [The Twilight of the Intellectual Poet] (UV, 2010). In 1999, she received the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize, and in 1991, she also received the Elías Nandino National Young Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been translated into English, Portuguese, Japanese, German, and Dutch.
J Buentello Benavides is a writer, teacher, editor, and translator. Her prose and translations have appeared in The Florida Review, Denver Quarterly, Newfound, Los Angeles Review, Texas Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University. Her translations were nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Several of her short stories have been named finalist for the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize and finalist for The Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize. She previously served as managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
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