Translations

Translation Tuesday: “Luz” by Samanta Galán Villa

March 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Tricia Viveros

Her tone of voice was like the chirping of a small bird.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to this sparse and beguiling story of a young schoolgirl who escapes from home and encounters a strange little girl, Luz. Written by the Mexican writer Samanta Galán Villa and published in Monolito magazine in May 2021, this story—related through the perspective of an innocent child—appears deceptively simple, but conveys a deeper sense of the way a child’s gaze can defamiliarise her little world into something bizarre and oftentimes beautiful. Tricia Viveros explains, in her translator’s note, how she strives to preserve this duality and makes a case for reading this writer from Guanajuato who represents a counterpoint to the dominant ways Mexican literature is read.

“My English translation of ‘Luz’ aims to maintain Galán Villa’s artful economy of language as much as possible—a task that required some compromise as, for instance, it’s not possible to omit the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in English. Adopting an adequate level of rudimentary wording was also challenging. The Spanish original elicits a sense of irony by juxtaposing its childish diction and syntax with a sophisticated narrative structure. Writing that is too unrefined risks detracting from the text and inhibiting the plot’s development; by frequently using simple sentences and contractions, my translation seeks to convey the near-surrealistic irony of the original without diminishing the prose. Samanta Galán Villa is part of a growing number of emerging contemporary voices across underrepresented regions of Latin America. Hailing from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, her writing evidences a long-established literary tradition beyond that of more cosmopolitan, affluent centers like Mexico City.”

—Tricia Viveros

Mama slapped me. Her lower lip trembled. How could they possibly have punished me, after class was dismissed, she said, together with the disobedient children. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that someone had smeared my braids with paint and I’d defended myself.

She didn’t want to hear it. She said that she knew me. That I wasn’t going to eat chocolate cereal with the family later, that she’d only give me a glass of juice. Zip it and don’t talk back to me, brat. Go to your room, right now.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “10 February 2020” by Dmitry Gerchikov

March 1, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lena Tsykynovska

War isn’t easy. / War is inevitable.

Poetry, in dark times, must record and resist. This Translation Tuesday, read Russian poet Dmitry Gerchikov’s response to a Penza court’s high profile sentencing of eleven men for allegedly participating in an anti-government anarchist organisation known as Network—a group widely regarded as non-existent and fictitious. Proceeding through an obsessive adherence to the reportage of numerical data points, Gerchikov stretches the language of factuality and neutrality to accommodate the absurd. In Lena Tsykynovska’s translation, Gerchikov’s protest poem against the banality of state violence and the state’s manipulative use of language is conveyed to chilling effect.

“In a 2019 essay about an imaginary action consisting of walking around Moscow wearing a mask of Putin, Dmitry Gerchikov wrote: “Art is what happens right now, but writing is always in the past, especially poetry. Poetry is always running late to reality.” “10 February 2020” was only two months late to reality, published in April 2020. The Network group that appears in the first line of the poem are eleven young men accused of participating in an anti-government terrorist anarchist organization, seven of whom, on 10 February 2020, were given long prison sentences. Many believe that the evidence against the defendants was falsified, and extracted through torture. 

One moment in the poem I could not translate within the poem proper was: “Mark Fisher is not a lion.” When I first sent him the translation, the author pointed out to me that the lion was also a play on the word for “left.” We decided to convey that information in this note. I also was not able to translate the fact that, toward the end of the poem—“I am still in love”—the speaker gestures to herself as female, by using the feminine form of the verb.

Thanks to Dima and to many other poets in Russia for their solidarity with Ukraine.”

—Lena Tsykynovska

10 February 2020

10  February 2020, the day of the sentencing of the Network group the average speed of the wind was 8 m/s. The day was 9 hours and 15 minutes long. The sun rose at 08:06.

According to a calendar called “A Calendar For Gardeners” it was a good day for gathering crops suitable for drying. The moon was in Virgo, which is the optimal time to do some bookkeeping, and promises healthy digestion. 

As noted by RIA news: “Comrade Beria lost his trust, so comrade Malenkov gave him some kicks.
Him some kicks.
Him some kicks.”

The magnetic field was calm. Barometric pressure was measured at 739mm. By 15:00 humidity had dropped to 70%.

A third world war is inevitable. Life is difficult. Sunset is at 17:22. We have fused together like a swastika and a star. A swastika and a star.
A swastika and a star.
Life is inevitable.

“The police wear big round caps, because they are forbidden to look at god’s sky, at god’s sky, at god’s sky by an order issued on 4 February 1999. So if they try to surround you, you should jump as high as you can, because then they’ll only be able to see your shoes, and won’t remember your face.
Won’t remember your face
Won’t remember your face.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Breath” by Ana Luísa Amaral

February 22, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Margaret Jull Costa

The woman sitting opposite me / plays with her handbag— / distractedly

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to feature a poem by the award-winning Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral. In “The Breath,” the speaker’s observation of the mundane everyday on public transport turns into a moment of poetic transport. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, this life-affirming poem from a frequent contributor duo is one to hold and behold, to turn over in our hands until, we realise, it becomes something too that breathes, something that moves.

The Breath 

The woman sitting opposite me
plays with her handbag—
distractedly 

She flips the handle-cum-wing
of the bag
back and forth
twines it around her fingers 

Like a small
dancerly bird,
the wing-cum-handle comes alive
between the woman’s fingers  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from “Galileo” by Yevhen Pluzhnyk

February 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Oksana Rosenblum

I am quiet as grass, even quieter still

First published in 1926, today’s Translation Tuesday features an excerpt from the long poem “Galileo,” first collected in Ukrainian poet Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s debut collection. Oscillating between the epic ambition of its length—running to more than twenty pages in its original publication—and the persona’s declaration of his own smallness (“I am quiet as grass, even quieter still”), this poem reads like an inverse of the Whitmanian celebration of the self even as it maintains its own brand of fierce solitude. Hear translator Oksana Rosenblum contextualise this poem that was written almost a century ago now: on Pluzhnyk’s proto-Existentialist spirit and the strange parallel journey the writer took when compared to his titular figure. 

“Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s poem ‘Galileo’ was published in 1926 as part of his poetry collection Dni (Days). The debut collection of the 28-year-old Ukrainian poet made a strong impression on Ukrainian literary circles. Pluzhnyk became instantly recognized as one of the most original poets of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s–30s, for the laconism and emotional strength of his poetry. The narrator assumes the persona of a fragile, traumatized person who went through the horrors of the Civil War—hunger, everyday survival, joblessness, and more broadly, a sense of not being understood or welcomed in a society ruled by the values of the NEP (New Economic Policy) adopted by the Soviet Union in 1921. In a way, he is that person, since he witnessed all of it: the upheaval of the Revolution, the trauma of the Civil War, life-long struggle with tuberculosis, and poverty. Even though the poem was written in 1926, before the appearance of Existentialism as a philosophical movement, there is an overwhelming sense of the narrator’s involvement with the kind of questions that an existentialist writer would ask: is there any meaning to life beyond what we assign to it? Why do some people always come to the top of the hierarchy, why do others suffer unspeakable pain and hardships?

Yevhen Pluzhnyk, a poet whose life was filled with personal and social hardships and was eventually cut short by the terror and purges of the 1930s, somewhat enigmatically entitled his poem Galileo. The title remains a mystery. We know that Galileo Galilei was forced to recant his views in front of the Inquisition. Pluzhnyk never addresses this fact in his poem; moreover, he mentions Galileo only in the very last stanza. Tragically, Pluzhnyk’s fate ran in parallel to Galileo’s: in 1935, he will have to recant his own views when accused of Ukrainian nationalism and terrorism. He would die of tuberculosis on Solovetsky Islands, thousands of miles away from his beloved Ukraine.”

—Oksana Rosenblum 

Galileo

Dedicated to Marusia Yurkova

Limitless spaces, familiar orbits
Still do not exhaust Earth’s purpose.
It rains again, and I struggle with doubts;
It’s autumn. 

As I walk by coffee shops, in my worn-out boots—
By the warm lights, people and daily affairs,
Suddenly, I feel so quiet inside:
Life or death, who cares?

Oh, autumn!
       It always wears me out,
       My heart is like a small tired stone . . .
Those days, wasted in a grey typhoid barrack,
And the black spots, ravens, and I am alone.

Listen up, you, competent people!
                                              You,
Whose jaws look like big ugly claws!
I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,
I am so easily unnoticed. 

Those who have strong nerves, they
Do not need to listen to my nonsense.
But for me, someone who starves every day,
Now’s my only chance to be open. 

Maybe I am a Philistine, saddened
by the absence of a warm winter coat.
Or perhaps I come from a land,
Where people die over and over.

Can I share one thought with you?
Being honest is not easy.
Under morbid rain, every day and night
I stand on the corner and howl.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Park Joon

February 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Youngseo Lee

I lay like a faded capillary / crossing through the love line / on my lover’s palm

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to feature two poems by Park Joon, one of South Korea’s top-selling poets. Drawn from his debut poetry collection, 당신의 이름을 지어다가 며칠은 먹었다 (I Took Your Name as Medicine For Days), these poems project a remarkable feeling of love in their condensed lines. Hear from translator Youngseo Lee how she negotiated Park’s spare punctuation in her translation—allowing the reader to experience the quiet tumult of these poems and their expression of a quiet beauty. 

“A particular difficulty that I faced while translating Park Joon’s gorgeous poems was in replicating the form without complicating the reading experience. In Korean, the ends of sentences are very easy to spot because they almost always end in “~다” or “~요”, especially in written text. This means that when Park uses little to no punctuation in his prose poems, it is not difficult to keep track of the beginnings and ends of each thought, and the reader can focus on the cascading between ideas and emotions without being distracted by the form. However, in the English, of course, phrases can easily be misread as part of a sentence that it does not belong in, or the transition from idea to idea can become confusing. Adding commas could be an easy solution for clarity, but Park uses punctuation very sparingly and intentionally, and I didn’t want to detract from the impact of the rare comma (or the lack thereof) by including too much of it. I took minor liberties in rearranging the order of information presented within each line for the sake of clarity, preserving the original as closely as possible, and focused on delivering the beautiful experience of reading Park’s work.”

—Youngseo Lee

Superstition

Bad luck plagued this year

Whenever I ate
I bit my tongue

I quit being a student,
met a lover who kept growing younger and younger,
played in the grass with our shoes off

People who have stretched their legs
and touched sole to sole

can’t watch over
each other’s deaths,
the young lover told me

I told my lover how
emptily scissoring
brings bad luck

and you have to write 王
on the backs of new furniture

My lover’s small hands
grew busier
searching for clovers READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Four Poems” by Milo Tse

February 1, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Eleanor Goodman

hug your father / and the air will solidify

This Translation Tuesday, we feature “Four Poems” by the young, up-and-coming Hong Kong poet Milo Tse, translated from the Cantonese by award-winning translator and author Eleanor Goodman. In these poems, what jumps out to the reader is Tse’s sardonic wit coupled with her insistent repetition that make for a delightful experience when read aloud. Allow yourself to be taken in by Tse’s energetic voice that represents just one of many voices emerging from Hong Kong’s literary scene today.

Four Poems 

Welcome into the glorious
windstorm
Of course you weren’t invited
I just happened to begin blowing
blowing across your eyes
blowing across your phone number
blowing across your time to sleep
blowing across your ancestry
blowing across your dignity
blowing across your hands and feet your hair and your
love, if you have any
Then stark naked you enter
the eye of my storm, whereupon
you’re not allowed to leave
In this holy place
I am your patron saint  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Chen Xianfa

January 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Romaine Scott

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems by the Lu Xun Literary Prize-winning writer Chen Xianfa. Chen’s meditative poems often begin from the plain contemplation of a minute object—a butterfly, the rain, an earthworm—only to draw them into a larger field of philosophical ideas where language and nature’s presumed certainties are interrogated. Reflecting on her translation of these poems, Romaine Scott emphasises “the process of dissolving linguistic and cultural borders to arrive at The Third Shore,” invoking Yang Lian’s notion of translation as forging a new element. So too does Chen write: “There is no such thing as an expression set in stone,” observing a word’s numerous metamorphoses. Immerse yourself in the sparse beauty of Chen’s poems where even a speck of the world can be made anew. 

Lanruo Temple

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’
There is no such thing as an expression set in stone
Nor can I speak unequivocally of a gust of wind
and though the temple may be built upon a speck
of dust, it will, nonetheless, collapse from within
There are moments when a butterfly is motionless
‘To live’ requires fewer strokes of the pen than ‘to take wing’

Taking Shelter From the Rain

It’s raining. In the square many people are running about blindly
a piece of clothing held over their heads
Of course, they are not actually blind
their eyes are simply fixed on taking shelter from the rain

Before the square was built, this was a shantytown
beneath whose poor-quality
bitumen roofs
the smell of poverty, excitement and rebellion rubbed shoulders
with the tavern’s moon. Heaven knows how many nights we
toasted each other READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Place of the Living-Dead” by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade

January 18, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade and Victor Meadowcroft

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me . . .

This Translation Tuesday, we feature a story that treads the line between the fantastical surrealism of dreaming and the brutal reality of living under conditions of war. In award-winning writer Gabriela Ruivo Trindade’s compact and evocative story, a disoriented narrator reckons with the aftermath of having stepped on a mine, where her lost limbs visit so as to relate to her the physical and spiritual damage that had been wrecked upon her body and her family. Translated from the Portuguese by the author herself and Victor Meadowcroft, the narrator’s voice exhibits a remarkable restraint. This quietly moving story brings the reader to a psychological space where the narrator’s processing of trauma feels at once real and irreal, at once emotional and strangely muted, an always liminal place. 

I don’t know my name, or where I was born, or how many years have passed since that day.  Around me there is only a grey haze, through which I try in vain to peer. I’ve lost track of the days: entire evenings are condensed into minutes. I’m surrounded by many others, stretched out on countless cots like mine. 

My head rests on a damp, foul-smelling straw pillow. My head is the only part of my body supporting me. The rest—my torso, my pelvis, both legs cut above the knee, and my right arm—I can barely feel. They’re entirely numb and don’t respond to my commands.  

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me; the arm, poor thing, always hurrying after the other two. That’s how I used to move, always rushing from place to place. I loved dancing, I remember that well, and people even used to say I would become a great dancer. Too bad. I heard one of the women who come to feed us say I’d stepped on a mine, a mina. I don’t know what that is; I can only remember Granny Mina, who used to tell stories of witches and sprites to all the neighbourhood kids.

But I was telling you about these visits from my arm and legs; it’s through them that I hear news of my family and other things I’ve long forgotten. They turn up every night, come through the door and begin talking right away, as if I were already fully awake, awaiting their arrival. And I am, really; I don’t know if it’s some kind of presentiment. On their first visit I was startled. I awoke to a hand shaking me and, upon opening my eyes, noticed there wasn’t a body attached to the arm. I thought it was a ghost and cried out.

Relax, said a voice, nobody’s going to hurt you. Come on, don’t you recognise us anymore?  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Jesús Cos Causse

January 11, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Kristin Dykstra

The fisherman knows something of sundown’s sorrow: / fire who loves the sea

Recipient of the prestigious Julián del Casal, Cuba’s National Poetry Prize, Afro-Cuban poet Jesús Cos Causse (1945–2007) was one of the country’s most prolific ambassadors for her arts and literature internationally. This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to feature three of Cos Causse’s poems from the collection Los años, los sueños: Poesía, 1970–1994, edited by the Panamanian writer Pedro Correa Vásquez. Cos Causse’s poetic language is direct and evocative, and these poems—keenly attuned to the legacies of slavery in the Caribbean—serve as a site of historical memory and resistance. Kristin Dykstra’s translation brings out the austere music of Cos Causse’s poems that sing collectively of a landscape inflected and transmuted by its violent histories and attendant movements: of setting out, fleeing, and summoning.

Fisherman

The fisherman sets out with his nets, his recollections
and dreams, for his encounter with the sea.

On the high sea, night resembles some unremembered port.

During the voyage he sings on deck,
confuses the moon for a beacon
and thinks of a woman, tattered surf.

The fisherman knows something of sundown’s sorrow:
fire who loves the sea.

At sunrise he returns, so tired that he leaves
his heart on the horizon, only to set out
once again on the same night.
READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Véronique Bergen

January 4, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by MARGENTO

in the ocean of tattoos / sea urchins shaped like fully loaded syringes

In our first Translation Tuesday feature for the new year, revel in two outrightly explosive and psychedelic poems by the Belgian poet, novelist and philosopher Véronique Bergen. “I petal blue,” is how Bergen begins one of these poems and it is in this frenzied flowering of one’s subjectivity that we meet the speaker in their radiant and radical metamorphosis. Following her own warped and dynamic syntax, Bergen’s poems lay bare an “orgy of guns”: she construes a poetic world that riots our senses and, in her turbulent re-contextualisation of the technologies that engender this anarchy, refracts a history of global violence. Always, they combust with a frank and freakish sexuality. Translated by our very own Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, MARGENTO brings to our readers the spectrum of technicolour brilliance and virtuosic world-building that is Bergen’s verse. 

Suave Blue 

I petal blue
looking for the way out of my maze
safe behind the bat my effigy

I curaçao
at the bottom of a swimming pool
in search of Isabelle A. of a Gin Cloud
inhaling vapors
of methylene blue
to deoxidize my moths

In the hollow of my sex
my sunken Atlantis
the Amazon of Mytilene
rapes me Lesbos earthquake
a touch of futuristic pornography
to stifle
my desire to sink
among water lilies
where Opheliacs drift

My mission is
to bleed out my blue blood
daily autistic drip
at the time when the sun
deviates into indigo

Periwinkle-colored
death
will have Isabelle A.’s eyes
an amniotic liquid
released from a cosmic uterus
will flow over my wounds
Yves Klein’s patented Tuareg blues.

Dirty Banditry Hour 

Capital Execution
would you like it in black and white crystalline powder
or technicolor pills?
The syringe between your teeth
stereophonic host
for a reality check
who does what
who empties the septic tanks
shoots the rainbow

From the magazine to the barrel
the same current is flowing through the revolver
long cartridges slipped under the tongue
loaded with electromagnetic whisky

The boa girl, smoke lens glasses, bare shoulders
is going to blow up the world’s leadership
decapsulate the tragedy of the spheres
her chain necklace says “yes” to the finger squeezing the trigger
her naked flesh a trap
the new Salome shoots the way we love doing it
point-blank range
firing a life-giving bullet
in the backs of the heads of order apostles
a poppy bullet spouting out
lost weapons undergrowth

Never forget to say
to heaven and earth
yin and yang
who does what
what nerd gives him the heads-up
on the dum-dum bullet rain
on a hero-in shoot-
up white as a fucking shroud

Never forget
in strip poker
blue orgasm cards lose
chemical mutations in language
give birth to counter-letters READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Sara Shagufta

December 14, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Patricia Hartland

my moon owes a debt to the sky / [i loaned this / moon from the sky]

This Translation Tuesday, we feature two exquisite poems of love and loss that take the moon as their emotional core. Drawn from the posthumously published collection Aankhein, this tender pair of poems by the Pakistani writer Sara Shagufta (1954–1984) wrestles with the experiences of mortality with an equal penchant for directness and metaphor: “death bore a child / left her in my lap.” Translated from the Urdu by Patricia Hartland, Shagufta’s poems here are suffused with a rollicking rhythm and a profusion of internal rhymes that move the ear as much as the heart. 

moon’s debt

tears carved our eyes into being

in our
          own
tidal tumult

we pulled at the ropes

             our own deathwailing

the earth hears
the stars’ screams loudest
                              not the sky’s

i unbraided death’s hair
                            and was stretched out on a bed of lies

eyes, a game of marbles
                                                        in sleep’s keep

not-morning-not-night
the between-space
withstood its own duality

my moon owes a debt to the sky
[i loaned this
moon from the sky] READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Landscape with Winter” by Anna Dodas i Noguer

December 7, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Clyde Moneyhun

at night constellations / observe themselves in isolation

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a thirteen-part poem by Anna Dodas i Noguer which was first published as a chapbook in Barcelona and was awarded the prestigious Amadeu Oller Prize in 1986. Blending the fragmented images of a snowy landscape with moments of gentle, philosophical questioning—the hypnotic rhythm of Dodas’ language recedes and surges with the force of the river that courses through her long poem. As translator Clyde Moneyhun suggests, this poem is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s description of her own collection, Winter Trees. That is, “Landscape with Winter” is a poem which contains what Plath calls “small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power.” Marking the first time that Dodas’ work is available in English, we are proud to present to our readers this exquisite work of Catalan poetry. 

Landscape with Winter

The tormented earth groans like a heart.
—Verdague

1

Hair is undone
and the stars shoot
across a milky firmament.
The acceleration, the jolt.
My heart fits
in the paw of an ogre.
Gallop, gallop
jump
gallop, gallop
the mountains ferocious
as the sea.
They cry, the bells,
they cry.
A faucet drips
like a streaming
tear.
All is sleeping.

2

A flock of clouds
white boulevards
snow, snow, snow.
Arrow of silence
flattens the air.
Life itself
            is mute.

Make me a place, make me a place
surface like skating rink
                         ice.
I see nothing, I am blind
the light
            dazzles
                        echoes.

It’s snowing.
Sacrifice spaces
take away the image, if you can:
nothing remains
                        nothing more
than a vast
                        desolate sorrow. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Jim Pascual Agustin

November 30, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jim Pascual Agustin

At home I no longer need to bolt / the windows shut

This Translation Tuesday, we feature the award-winning poet Jim Pascual Agustin who—born in the Philippines and subsequently moved to South Africa in 1994—represents what it means to write from a bilingual and binational space, to write between and across two homes. Self-translated from the Filipino across three decades, these poems speak to moments of precarious fragility that stretch from the life of a cockroach to his speaker’s experience of existential freedom. In Agustin’s translator’s note, we are treated to a mind that views the relationship between writing and translation as symbiotic—troubling the easy distinction and hierarchy between an original and a translation—as he explores his attitude towards self-translated writing as a kind of feedback loop and versioning. 

“More and more I have been looking at my self-translated writing as ‘versions’ instead of traditional translations. These poems were written and translated over many years. The original Filipino version of ‘Upon Waking’ (‘Paggising’) was written in 1994 and first appeared nearly two decade later in my all Filipino poetry collection Baha-bahagdang Karupukan (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, Manila 2011). I first attempted translating it in 2010, and then again in 2014. With feedback from a special international group of friends from an online discussion group called The Boathouse, I decided to leave out an entire stanza that was in the middle part of the original. The cut made for a stronger version of the poem. ‘No Past, No Future’ sees publication ahead of the original Filipino (‘Walang Kahapon, Walang Kinabukasan’). This poem was written, revised and translated on the same day in January 2021, with each version influencing the completion of the other. To me, though, the English version lacks the immediacy and nearly blunt force of the original such that it almost comes off, in comparison, as a cushioned version. I attempted translating ‘For the Saviours’ ten years after the original (‘Para sa mga Tagapagligtas’ from Baha-bahagdang Karupukan, USTPH 2011) was published. I don’t have the exact date of composition, but I think it dates back to the years following the 1986 People Power EDSA Revolution which toppled the Marcos dictatorship. Looking at the images again, I cannot help but see that they are just as apt to the tragedies brought upon by the current Duterte regime in the Philippines.”

—Jim Pascual Agustin

Upon Waking

Wing of cockroach
lies on the floor, but
no trace of its body

or a single leg.
Last night I heard it
crawling like

someone whispering
in the wall
next to my bed.

I pick up the wing,
it feels breakable.
Distant echo

of the flapping
of angels or demons.
Now it is here,

right here
between
my fingers

that are nothing
but mere flesh,
mere bone. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ernesto López Parra

November 23, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by James Richie

The fire / of the love with which we see things

The Ultraist literary movement—of which Jorge Luis Borges was one of its most prominent core members—was an early-twentieth-century avant garde literary movement in Spain that, amidst the influences of multiple European literary trends, promoted the use of imagery and references to new scientific ideas and technologies in poetry. This Translation Tuesday, we are delighted to present two poems by a major figure of the Ultraist movement, Ernesto López Parra, in James Richie’s translation. The poems’ energetic typographic style and evocative metaphors combine to create a new field of perception that reflect how new-fangled technologies from airplanes to electric balloons had begun to shape the literary imagination. The poems of López Parra—who has hardly been translated into English—enhance our appreciation of an influential experimental movement that shaped Spanish poetry.

Color does not exist

Color does not exist. Color—
A vice of the retina
Everything is white
Like the moon and the stars.
If we see the sky as blue,
It’s because Hugo told us,
“And foolishly, we followed his trickery!”
From afar, blue is the summit
Up close, the summit is gray,
But the only truth is that it is white.
The Sacred Books would tell us
That God made the colors.
Flowers are not red nor green
Nor yellow nor purple
The carnation and the violet
The rose and the daisy
Are white . . .
                            (The fire
                            of the love with which we see things
                    Makes us see them with different colors.)
                            Therefore, snow is cold
                            And we see it always as white . . .
                                       (in LIFE, truth, and snow
                                       White and cold)
God did not create color . . .
           He (Ecclesiastes) tells us nothing
           The commentaries silence . . .
  Man invented color
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