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.