Three Poems from The Face of the Quartzes

Chus Pato

You stones, bring me words
you are the boondocks of life

bring me the crumb of bread
the one the slug devours
mixed with mud from the roads

I hoped for nothing
believed in nothing

there was but the marvel of being comanche and at the same time
a tree

chestnut leaves encircling my brow
long tresses sewn with pine needles
the gown

just as the crow crosses the rails
and nearby and on the snow watches the train pass

so the voice
a horse
brought to drink from mirrors
at its hooves it keeps
ready
Dance slippers




From the eagle
from one of its wings

bone
for the flute
of the shepherd
 
the beak sunk into flesh
devours it
 
no interjection of astonishment
mouth sealed by five fingers
 
from one wing
a bone
 
for music



In memory of Francisco Cortegoso
Night was falling
and you
who until this moment were imperceptible
materialized
neither rain nor autumn nor cold set you back
you didn’t want to leave
 
your beauty was navigated through a delta
your phrases you spoke slowly
like those of a man conscripted in ’36
who discharges all the shrapnel into himself

you parted time just as a wave parts the sea
 
you were a boy and you served up love-feasts, agapai
your house was a valley, with ample views
 
the nights
feral

lively were the words
as populous as the megapolises of the planet
 
is that why
the name is insuperable
and from its contemplation or theory
flourishes a writing
so frank
that into it flows all that is born
 
and it spreads wide
its field-limits teeming with names
or name
all insensate
without possibility of reading
mute?

like petals on a corolla
speech too radiates from the signs

thus you were able to let go
and ask after the moss that grows in the shape of a star
or lift your gaze
and encounter the different
the leaf of cork-oak

look look
 
when not one of the horse’s hooves
paws the earth
the shadow’s
like a dagger of flint
like the sex of a nymph
the belly of the voice

thus my jealousy of death grew
 
together we were in Córdoba
you were a dove on the ledge of morning
and in Naples
you were Sorrento and Capri and the Posillipo

night was a curtain of silk
they’d spread a tablecloth over an oasis
there where rats run up palm trees
to their home
up high
nestled with the dates

translated from the Galician by Erín Moure



Click here for Jay Miller’s review of The Face of the Quartzes by Chus Pato, translated by Erín Moure, from our Spring 2022 edition.

Read the original in Galician

Listen to the original read by the poet:

These poems are from Un libre favor (The Face of the Quartzes), the sixth book (not counting the essay At the Limit) by Chus Pato that I’ve translated in the past eighteen years. The first four books held the challenges of her prose forms, which were prose but not-prose, poetry in prose, and included interviews, plays, computer scrolling imitations, letters, radio shows, and invented women characters moving in histories of Europe and its migrations and changes, through cities and men and each other, in ways that I, a Canadian, had to learn. Pato’s run-on sentences, comma splices, and other sedimented syntactical effects both interfered with and intensified semantic values, or meaning, which was insolent, refractory, sincere, hilarious, and wise all at once.

Her most recent two books of poems turn again to the use of condensed “lyric” verses with line-breaks that draw syntax tight in all its possibilities, resulting in what I call a “compound syntax,” built of particles and absences, which in itself has semantic value and resonance. Meanings vibrate, never quite settling down.

With these poems, I have to translate not just the meanings of words but their weights, register. I aim to both sense and “situate” their multiple and paradoxical meaning-values in a language that is differently structured, that carries ambiguity and presence in different ways. The result, to a reader, appears very simple! Yet the resonances in English are necessarily different, as readers in English do not share Pato’s Galician history, and “The Face of the Quartzes” is a book of nativity, of grounding in a native land—in the birds, waters, bridges of her native city of Ourense.

Without that grounding (though I hint to it here), the poems read as more eerie, more sombre, more symbolic, more ominous. I am intrigued by this passage of weight and register, as much as I am in “meaning.” The poems come across as sombre but lively, as prophetic and postapocalyptic, stark but humane, rooted in the here and now.

The final poem, “Night is falling,” is for Francisco Cortegoso, a young and vital poet who left our poetry-earth in October 2016 at the age of thirty-one, leaving his own incredible body of work. No selection of Galician poets today would be complete without invoking him, and Pato’s poem does this beautifully, in a funeral march that is a cry of life and language.

Chus Pato teaches history and geography in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain, and writes in Galician. m-Talá, her sixth book of poetry and first in her pentalogy Decrúa (Delve), broke the poetic mould in Galicia in 2000. All five books of the pentalogy have appeared in English translation: m-Talá (Shearsman Books, 2009), Charenton (Shearsman Books, 2007), Hordes of Writing (Shearsman Books, 2011), Secession (Book*hug Press, 2014), and Flesh of Leviathan (Omnidawn, 2016). Hordes of Writing received the 2008 Spanish Critics’ Prize and the 2009 Losada Diéguez Prize. In 2013, the Galician Booksellers’ Association proclaimed Chus Pato Author of the Year. In 2015, her voice was recorded for the archive of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. In 2017, she was elected to the Royal Galician Academy. In 2019, she read at Queen’s College, Oxford University with Erín Moure who was the international translator in residence. Pato reads frequently in Europe and South America and has also read in Canada, USA, Cuba, Mexico, and North Africa.

Erín Moure recently released a collection of poems, The Elements (House of Anansi Press, 2019), “a book of Dad.” In it, poems about and for Moure’s late father—accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers—are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. “The Face of the Quartzes” is her sixth translation from the work of Galician poet Chus Pato. In spring 2020, she published two new translations: a sequence from Juan Gelman’s Argentinian “translations” of the English poet John Wendell, Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Eulalia Books) and, from the rich mountain Galician of Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands, Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books). Forthcoming in fall 2020 are: a translation of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug), and Toots fait la Shiva, avenue Minto (Le Noroît, tr. Colette St-Hilaire), the French version of her memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star Books, 2017). A forty-year retrospective, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press.