Month: April 2022

Reverie / El Ensueño

Rain drops fall through a puddle.
In their wake a sizzling hole. 
The water drains. 
At the bottom babies
Wake up, levitate, and fly away. 

El agua se viene de abajo el charco. 
Al pasar un agujero chisporroteante. 
El agua vacía. 
Los niños están al pie de un pozo 
Se despiertan, levitan y se echan a volar.

Ahora vuelvo a ser yo / Now I Become Myself

The following poem was originally composed by May Sarton, a 20th-century Belgian-American writer. I first encountered this poem in 2019 when I was going through a difficult breakup. I confided in a friend, melodramatically saying that I “had lost myself.” They countered by reciting this poem in its entirety, which at the time I found to be insensitive, as they were stealing my thunder. But as the poem has stuck with me, I’ve come to appreciate it as a gift.

Sarton is not a very famous writer, and I haven’t yet found an English – Spanish translation of her work. So, I gave it a go. But, I have translated only the first stanza, which I consider to be the most focused and illuminative. 

Ahora vuelvo a ser yo                                                   Now I become myself

Ahora vuelvo a ser yo. Había tomado                         Now I become myself. It's taken
De tiempo atrás, muchos años y sitios;                     Time, many years and places;

Me había disuelta y alterada                                        I have been dissolved and shaken
Usada las caras de otras                                              I have worn other people's faces

Corro tontamente                                                         Run madly,
como si El Tiempo fuera allí                                        As if Time were there, 

Abuelo fatal, grita una advertencia                           Terribly old, crying a warning
"Ven, serás muerta antes de-"                                  "Hurry, you will be dead before-"

Qué? Antes de que llegas al alba?                            What? Before you reach the dawn? 
O realizas el fin de la poema?                                    Or the end of the poem is clear?

el desecho

Lovely people keep asking me what this poem “Refuse” is “about,” a demanding kind of question I struggle to answer completely whenever I’m called to contextualize my own poetry. My answer is, when I write poetry, it is because some inner lens has focused, and a mood comes over me (a mood nearly grammatical in its totality, a paradigm shift, like that of the subjunctive tense) and in that mood I draw near the unknowable feeling, the center of the flame, using language. This is my philosophical approach to poetry. It’s also an approach that owes itself to Paul Éluard’s La terre est bleue.

I’ve taken to saying that writing poems is like playing a game with words. After an encounter with Antonio Machado’s true poem En el entierro de un amigo I’ve been thinking about how translating poems is a game too: new meanings appear. The opening line of the poem is Tierra le dieron una tarde horrible / They gave him Earth one horrible afternoon. There is just enough absurdity in that phrasing: They did not give him to the Earth, like abdicated property: they gave him the element of Earth, like a gift. Simple phrasing fitting for most horrible of afternoons. My literal English ear is even tempted to say it as, “Earth they gave him one horrible afternoon.” But, the entire encounter sparked in me some somnambulistic curiosity, and I wanted to see what shifted in my own poem if translated it.

So in honor of my friends who are formidable translators, I did my own clumsy rendition of “Refuse / El Desecho.”

Llora para que el agua sea un hecho de palabras 
El hielo en las alas de la abeja 

En mí cuerpo influyen árboles abuelitas
Rareza teje una bufanda 

Había gatitos con un soplo de curry 
Colgaban a los narices de un gancho en la gravedad 

Los ojos que son perdidos rehusaba la tema 
El sol se hundía el patio de juegos