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
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