Under the sky born after the rain,
I hear the quiet slap of oars against the water
and I’m thinking: happiness is nothing
but the quiet slap of oars against the water.
Or maybe it’s nothing but the light
on a small boat, appearing and disappearing
on the dark swell of years
slow as a funeral supper.

Or the light of a house discovered behind the hill
when we’d thought nothing remained but to walk and walk.
Or the gulf of silence
between my voice and the voice of someone
revealing to me the true names of things
simply by calling them up: poplars, roofs.
The distance between the clinking of a bell
on a sheep’s neck at dawn
and the thud of a door closing after a party.
The space between the cry of a wounded bird out on the marsh
and the folded wings of a butterfly
just over the crest of a wind-swept ridge.

That was happiness:
drawing random figures in the frost,
fully aware they’d hardly last at all,
breaking off a pine bough on the spur of the moment
to write our names in the damp ground,
catching a piece of thistledown
to try and stop the flight of a whole season.

That’s what happiness was like:
brief as the dream of a felled sweet acacia tree
or the dance of a crazy old woman in front of a broken mirror.
Happy days pass as quickly as the journey
of a star cut loose from the sky, but it doesn’t matter.
We can always reconstruct them from memory,
just as the boy sent out to the courtyard for punishment
collects pebbles to form resplendent armies.
We can always be in the day that’s neither yesterday nor tomorrow,
gazing up at a sky born after the rain
and listening from afar
to a quiet slap of oars against the water.

***

Thanks to everyone who helped out on Facebook with the line about the solterona loca. I’ll have to make a habit of “friend-sourcing” translation problems from now on. Further critiques are of course welcome, too. This was somewhat freer than my usual attempts at translation.

Mares
by Juan Ramón Jiménez

Siento que el barco mío
ha tropezado, allá en el fondo,
con algo grande.

¡Y nada
sucede! Nada…Quietud…Olas….
—¿Nada sucede; o es que la sucedido todo,
y estamos ya, tranquilos, en lo nuevo?—

Seas

I sense that my boat
has struck, deep down,
against some massive thing.

And nothing happens!
Nothing… silence… waves…
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are already resting in the new life?

*

It may be a mistake to try and make a video for one of my favorite poems: I’ll never be satisfied with the results. In this case, my dissatisfaction is especially acute because one of the main things that made the footage so compelling to watch on my home computer — the complex patterns of waves — is excessively pixelated at anything but the highest of resolutions. Also, there’s some absurdity in visually equating the surface of a small, vernal pond with Jimenez’ “Seas.” Oh well.

For the translation, after much thought I decided to borrow from Robert Bly’s translation and render “lo nuevo” as “the new life,” instead of simply “the new,” because I think that is the gist of it. As always with my translations, I’d welcome suggestions of alternatives. I was trying to figure out some way to use “calm,” or a variation thereof, for “tranquilos,” but “becalmed” seemed over-reaching. It’s frustrating to have a clear idea of what the poem means and be unable to quite convey it.

I’ll be sharing this at Moving Poems in a couple of weeks, but here’s a sneak peek. For the Spanish text (or my translation), see “Federico Garcí­a Lorca: two translations,” my post from 2005.

“Gacela” means “ghazal,” but I decided to keep the Spanish word this time to avoid confusion, since Lorca’s notion of what constitutes a ghazal differs so much from the practice of contemporary English-language poets (to say nothing of Arabic poets). This was part of Lorca’s 23-poem cycle Divan del Tamarit, an homage to the great Moorish civilization of his native Andalusia.

Lorca’s free adaptations of the ghazal and qasida reflected the influence of the anthology Poemas Arábigoandaluces translated by Emilio García Gómez, which created a minor sensation among Spanish readers and intellectuals when it was published in 1930. Poets of the renowned Generation of 27, which included Lorca, found it especially revelatory. Rafael Albertí later told an interviewer, “That book opened our eyes to all that Andalusian past, and brought it so close to us that it left me with a great preoccupation for those writers, those Andalusian writers, Arabs and Jews, born in Spain… If one studies Arab-Andalusian poetry carefully, so full of metaphors and miniaturism, we will see that there is a continuity with the later poetry, of Góngora, Soto de Rojas, and centuries later, with our own.” (I’m quoting from the introduction to an English translation of the anthology, Poems of Arab Andalusia, by Cola Franzen.)

The music, as noted in the credits, is by Antony Raijekov. It’s from his Jamendo.com collection Jazz U, to which he applied a liberal Creative Commons license that allows for remixes.

Gakumon wa... haiga by Yosa Buson (photo by ionushi on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)

Gakumon wa ketsu kara nukeru hotaru kana

(Study/scholarship as-for, ass from exiting/emitting firefly [exclamatory particle])

All this study—
it’s coming out your ass,
oh firefly!

*

I found this gem while looking for a photo of one of Buson’s haiga (haiku illustration, a proto-Manga-like genre he did much to advance) as a possible addition to Sunday’s post. It comes courtesy of Mexican blogger and man-of-letters Aurelio Asiain, who, as it happens, now teaches at the very college in Japan where I spent a formative year as an exchange student back in 1985-86.

This is as close to an outright simile as a haiku can get. Notice that there’s no firefly in the painting, which acts as a kind of commentary on the poem. In the absence of any additional information, one could certainly read this as a poem about a firefly whose diligent study bears fruit in the radiance coming from his abdomen. But the facial expression of the figure in the painting encourages a more Rabelaisian interpretation. Notice, further, the placement of the text in relation to the figure, the calligraphy suggesting curls of vapor. This is a fart joke.

It translates particularly well into modern American English, since “talking out one’s ass” is such a popular way to characterize know-it-all bloviating. Intellectual pursuits had a much higher value in Edo-period Japan, though, where students and scholars were often poetically said to study by firefly light — a conceit that survives to this day:

“Keisetsu-jidadi” which literally translates into “the era of the firefly and snow,” means one’s student days. It derives from the Chinese folklore and refers to studying in the glow of the fireflies and snow by the window. There is also an expression “Keisetsu no kou” which means “the fruits of diligent study.”

So Buson’s insight consists simply in pointing out where on its anatomy the firefly’s light emerges.

We shouldn’t be surprised that such a humorous haiku came from the brush of one of the greatest haiku masters. Humor and earthiness were primarily what distinguished haiku and haikai no renga from the much older renga (linked verse) tradition in the first place. In social terms, haiku poetry represented a middle-class appropriation and popularization of what had been a very aristocratic pursuit. And Japan was and remains an earthy culture; there’s nothing like the split between classical and vernacular views of the body which has afflicted Westerners since the Renaissance. Buson was able to paint equally well in a high-brow Chinese style and in the cartoonish fashion seen here, just as Chaucer included the Knights Tale and the Miller’s Tale in the same work.

Yosa Buson (1716-1783) is generally considered one of the four greatest writers of what we now call haiku (the others being Basho, Issa, and Shiki), and he was a brilliant painter and sketch artist to boot. Though ambiguity has always been prized in Japanese poetry, Buson took it to the limit in some of his haiku. Others, of course, are entirely straightforward. Here are a few of each.

***

Nashi no hana tsuki no fumiyomu onna ari

The blossoming pear—
a woman reads a letter
in the moonlight.

*

Is it live, or is it metaphor? Other translators tend to make this a bit more instrumental and say “by moonlight,” but the grammatical structure suggests that letter-reading woman is to moon as blossom is to pear tree.

***

Shigi tôku kuwa sugusu mizu no uneri kana

A distant snipe.
Rinsing off the hoe,
how the water quakes!

*

The association here may be with the circling, diving courtship display of a common snipe (Gallinago gallinago) at dusk, or simply its zig-zag flight when flushed. The verb uneru means to undulate, meander, surge, swell, roll, etc.

***

Kura narabu ura wa tsubame no kayoi michi

Behind the warehouse row,
a road busy with the back-and-forth
of barn swallows.

*

This is Hirundo rustica gutturalis, a different subspecies but substantially the same bird familiar to Europeans and North Americans.

***

Yado kase to katan nage dasu fubuki kana

“A night’s lodging!”
and the sword thrown down—
a gust of snow.

*

Buson really makes the little words work hard. The Japanese particle to attributes the opening phrase to someone — we’re left to imagine who — while at the same time introducing the down-thrown-sword gust of snow.

***

Me ni ureshi koi gimi no sen mashiro nari

As utterly blank as it is,
I can’t stop looking
at my lover’s fan.

*

The archaic mashiro means “pure white,” but the contrast with the norm — brightly painted fans — is clearly in play here. And though we might not share the premodern Japanese attraction to pure white skin, our fashion photography suggests we still understand the sexiness of a blank expression.

***

Enma-Ô no kuchi ya botan o hakan to su

The King of Hell’s mouth:
peony petals ready
to be spat out.

*

The King of Hell in popular East Asian Buddhist iconography is always shown with an angry, open mouth. Is Buson looking at a statue of Enma-Ô and imagining a peony, or vice versa? I picture an aged, pink peony blossom in a state of partial collapse.

***

Kujira ochite iyo-iyo takaki o age kana

The diving whale—
how its tail keeps going
up!

*

Iyo-iyo means both “increasingly” and “at last.” There’s probably a better way of conveying that dual sense in English than what I’ve gone with here.

***

Kari yoroi ware ni najimaru samusa kana

Fitting the borrowed
armor to my body—
Christ it’s cold!

*

The last line is not, of course, a literal translation of samusa kana, but in modern colloquial American English, it’s hard to imagine exclaiming about the cold without deploying at least a mild curse.

***

Sakura chiru nawashiro mizu ya hoshizuki yo

Cherry petals
in the rice-seedling water,
moon and stars.

*

Another conjunction that’s not entirely a metaphor, but could be if you wanted.

***

Ichi gyô no kari ya hayama ni tsuki o in su

All in one line, the wild geese,
and the moon in the foothills
for a seal.

*

Nature as calligraphic painting.

***

Asa giri ya e ni kaku yume no hito dôri

Morning fog—
the road full of people from
a painter’s dream.

*

Fog, mist, haze: the East Asian landscape painter’s way of collapsing time and distance.

***

Tsurigane ni tomarite nemuru kochô kana

On the temple’s
great bell,
a butterfly sleeps.

*

“Bell” is of course entirely inadequate. The English word conjures up a clanging or tolling thing with a clapper, nothing like the booming bronze behemoth meant here. Tomarite — “stopping,” “lodging” — seems redundant in translation.

This butterfly is the Buson equivalent of Basho’s ancient ponderous frog. So many interpretations, so much weighty critical analysis! How can it possibly sleep?

***

Utsutsu naki tsumami gokoro no kochô kana

Not quite real,
this sensation of pinching—
a butterfly.

This haiku is notoriously hard to pin down: is the sensation one that a human feels, holding a butterfly by the wings, or is it — as the grammar seems to suggest — the butterfly who feels this not-quite-real sensation? Personally, I favor a third view: that the sensation is the experience of a human on whose finger a butterfly has landed. Butterflies can cling quite tightly — I don’t think it would be a stretch to use the verb tsumamu for that — and when they then begin to mine the grooves in your finger for salt with their long proboscis, the sensation is very strange indeed.

***

Asa kaze no ka o fukimiyoru kemushi kana

Morning breezes
play in the hair
of a caterpillar.

*

As with the temple-bell butterfly haiku, there’s an extra verb here (miyoru, “can be seen”) that really doesn’t need to be translated. Even without it, the poem is all about perspective.

***

Kin byô no usu mono wa dare ka aki no kaze

Whose thin clothes
still decorate the gold screen?
Autumn wind.

*

Painted on the screen, one wonders, or draped over it? I think this is another haiku that merges world and painting. Autumn wind typically conveys loneliness in Japanese poetry.

***

Shira ume ni akuru yo bakari to nari ni keri

(final deathbed poem)

The night almost past,
through the white plum blossoms
a glimpse of dawn.

*

Buson in fact died before dawn, so this glimpse, too, is an artist’s vision, poised between dream and metaphor.

Landscape With a Solitary Traveler, by Yosa Buson (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

*

My Identi.ca collaborator Patricia F. Anderson and I continue to work at our chain poem derived from news stories. I think it’s near completion.

*

The new Read Write Poem social network is really taking off, with 267 members, 6000-10,000 page views a day, and lively conversations proliferating in the groups and forums. I administer groups for Micropoetry, Video Poetry, and Politics and poetry, which is probably about all I can handle right now. Fortunately, lots of other people have been stepping forward, and the site now has 44 groups to choose from — everything from American Expatriates to New Formalism to LOLcat Poetry.

I’ve been a little surprised to find myself so active there; up until now, I’ve actively avoided involvement in discussions about writing and literature, which so easily become contentious. But so far, at least, the dominant tone at Read Write Poem has been enthusiasm rather than snark. And in another test of the expanded site’s success, the responses to the first weekly poetry prompt since the changeover have included a number of pretty impressive poems. I may never become a regular writer to prompts myself, but it’s great to see so many talented writers coming together across boundaries of distance, background, level of expertise, and stylistic approach. If you were thinking of applying for an MFA program somewhere, I’d advise you to save your money and join Read Write Poem instead.

To shed some light on the social context and on the profession of poetry in Honduras, I decided to translate a short interview with Robert Sosa that I found in the online archive of La Prensa Literaria, the books section of Nicaragua’s La Prensa newspaper. This originally appeared in March 2004 under the title “La Poesía es dolor.”
__________

Interview by María Antonia Martínez de Fuentes

In his garage, an entire era has been preserved. A portrait of Che Guevara and an orange ’69 Pontiac prompt an inevitable trip back in time, to those years when rebellion gave him strength and anti-militarism was his obsession.

In every corner of his house — in the cramped living room, on the way up to his study, ensconsed in the middle of his impressive library — one finds small tributes recalling those charismatic bearded figures of four decades ago.

It’s all an homage to that tragic time in Latin American history. His head is never without a brimmed beret, and no one can remember ever seeing him without a beard.

In his exceptional literary production, poems always burst forth with abundant energy, often at the same pace as the atrocities commited by abusive dictatorships spawned by the shadow-side of capitalism. His works are a response to poverty, injustice, and the global inequalities that create divisions among us.

In his 70s, the poet Roberto Sosa still speaks passionately about the pain involved in writing poetry, about his unabashed pride at surviving the “gifts of age” without pain, and about managing to preserve his most valuable possession as a writer: his conscience.

Let’s sit down there, between the old Pontiac and the Che portrait, to begin our conversation with him.

How does a poet live in Honduras?

In my case, I’m devoted to social interaction, which is an important complement to my literary life — for one thing, making contacts simply helps keep me going. Engaging in chit-chat, giving interviews like this — it could be worse!

Has the situation with poverty improved at all?

No, quite the contrary. Today it seems as if we’re below the poverty line and we’ve become accessories to misery, and sometimes to what could only be called sub-misery. There’s a very clear social degradation in Honduras, one that can’t be hidden, and it diminishes us all in a truly terrible manner.

Your best-known works, without a doubt, have been the ones fired by denunciation, by social critique, by rebellion. How do you remember your first twenty years of literary work, that is to say, between the publication of Caligrama [1959] and Un Mundo Para Todos Dividido [1971]?

With Caligrama the dimensions of my poetry were taking shape, and they expanded further with the publication of Los Pobres in 1968. By 1971 I had published Un Mundo Para Todos Dividido, and from then on I’ve continued much futher along the path I embarked on then, which is to denounce without contributing to factionalism. I’ve never belonged to any political party, either national nor international, both out of class consciousness and, it must be said, my conscience as an artist, because I had and have a responsibility to my country, my society and my time.

Do you consider yourself a revolutionary? Do you feel that literature has been a favorite weapon in revolutions, especially in Central America?

No, literature doesn’t provoke revolutions, or if it does they’re restricted to literary circles, but it does assist in social reconstruction, both immediate and far-reaching. It’s an aesthetic reflection of the way things are, to the extent that it captures the critical elements of a society: corruption, for example, betrayal, treason, impunity, injustice.

There are critics who assert that your work is of watershed importance in the history of Honduran poetry, dividing it into two sections: pre-Sosa and post-Sosa. That your poems begin to confirm the definitive acclimization of the avant-garde. How do you explain this?

I can’t explain it — those are the views of critics and literature professors who share responsibility for such value-judgements in the first place.

Is today’s Roberto Sosa — aside from physical changes, of course — the same as the one who raised the flag of denunciation, a direct and ferocious denunciation of dictators and militarism? Have your point-of-view or your philosophy changed over the years?

I continue to defend the principles I put forth in that era. I cannot repent. I believe I’m making and will continue to make my own way; I could never change to the extent of making some ethical or aesthetic adjustment that would mean the renunciation of the values I’ve defended for so long.

What do you think about corruption? Do you feel it’s the most serious problem in Honduras right now, or are there worse problems?

Corruption has begun to take the shape of a professional calling. I’ve heard it said that in hotel registers, well-dressed people from the “high life” even write “corruption” down as their profession.

When you write, what audience do you have in mind? Which do you think is your most important audience?

When I’m writing, I’m absolutely not thinking about any addressee. I write concentrated within myself and I can’t think about the fate of what I’m writing, because that would become a huge obstacle in the creative process. But yes, my ambition is to write for a great number of readers. If a piece of writing is equal to the inspiration, it’s for the people — though “the people” is an abstraction in this country. The people, this multitude that translates as “people” in Honduras, is a fearsome reality, but can be made to seem manageable as an abstract noun in the mouths of demagogues, for example.

Why lamentation?

Because poetry itself is painful; poetry isn’t an easy thing. It’s a complex construction that entails plenty of sweat. Ninety-five percent is sweat.

In Honduras are there more poets, more novelists, or more short-story writers?

It’s practically a poetic country. There are more poets than anyone.

With all your experience, what advice would you give to young people who aspire to write serious poetry?

Who am I to give advice? But I can say that one does need to read voraciously, work hard and never let oneself be seduced by the imp of publicity. In reality, each writer is a special case and all writers have their own structure, their own worldview, and it’s impossible for any one writer to point out a road for the others. There’s only the general rule that one must be honest, just like with anything else.

What are the great loves of Roberto Sosa?

Poetry, my family, and my country, among other things.
__________

For another, longer and more interesting Sosa interview in English, see this one, by his translator Jo Anne Englebert. He talks about his childhood in the province of Yoro — famous for occasional rains of fish — his largely self-directed education, and his search for a new aesthetic:

I was attracted by testimonial writing. I suspected that this type of writing came closest to the truth. And for me, truth, a specific truth, had to be the basis of poetry. Honduras was not a folkloric reality, it was a transcendent reality, and this transcendence had to find its aesthetic formula: we had to find an exact base and the form to express it — this had to be balanced, integrated, like two halves of the same thing. I started from the social reality, the life I lived, the city, reflected in mirrors and tried to find the form.

His remarks at the end of the interview about women and the feminine image in poetry are also very interesting.

Translations of Sosa’s poetry into English include The Return of the River and The Common Grief, both translated by Jo Anne Englebert for Curbstone Press, and The Difficult Days, translated by Jim Lindsey for Princeton University Press. All three are bilingual editions, and both translators are adequate, if not always inspired.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras by Fellowship of the Rich on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND licence)

AUTOPSIA
Herber Sorto

He cruzado esta calle
con la ilusión de llegar a otro mundo,
por lo que digo:
aquí no hay nada,
no existe nada.
El paisaje se hace camino en las alturas,
el horizonte regresa a su lejanía,
la fábula es lo que he vivido
y el lado roto de la vida, lo que crece.
__________

AUTOPSY
tr. by Dave Bonta

I have crossed this street
under the illusion that I was arriving
in the other world, saying:
there is nothing here,
nothing exists.
The land becomes a road through the mountains,
the horizon recedes into the distance;
I’ve been living a fiction all the while
life’s broken side continues to grow.
__________

__________

__________

BARRIO TRISTE
Tulio Galeas

Este es un barrio triste. Los niños
al crecer vistieron de soledad las casas,
las risas devolvieron su manantial al sueño,
y el misterio reparte su pan con manos amplias.

Las madres estaán solas y la cena está fría.
El viento temoroso de romper el silencio
cierra con pesadez sus grandes párpados,
y hasta mi corazón late despacio para no despertarme.
Ruedo por escaleras de niebla gota a gota,
cubro mis dedos tibios con ceniza,
y un río negro y sucio me invade y me corona.
__________

SAD NEIGHBORHOOD
tr. by Dave Bonta

This is a sad neighborhood. Children cloaked
the houses in solitude when they grew up,
laughs reverted to their origin in dreams,
and mystery doles out bread with its broad hands.

The mothers are alone; supper has grown cold.
The wind, afraid to break the silence,
eases its great leaden eyelids shut
and even my heart beats slowly to avoid waking me.
I tumble down stairs of mist drop by drop,
coat my warm fingers with ash,
and a filthy black river invades me and fills me to the brim.
__________

TEGUCIGALPA
Roberto Sosa

Vivo en un paisaje
donde el tiempo no existe
y el oro es manso.

Aquí siempre se es triste sin saberlo.
Nadie conoce el mar
ni la amistad del ángel.

Sí, yo vivo aquí, o más bien muero.
Aquí donde la sombra purísima del niño
cae en el polvo de la angosta calle
El vuelo detenido y arriba un cielo que huye.

A veces la esperanza
(cada vez más distante)
abre sus largos ramos en el viento,
y coundo te pienso de colores, desteñida ciudad,
siento imposibles ritmos
que giran y giran
en el pequeñ ciculo de mi rosa segura.

Pero tú eres distinta:
el dolor hace signos desde todos los picos,
en cada puente pasa la gente hacia la nada
y el silbo del pino trae un eco de golpes.

Tegulcigalpa,
Tegucigalpa,
duro nombre que fluye
dulce sólo en los labios.
__________

TEGUCIGALPA
tr. by Dave Bonta

I inhabit a landscape
where time doesn’t exist,
where gold’s been tamed.

Here, one is always sad without realizing it.
Nobody knows the sea
or an angel’s friendship.

Yes, this is where I live — or rather, die.
Here where a child’s purest shadow
falls in the dust of a narrow street.
The flight delayed beneath a fleeing sky.

At intervals, hope —
each time more distant —
opens its long branches to the wind,
and when I think of you in colors, faded city,
I feel impossible rhythms
circling and circling
in a tight orbit around my definite rose.

You are, however, distinct:
suffering signals from every peak,
on every bridge people cross over into nothingness
and the hiss of a pine tree carries an echo of blows.

Tegucigalpa,
Tegucigalpa —
hard name that flows
sweet only on the lips.
__________

ARCANO
Rigoberto Paredes

Algo en pie quedará
de este reino de furia: seres, brasas, semillas
guardan fresca memoria de otro tiempo
que hoy se estanca entre ruinas.
Sangre fértil
estalla
en algún lugar de Centroamérica.
No tardará en llegar el verde de los días.
__________

ARCANUM
tr. by Dave Bonta

Something will remain standing
from this kingdom of rage: beings, embers, seeds
keep fresh the memory of another time
that today stagnates among ruins.
Fertile blood
bursts out
of almost any spot in Central America.
Green days won’t be long in coming.
__________

For another, lighter poem by Rigoberto Paredes, see his “Elegy to Obesity” at Moving Poems.

EL LLANTO DE LAS COSAS
Roberto Sosa

Mamá
se pasó la mayor parte de sus existencia
parada en un ladrillo, hecha un nudo,
imaginando
que entraba y salía
por la puerta blanca de una casita
protegida
por la fraternidad de los animales domésticos.
Pensando
que sus hijos somos
lo que quisimos y no pudimos ser.
Creyendo
que su padre, el carnicero de los ojos goteados
y labios delgados de pies severo, no la golpeó
hasta sacarle sangre, y que su madre, en fin,
le puso con amor, alguna vez, la mano en la cabeza.
Y en su punto supremo, a contragolpe como
                                                    desde un espejo,
rogaba a Dios
para que nuestros enemigos cayeran como
                                                          gallos apestados.

De golpe, una por una, aquellas amadísimas
                                                                  imágenes
fueron barridas por hombres sin honor.

Viéndolo bien
todo eso lo entendió esa mujer apartada,
ella
la heredera del viento, a una vela. La que adivinaba
el pensamiento, presentía la frialdad
de las culebras
y hablaba con las rosas, ella, delicado equilibrio
entre
la humana dureza y el llanto de las cosas.
__________

THE WEEPING OF THINGS
tr. by Dave Bonta

Mama
spent the greater part of her life
standing on one brick tile, knotted up inside,
dreaming
that she was going in and out
through the white door of a cottage
watched over
by the brotherhood of domestic animals.
Thinking
that her children were
what we wanted to be, not what we could be.
Believing
that her father, that butcher with the eyes of a cat
and the thin lips of a vindictive judge, didn’t beat her
until the blood flowed, and that in the end
her mother once laid a loving hand on her head.
When pushed to her utmost, she’d counter-attack as if
                                                        through a looking-glass
and pray to God
that her enemies would be stricken
                                            like sick fowl.

Suddenly, one by one, all of her most cherished
                                                                                dreams
were swept away by detestable men.

As time went on
she understood all this, that woman apart,
inheritor
of a candle from the wind. She who could read
thoughts, sense the coldbloodedness
of snakes
and converse with roses, she the delicate equilibrium
between
human hardness and the weeping of things.
__________

OTRO POEMA A MI MADRE
Clementina Suarez

Madre:
A horas apenas de partir
tu casa ya no era mi casa.
Sentada en la puerta
miraba para adentro,
donde la pena empezaba a mancharlo todo
y el miedo me hacía señas desde lo oscuro.
Anduve descalza, para no despertarte
y retrasar tu viaje.
Me vestí de infancia para recorrer
más rápidos todos tus pasos.
Eché para atrás los años
para comerme el pan desde tus manos,
como un animal herido tirité de frío.
¡Ay! me dije; dónde podré ahora
dejar caer mi cabeza pesada de sueños.

Cuando yo era una niña
buscaba siempre tu falda para gemir.
Y ahora la muerte me quiebra
mi mejor alondra, mi patria madre,
mi señora, mi madona.
No tengo aliento para comerme las manzanas,
ni tengo pájaros para que aniden en el pecho,
estoy huérfana y definitivamente sola,
podría desde ahora dormir en las calles
dando gritos de gritos
sin que nada me consolara.
Pero quizá es tu cara la que me mira
desde adentro, y no deja caer
a mi corazón en la noche.
__________

ONE MORE POEM FOR MY MOTHER
tr. by Dave Bonta

Mother:
Scarcely hours after you’d gone,
your house was no longer mine.
Sitting in the doorway,
I looked inside —
pain was beginning to stain everything
and fear signalled me from the darkness.
I walked barefoot, so as not to awaken you
and delay your journey.
I dressed like a child so I could retrace
your steps more quickly.
I threw the years aside
so I could eat bread from your hands,
shivering with cold like a wounded animal.
Ah! I cried — where now can I let my head drop
when it’s weighted down with dreams?

When I was a girl,
I’d seek out your skirt to howl in.
But now death has laid waste
to my greatest lark, my mother country,
my mistress, my madonna.
I don’t have the appetite to eat these apples,
nor do I have any birds to nest in my breast,
I’m an orphan, alone as I can be.
I could go sleep in the streets now
and cry all I want
and no one would come to comfort me.
But perhaps it’s your face that watches me
from within, and keeps my heart
from stopping in the night.
__________

__________

See today’s Moving Poems for a short documentary on the life of Clementina Suarez.

pueblo contra el ejercito, by kilo (Honduras Indymedia)

Clementina Suárez (1906-1991) is not only Honduras’ preeminent woman poet, but a central figure in the Mexican literary and artistic scene of the mid-20th century. She was profiled in a wonderful biography by Janet Gold, which includes a generous selection of her poems in translation, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of feminism in Honduras. I thought of Clementina on Sunday when I watched videos and photos of indominable women punching soldiers and facing down armored vehicles in the streets.

COMBATE
Clementina Suárez

Yo soy un poeta,
un ejército de poetas.
Y hoy quiero escribir un poema,
un poema silbatos,
un poema fusiles
para pegarlos en las puertas,
en las celdas de las prisiones,
en los muros de las escuelas.
Hoy quiero construir y destruir,
levantar en andamios la esperanza.
Despertar al niño,
arcángel de las espadas,
ser relámpago, trueno,
con estatura de héroe
para talar, arrasar,
las podridas raíces de mi pueblo.
__________

FRAY
tr. by Dave Bonta

I am a poet,
an army of poets.
And today I want to write a poem —
a whistles poem,
a rifles poem —
to strike them in doorways,
in prison cells,
within the walls of schools.
Today I want to build and destroy,
to give hope a lift onto the scaffold.
I want to rouse the child,
archangel of swords,
to be lightning-flash and thunderclap
with a statue of a hero
to topple, to obliterate
the rotted roots of my people.
__________

Honduras’ most famous and influential poet of all, without a doubt, was Juan Ramón Molina (1875-1908), a friend and contemporary of the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío, who joined him in rousing Spanish-language poetry out of its two centuries of slumber. Which is very much how they would’ve described it in the late-Romantic style they pioneered, modernismo. (See “Metempsícosis” at Moving Poems for a much grander Molina poem about reincarnation.)

While the narrator of “Combate” wanted to do away with heroes, the narrator of the following poem pines for a vanished heroic age — the archetypal conservative.
__________

ANHELO
Juan Ramón Molina

¡Viviese yo en los tiempos esforzados
de amores, de conquistas y de guerras,
en que frailes, bandidos y soldados
a través de los mares irritados
iban en busca de remotas tierras.

No en esta triste edad en que desmaya
todo anhelo — encumbrado como un monte —
y en que poniendo mi ambición a raya
herido y solo me quedé en la playa
viendo el límite azul del horizonte!
__________

LONGING
tr. by Dave Bonta

Ah, that I had lived in times tested
by love, by war and by conquest,
when friars, soldiers and desperadoes
went off across unquiet seas
in search of distant lands,

and not in this pathetic age when longing
has grown faint, inaccessible as a mountain peak,
and holding my ambition in check,
wounded and alone I linger on the shore,
gazing at the horizon’s blue limit!
__________

Roberto Sosa, by contrast, turns his gaze toward those most wounded by military adventurism. This is from his 1995 volume El llanto de las cosas, and was also translated by Jo Anne Englebert as “The Common Grief” in her book of the same name.
__________

LOS PESARES JUNTOS
Roberto Sosa

Aquí
hijas del verbo: madres, los esparemos.

Escúchenos, “vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.”
Recuérdenlo en el nombre del padre, del hijo y del hermano
detenidos y desaparecidos.

Esperamos con la frente en alto
punto por punto unidas como la cicatriz a sus costuras.

Nadie podrá destruir ni desarmar nuestros pesares juntos.
Amen.
__________

UNION OF SORROWS
tr. by Dave Bonta

Here
we wait for them, daughters of the word. Mothers.

Hear this: alive they were taken, alive we want them back.
Remember it in the name of the father and the son and the brother
detained and disappeared.

We wait with heads held high,
joined stitch by stitch like a scar to its sutures.

No one shall destroy or disband this union of sorrows.
Amen.

__________

Incidentally, in case anyone’s wondering why I’m signing my name to each one of these, I’ve noticed that translations are a popular item to copy and paste around the web, and I thought I’d make it easier for people to do so without having to worry about adding the attribution, which for some strange reason often seems to be neglected where translations are concerned.