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Friday, October 14th, 2011
Laura's wishing Peter would just
Give up this pretension, would just
Break this patterned silence
Where he builds his lonesome castle. Now she
Cries out in the morning when she
Wakes and finds him missing. Wishes
He'd reach out and touch her, wants
To hold him in his grief -- she wants to
Have back these long years that
she's been waiting for his voice. Peter's
Walking in the garden, where he
Knows the paths are laid,
Planted crocus in the springtime, planted
Hostas in the shade, wanders
Down the road to town, but nothing's
Open Sunday morning, now he
Rubs his eyes and wonders if he'll
ever find his home.
Expectation conquers knowledge and the
Evidence of senses; what I
see and hear and feel
I'll never grasp if I decline;
For all I wish and want and hope I'll never
Stand beside my grave, I'm seeing
Gauzy patterns traced out
On the page of wounded time.
She gets up, groggy, runs the water,
Steaming up the mirror, she hears
Peter downstairs in the kitchen,
hopes he's making coffee,
Laura's tired out, she didn't sleep well,
Combs her hair and squints and in the
Mirror she can see the look of
anguish on her face.
She's downstairs with a cup of coffee,
Looking quizzically at Peter,
Peter's solemn face that just
can't seem to meet her gaze.
A question's in the air and they both know it, but the
heavy silence keeps their lips held tight; keeps
Heavy thoughts drawn back to yesterday.
posted evening of October 14th, 2011: 3 responses
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Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
I said my goodbyes in a hurry.
Juan gave me a hug. It looked like he was about to cry.
Lourdes gave me her hand; I squeezed it firmly.
I climbed on to the boat that was waiting.
A man fired the engine, and the boat started moving.
I saw Lourdes petting one of the dogs; Juan was in the water up to his knees, signaling to me with his hands.
The island grew smaller as we got farther away.
The sky was clear.
I never heard anything more of my father, nor of Lourdes, nor of Juan. I never went back to the island.
When I first read Juan Pablo Roncone's story Geese, it struck me as a highly original story, as not quite like anything I had read before. Which is funny, because as I go back and reread it and look at the structure, parts of it seem highly formulaic -- the young author running away from his frustrated life in the city and learning in the wilderness how to express himself via a symbolic confrontation with his father; the Œdipal attraction to Lourdes and the confrontation with her ex-husband who is again a stand-in for the narrator's father; bonding with Juan and that making him want to be a father... Simplifying the plot elements, they seem, well, formulaic. Like I've read many other stories with similar elements. I'm interested in figuring out what makes "Geese" stand out as a distinct, original story of its own.Part of it of course is the skill with which Roncone executes the storytelling; he imagines his characters clearly enough (at least the narrator and Juan) that I was able to put myself in their shoes. Any story where that happens is certain to feel fresh, this experience of identifying with a new character is stimulating almost no matter how old and tired the plot the character is moving through may be. But another key element of this story is minimalism. The narrator's attraction for Lourdes is almost entirely unstated, is never acted upon. The narrator's confrontation with his father occurs only in his head. The narrator leaves the island without any resolution to the events of the story -- the fight with Lourdes' ex was pretty meaningless in the long view -- but with a commitment to return to his girlfriend in Santiago. Roncone's refusal to follow through in the conflicts that make up his plot makes the story not be "about" the conflicts, but "about" the characters.
 (One issue that is bugging me: in the final two sentences I want to render the verbs as "would never hear" and "would never go" -- but Roncone seems to be saying clearly, "never heard" and "never went".)
posted evening of September 20th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
 I just loved Juan Pablo Roncone's story "Geese" in the new issue of 60 Watts. I thought I would sit down and try to translate it... And wow! I am surprised at what a challenge it is to get the English to sound as simple, as elegant as Roncone's Spanish. It seemed like it would be a breeze -- the sentences are generally quite short, single declarative clauses, easily understood, I don't have the problem of forgetting midway through the long sentence what the subject was... But it turns out that mimicking the structure of the sentences in English comes out clunky and repetitive. Or at least it has so far. I think I am going to finish the rough translation, then tear it up and try again.
posted evening of September 14th, 2011: 1 response
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Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
A lovely passage from "The Return", the first story in Zupcic's Dragi Sol.
He walked down to the beach. He carried in his eyes the blue of his childhood seas. There would be no point in trying to compare it to this other blue, the blue of America: even if all the world's seas flowed into one sea and all the earth were a single mountain, the blue which was dampening his feet would never be the same as that of his eyes, as that whose gleam he had sought out from the bell tower of the cathedral in Rikeja, from the tall houses of Sibenik, forty years ago.
An interesting translation puzzle -- the narrator in this story (and throughout Dragi Sol) refers to Croatian boys as "niños cerulei", an Italian adjective modifying a Spanish noun. My impulse would be to translate this as "cerulean boys" but I don't think that's quite right, I've never heard "cerulean" used to mean "blue-eyed"...
posted evening of September 13th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, September 5th, 2011
I want to try posting a rough translation of the first canto of Gerbasi's "My Father the Immigrant". The loose rhythm and magical language of the poem are seeming to come across into English pretty naturally.
My father, Juan Batista Gerbasi, whose life inspired this poem, was born in a winemaking region on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy; he died in Canoabo, a tiny Venezuelan village hidden away in the wilderness in Estado Carabobo.
We come from the night; and into the night we go.
We leave behind the earth, enveloped in her vapors;
the dwelling place of almond grove, of child and of leopard.
And leave behind our days: lakes, snowstorms, reindeer,
dour volcanoes, enchanted forests
where the blue shadows of fear live.
And leave behind the graves beneath the cypress,
lonely like the grief of distant stars.
And leave behind our glories, torches blown out by secular gusts.
And leave behind our doors, muttering darkly in the wind.
And leave behind our anguish in celestial mirrors.
And time we'll leave behind, time with man's drama:
Progenitor of life, progenitor of death.
Time, which raises up and wears down columns,
Which murmurs from the ocean's multitude.
And leave behind the light which bathes the mountains,
which bathes our children's parks, our altars white.
But also the night with its mournful cities,
quotidian night, no longer even night,
that brief respite, trembling with lightning bugs,
or passing through our souls in savage strokes.
Night which falls again against the light,
awakening the flowers in moody valleys,
remaking the waters' lap among the mountains,
launching horses into clear blue streams;
meanwhile eternity, gleaming golden,
makes its silent way through heavenly fields.
posted morning of September 5th, 2011: 2 responses
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Thursday, September first, 2011
 The September issue of Words Without Borders is online today; the featured story is my translation of Requiem, by Slavko Zupcic.
posted morning of September first, 2011: 2 responses
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Sunday, August 28th, 2011
The poem I posted this morning started out as a response to William Carlos Williams' Spring and All -- I've been reading it in fits and starts over the past week or so and loving the physical and the auditory texture of the words, but far from sure they are making any semantic impact on my consciousness -- when I turn the page, the words I was reading do not seem to persist much as imagery or meaning.  This is a common response of mine to long poetry and to dense prose, and the answer always seems to be, just enjoy the sounds and let the meaning follow if it will. I got interested in this book when I realized that after so many years of pastiching "Red Wheelbarrow" and "This is just to say" on Making Light, I still don't have much knowledge of Williams beyond those two poems. In the interests of repeating the text, here are a few passages I am enjoying. (Generally I am pretty psyched and amazed by the use here of paragraphs within poetry.)
If anything of moment results -- so much the better. And so much the more likely it will be that no one will want to see it. There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here. 
Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here.
...
The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already planted.
o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable ! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays -- and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls -- our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure !
 Ah -- here's the excerpt I was looking for -- the one that initially, when I was reading it, made me want to write this post, but which, when I went back to look, I could not find.
Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow -- that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide. That or the imagination which in this case takes the form of humor, is known in that form -- the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quantity of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating: quite plainly we have no appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves -- by acknowledging a new situation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast -- but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quantity of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind.
posted afternoon of August 28th, 2011: Respond
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The path to understanding verse
must lie through repetition --well,
that's where my thoughts are leading me,
internal iteration linking
letters on the page to solid
consonants and sibilation
nothingness, annihilation
pausing where there's punctuation--
Write the letters large enough,
inscribed inside my skull, retraced,
and give my mind no choice except
to follow where they lead, to paint
the pictures they express, to put
myself inside the poet's psyche:
See what he sees, maybe, or self-
consciously be made to see
exactly where my failure lies
to get across what's bugging me
my fault as reader or as writer,
guilt external to the page, the
page can feel no guilt, it's paper,
blank until I taint it with
my thoughts, my visions, my regret,
my happy-ever-after longing;
Strike a key and watch the letter
print itself, its inky form
laid down forever with its partners.
Sing in silent chorus from the
blankness of the page.
posted morning of August 28th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, August 12th, 2011
A bit frustrating: last night's vivid dream was a dream explicitly about words; but the vividly recalled portion of the dream is all visual imagery and context, no words. In the dream, I am writing a poem and think of a line that I want to use in it, a poorly-remembered line from a Salt-n-Pepa song. I bring up Google to check my memory of the lyric. Somehow Google will not give me the transcribed lyrics to the song, I can only find the song's video on YouTube. So I start watching it and listening. It is a fantastic, breathtaking video, with references to film noir and to Kurosawa, one that brings out resonances and meanings in the song that I have never understood before. But it is distracting and frustrating to be watching it and listening for a particular line, and trying to keep in mind the poem that I was writing and the way I wanted to use the line. The video is very long -- long enough to be divided into mutiple parts on YouTube -- and I wake up before I find the line I am looking for.
posted morning of August 12th, 2011: 2 responses
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Sunday, July 31st, 2011
The hiss of the cicadas in the trees behind our house is at its peak this evening -- really reverberating through our entire second floor. (It's a sound I love, for which small mercy I give thanks.) As I was listening to the buzzing just now a new approach hit me to a problem of tense that I'd been batting around a few weeks ago:
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£)
by Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Thus spoke el maestro
de Tarca:
Catch the cicada
by its wing
At least
you're holding in your hand
its song.
 I believe this is both truer to the source and better sounding, more poetic, than what I had previously.
posted evening of July 31st, 2011: 1 response
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