Triunfo Arciniegas / Ceremonies

CEREMONIES

By Triunfo Arciniegas

Translated by Anabel Torres

There’s my mother

Weaving with threads of light

The blood of her nights.

Sylvia Plath / The Colossus

Sylvia Plath

THE COLOSSUS
by Sylvia Plath

Translated into Spanish

by Julia de Ruschi Crespo and Jesús Pardo

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull-plates and clear

The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing.

Sylvia Plath / Strumpet Song

Picture by John U. Abrahamson

 STRUMPET SONG

By Sylvia Plath
Translated into Spanish by Jesús Pardo

With white frost gone

And all green dreams not worth much,

After a lean day’s work

Time comes round for that foul slut:

Mere bruit of her takes our street

Until every man,

Red, pale or dark,

Veers to her slouch.

Mark, I cry, that mouth

Made to do violence on,

That seamed face

Askew with blotch, dint, scar

Struck by each dour year.

Walks there not some such one man

As can spare breath

To patch with brand of love this rank grimace

Which out from black tarn, ditch and cup

Into my most chaste own eyes

Looks up.

Sylvia Plath / Event



Photography by Andreas H. Bitesnich



EVENT

By Sylvia Plath
Translated into Spanish by Jesús Pardo

How the elements solidify!—

The moonlight, that chalk cliff

In whose rift we lie

Back to back. I hear an awl cry

From its cold indigo.

Intolerable vowels enter my heart.

The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,

Opens its mouth now, demanding.

His little face is carved in painted, red wood.

Then there are the stars—ineradicable, hard.

One touch: it burns and sickens.

I cannot see your eyes.

Where apple bloom ices the night

I walk in a ring,

A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.

Love cannot come here.

A black gap discloses itself.

On the opposite lip

A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.

My limbs, also, have left me.

Who was dismembered us?

The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.

Triunfo Arciniegas / Biography



El beso de la suerte
Photography by Marco Chamorro

  biography

By Triunfo Arciniegas

Translated by Anabel Torres

 

With his top as a pencil

A little boy scribbles on the dust

The history of his life.

Lyndall Gordon / Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

by Lyndall Gordon

This is a biography of Emily Dickinson that goes further than any previous biography. As well as an enthralling account of the life of the poet, Lyndall Gordon has explored the vicious family feuds that began even before Emily Dickinson’s death & intensified afterwards. The life is well-known. Emily Dickinson lived a secluded life in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. I think she wrote the most extraordinarily original poetry of the 19th century. I loved her poetry as a teenager & although I hadn’t read her recently, as soon as I picked up this book, lines came back to me. As a teenager, her poems about death fascinated me. I felt a funeral in my brain; I heard a fly buzz when I died; Safe in their alabaster chambers; I died for Beauty but was scarce adjusted in the tomb. My copy of the poems has lines marked everywhere. The metaphors reminded me of the metaphysical poets like Herbert & Donne. The props assist the house until the house is built; My life had stood, a loaded gun. She had a rigorously Puritan education, studied the sciences & all this comes through in the work. The unconventional punctuation, the capitalization & dashes, was so radical at the time that it wasn’t until the 1950s that an edition was published with the original punctuation. Lyndall Gordon also has an interesting theory about the cause of Dickinson’s seclusion. One of the enduring myths is of the New England nun, flitting around the house in a white dress, coyly avoiding visitors. The conventional explanation is an unhappy love affair. Gordon has some compelling evidence that Dickinson may have suffered from epilepsy, which was seen as a shameful mental illness in the 19th century. The incurable, random nature of the symptoms of epilepsy could have left Dickinson reluctant to be seen much in public & the effects could also explain some of the striking images of psychic disturbance in her poetry. The fact that we have so much of Dickinson’s poetry at all is due to the efforts of her family as only a few poems were published during her lifetime & they had been tidied up by fussy editors. Reading about the feuds, the adultery, attempted fraud & bad feeling that erupted between two branches of the family in the century after Dickinson’s death makes me wonder how the work survived at all. It began with Dickinson’s brother, Austin’s, affair with a young woman, Mabel Loomis Todd, whose husband was a faculty member at the Amherst Academy. Austin Dickinson was Treasurer there & Mabel’s husband, a philanderer himself, seemed content for his wife to have an affair with a powerful man to further his own career. Austin was completely besotted with Mabel & removed himself emotionally from his wife, Sue, & their children. Austin & Sue lived next door to his sisters, Emily & Vinnie. The affair was conducted at his sisters’ house & caused divided loyalties from the start. Emily sided with Sue, her girlhood friend & most perceptive early reader. Vinnie sided with her brother. Mabel fancied herself as a discoverer of genius & although she never met Emily, she recognized the worth of her work when first Sue, then Vinnie showed her the poems. She undertook to edit a selection of the work after Dickinson’s death. She did an admirable job, although she tidied up the punctuation & added titles. The poems were an immediate success & Sue, who had still more poems in her possession, wanted to stop Mabel & edit her own selection. Mabel was a great plotter; she wanted Sue out of the way & her relationship with Austin legitimized. When her plans failed, she tried to get hold of some Dickinson land from Vinnie after Austin’s death & this led to accusations of fraud & a lawsuit. I couldn’t admire Mabel, but, she ensured that the poetry would survive. Then, the accusations & bitterness were carried on to the next generation - Mabel’s daughter, Millicent & Sue’s daughter, Mattie – each determined to uphold her mother’s reputation. Lyndall Gordon has done a wonderful job of putting together a coherent story from such tangled events. It’s impossible to summarise it & I feel I’ve done a poor job of it here. If you feel confused but intrigued, just read the book.

ABOUT ME

LYN

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

I'm an avid reader who loves middlebrow fiction, 19th century novels, WWI & WWII literature, Golden Age mysteries & history. Other interests include listening to classical music, drinking tea, baking cakes, planning my rose garden & enjoying the antics of my cats, Lucky & Phoebe. Contact me at lynabby16AThotmailDOTcom

http://preferreading.blogspot.mx/search/label/poetry

Emily Dickinson / A Book

Katia reading
by Balthus

A BOOK

By Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

Emily Dickinson / The Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

THE HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Michio Mado / Apple

APPLE

By Michio Mado

Translation: Takako Lento

As I place
one apple
here

the apple,
its mass,
all by itself
occupies all

Here exists
0ne apple
nothing else

Ah
what is
and what is not
come together
blindingly clear

Raúl Gómez Jattin / A Small Elegy

Raúl Gómez Jattin

A SMALL ELEGY

By Raúl Gómez Jattin

Translated from Spanish by Nicolás Suescún

Raúl Gómez Jattin / Pequeña elegía

Why remain a tree
if this two-year summer
tears away my leaves and my flowers
Why remain a tree
if the wind no longer sings in my foliage
if my birds migrate to other places
Why remain a tree
without inhabitants
besides those hanged ones that dangle
from my branches
like rotten fruit in Autumn

Raúl Gómez Jattin / The Adoring God

Raúl Gómez Jattin



THE ADORING GOD

By Raúl Gómez Jattin 

Translated from Spanish by Nicolás Suescún

Raúl Gómez Jattin / El dios que adora

I am a god in my town and my valley
not because they adore me    But because I adore myself
Because I bow before anyone who gives me
a few granadillas or offers me a smile
Or because I go where the harsh people live
to beg for a coin or a shirt and they give it to me
Because I watch the sky with the eyes of a hawk
and I name it in my verses   Because I am alone
Because I slept seven months in a hammock
and five on the sidewalks of a city
Because I look askance at riches
but not with hatred   Because I love those who love me
Because I know how to grow orange trees and vegetables
even under the noon sun  Because I have a godfather
and I baptized all of his children and blessed his marriage
Because I am not good in a known manner
Because I love birds and the rain washing my soul
in the open   Because I  was born in May
Because my mother abandoned me precisely
when I most needed her   Because when I am  sick
I go to the charity hospital   Because  above all
I respect only he who respects me The one that works
every day for a bitter lonely and disputed piece of bread
like these verses of mine stolen from death

Raúl Gómez Jattin / I have for you my good friend

Raúl Gómez Jattin and Milcíades Arévalo

I HAVE FOR YOU MY GOOD FRIEND
By Raúl Gómez Jattin

Translated from Spanish by Nicolás Suescún

Raúl Gómez Jattin / Yo tengo para ti mi buen amigo

I have for you my good friend
a heart of mango from the Sinú
fragant
genuine
kind and tender
(The rest of me is a wound
a no man’s land
a stone blow
a twinkling of an eye
in someone else’s night
hands that murder ghosts)
And a piece of advice
don’t ever meet me

Jorge Gaitán Durán / I know I'm alive



Noon
Saint-Rémy, 1980
Vincent van Gogh
París, Musée d'Orsay



I KNOW I’M ALIVE . . .

By Jorge Gaitán Durán

Translated from Spanish by Dina Moscovici

I know I’m alive on this beautiful day
laying beside you. It’s summer.
Heated fruits in your hand
pour their thick odor at midday.

Before we laid down here, this radiant
world didn’t exist. Never in vain
we tore away from desire
the human love that defies the stars!

I run naked towards the blue of the sea.
I return to you like I return to the sun and I knot myself in you,
I’m born in the splendor of knowing you.

I feel the sweat of the siesta.
We drink red wine. This is the feast
in which we remember death the most.

Eva Durán / The woman you loved

THE WOMAN YOU LOVED

By Eva Durán

Translated from Spanish by Anabel Torres

The woman you loved
During a night of wine
The sorceress
Who danced above you
Who kissed you in the mirror
Has satiated her
Body with music
And keeps nothing
In memory of your name
Not even the petty consolation
Of her disdain.

Eva Durán / The Perverted One

Angelicatas

THE PERVERTED ONE

By Eva Durán
Translated from Spanish by Anabel Torres

The perverted one
The good little girl in a sky-blue room
The quiet deep-rooted lover,
The night on fire turning into
Skin
The hopelessly ubiquituous
Who always leaves
Without saying goodbye
Without giving a kiss
Without admitting that she’s happy,
That she likes to be alive
That having been born suffices her,
The one who has learned to forgive
Above all things
and that precisely for that reason
Her hands are full,
That’s why she sings at dawn
That’s why she smiles when they say she’s
mad,
The one who came naked to the mango’s heart
Without a knife and fork
Closing her eyes
Chewing slowly
And the one who wakes up with you
Absent-mindedly
Because she expects nothing
Because she likes to devour you
Because she reads Fallaci
Because she
Loves you.