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.