Poemas traducidos, II

de Atila (2000)

I believe in Night and Discord,
Furies, Fates, and in Zeus;
lord of lightning,
and a little perverted.

Image
and likeness.

≈

The wind says: “I blow upon the vast city
the calm demolition of fog.
I blow upon the vast city of ashes.”
City of ashes.
Ashes.
Corners of the village.

Hurting bridges, remarkable alleys,
plane-tree leaves blown by the wind;
streets where light is false and appealing.
Is there a spirit here?
In each stone, in each loner, in each imperfection?
Is there an order here for the souls,
the bodies, the trades, the young
imbecile?
Woe to us, whitewashed tombs!

A gloomy radio at dawn
throwing the black eternity
against the eyes.
Wind says: “I blow upon the vast city
of ashes.”
It still remains the air the oligarchy sweated,
the poor´s imitation,
the houses in Olivos and Belgrano,
the banal flirting
of couples at night.

≈

Relationships

We all bring the past to the table;
jokes, ideas. Behaviours that haven´t changed,
and will not change with time
and the silence that remains, veiled and obvious,
in the usual quietness. Euphoria and melancholy.

Time should be an unbearable emotion,
a patient study.
Instead we dine. We repeat the cycle of all that exists.
Later, we´ll know that having achieved something or not,
thinking one way or another –even not thinking–
is not important.

Our figures attract or repel, that´s all.
This is slowly learned and later forgotten.
Perhaps we wish to have said different words,
to have joined a list of honorable dead; and we regret
the progress of time.
We´re still seas away from life.
Days resemble us: they grow and fall, shine,
and the night erases them.
We embrace each other, Helga. Our little bed in this uncertain place.

Again I ask where does all this lead us
what effective and ignorant glacier
will bury the bones under its white belly,
the bones of my daughters. We dream, perhaps. We sleep
we sleep

≈

The bow sinks and rises: that is
the simplest cycle of pain.
Voices missing,
eyes missing from life.
Ships that arrive or depart out of step.
And then to think a passion, to fake a passion,
to wish a passion.
To bear the solitude which other men imagined.

Neither pious fantasies, prayers,
paintings on stones,
nor the beloved splendour of cities.
Before us the sea,
the tired body,
the eternal weeks like islands.
And the air in the lungs fuses with each
dark point of the night. A bundle of bones
in delicate balance.

≈

Bristol

The breeze blows from the North,
soft and salty;
far from all,
the Atlantic rests
cradling the fish

Sails of the sea
slept in the first heat of September.

I prefer to stay at this table
and let time slip while a waiter serves me.

I look at the esplanade,
the bodies laid out on the sand,
the pale colour of a sunshade.
Clouds work slowly;
far from all
the ocean rests

Lost Penelopes pass by.

≈

Trains

Later, in another town of many belfries, I heard a bell.

It was the clumsy yearning of a traveler
for things that I´ve never in truth cared about:
the wine I never drink, the districts I always avoid,
the wicked warmth of people.


Yearning, I said, or fever. There´s no better Irish
than the one from Tierra del Fuego,
better English than the one from Bombay or Alexandria,
better Argentinian than the one from the arrogant,
frivolous, refined, and tyrant Europe. Blind,
like us.


It was only the time, the candour,
the taste for crossing a border:
anyone knows that things happen everywhere
with names just as evocative.
Names that you constantly repeat.


≈


Poena danni


I have neither strength nor faith
to win the heaven of Catholics.
I suppose I´ve earned credits
for the fire prepared by the devil
and his angels –beautiful,
until their sin of pride.
A fetid and narrow hell.


There is perhaps a lesser god,
a lower sky,
simple, parallel.
A god who may take us into consideration:
men of flesh and doubt,
who without faith or strength
bear this journey on earth.
Or time.


Earth that no one made.
Time which a tyrant would conceive.


≈


Innocents


We´ve come to this: a harsh light,
an iron bed,
a style wardrobe. And mirrors.
We are bound to a strange mechanism.
The blood, the words, the rhythm of things.
Serpent and mist.
Let us kiss now.


I see the stones of ours
falling. A sober game, an interesting mutation.
It is remarkable,
things are pathetic.
Then it is time, patience, innocence,
anger, idiocy,
talent.


≈

Solitudes

I think of our humid meetings
at the end of a hall
under the sordid light and the incense.
Smoke rises from the bodies
without ever touching.
Just fog.
Neither Eteocles nor Polynices. Not even atavism.


≈

All right, Catullus, what a women says
has to be written on the wind
on the fleeting wave.
Also what we think,
what we teach like fallible oracles.


Dreams, sand.
What we gather among the dawns
on the fleeting wave.


≈

Non trovo scudo ch'ella non mi spezzi
ne loco che dal suo viso m'asconda. —Dante

Here we are, mortals,
vulgar like the crowd,
among remains of honour and virtue.
Alas, perfectly,
stupidly hidden in language
I have always entered passion
as an unhealthy kingdom.


The distance of your body doesn´t hurt less
than your runaway spirit.


You´ve hit, o bitch, like skilled boxers do,
strong, sharp,
in the right moment.


≈

Finisterre


I – The river, the changes in light and season,
the houses that suggest a decorous past.
Just a dull clamor
of human affairs.
It´s true, the nights are colder
and time lingers among the fog banks.


Wrath seems dispensable; it only persists
the absence of the sea,
the impression of lives and deaths tacked
to a same birth.


II – A plate, a glass, a chair;
a sky insipid and feeble, whitish.


Once the summer –the vulgarity of summer– is past,
the winter reduces the world to two or three
basic emotions. Papers, books,
memories of words.
And then the dreams; the uncertain shapes
of clarity and dominion.


≈


Logbook


September, 1989. All of we turned into part of the half-light,
waiting for the dawn to break
for the umpteenth time upon the sleeping flesh.
I keep on watching the lighthouse, the loneliness of fire.
Behind us, summers,
ciphers and light, shelters, loyalties
kept on recurring:
“It´s daybreak in rue Lamarck;
only quietness floods the petrified street,
only beauty lights the street
besieged by the fog.”


What ships do they travel in now,
the eternal masks, the eternal words,
the same miraculous marble,
from island to island, from age to age,
from one to another compassion?


Time, our true nation,
throws us at intervals out to the sea,
the dream, the distance.
Not by will or clarity
we´ve set off long ago
to an old metaphor.


September, 1989. War is immutable;
the illusion of a sole reality.
It is other winters and summers,
other pasts, other empires.
Memory of eagles
in the tide of the world.


I wish I´d have men hanged, as well;
hanged, like paintings. A long line of enemies.
A kind of pride, of potency,
a certain silence.
They would have been others, that´s all.
I´d have thought that I´ve won. And this too is all.


. . .


Salt has turned us more and less tolerant,
more and less atheistic,
more and less real. Now we pass twice
across the same river.
I sense the sea and the night and things in general
must tell us something
that we don´t get. Like a satori
we didn´t have.


September, 1989. We lost the course
under the beauty and the expensive,
among the seven walls of Buenos Aires.
Now the daggers and cherry trees glitter
and all is correct and slight,
clean, like the desert.


≈


The Tartars’ desert

to H.

The only dream,
the only sight, the sole beauty that reaches a tower
a cell in a wing of a fort
is always dubious, diffuse,
fragmented fact.
Farther, however,
where the eye doesn´t reach,
where the dream multiplies,
the demon, the blood,
the other moons move.
All the souls that a person carries,
those that no one, no human in a fort
ever gets to imagine. The ones that ramble
or transcend forever. Alone.
Not the mirages.


≈

Finisterre II

It took two deaths and fortune
to get here, 800 kilometers to the north of nothing.
A valley crossed by a river.
Here I work, translate, read.
Odin dies on Ragnarök, in the plain of Vigrid...
Here is the music, the time,
the images that won´t avoid dissolution.


Winter starts descending in the valley;
light turns into acceptance, mercy.
In these places,
in these cases of mountains and ignorance,
you evoke the past:
a particular cold, a precise body,
a strange city on the banks of the Fresh Water Sea.


There´s nothing, however, apart from the chains. Nor the dead,
Nor the dull sea, nor the east or the west,
Or the shadow, the sphinx,
the ultimate kiss, the frozen eve.