Poemas traducidos al Ingles

JOSE MARIA

José María came riding a bus, across la Oroya to Lima,
Listening to Lou Reed through his earphones
Out there the soaked mountains, the rain penetrating,
Inside of him through the bullet holeThat mix of Perfect Day
and the falling rain added nostalgia
To the crystal-clear vision outside the window
He remembered then how he used to sleep on his skin as a child
He learned Quechua, songs ever sadder than Lou’s
The mountains and their mines were no longer
A dwelling places for myths, mountains looking as Huarochiri
And smoke coming out of the chimneys
A ghost train went into an old tunnel
The rain as sepia as harp strings tingled his bullet hole, then he wondered
If in fifty years this country would still be there
This thought embarrassed him
He tuned in for a different song, something of “Pastorita”
And just when he started to get the hang of it, he fell asleep
The road wound ahead and cuddled him. “Hey, kid”, they said, “go back home.”
But his mother died. “This isn’t your language, kid.”
But he sang on the bus:I still can’t my hometown mountain. I’m a foreigner.
I’m spirit wandering along the riverI have a gun in my holster.
My heart, a tinya drum, a charango and a quena flute.
On, the river has taken my heart and I still can’t see my hometown mountain.
José María used to sing in Quechua with his wooden guitar but deep inside
In the entrails of his voice, the dancers already counted theirs steps
Death is a wound you bear since birth
Death is a spirit that keeps you company:
A feeling of nostalgia, a country
The child that sang in the river called to his mother to save him
That child feared that his heart would be taken away
That in fifty years nobody would sing their songs in Quechua
For his country had mountains and shiploads arriving at the seaports,
All was plundered, all was pillaged
The scenery of famished dogs that was announcing his arrival in town
Blended the sweet melody of his voice with the loud sound of a bullet
His friends loved him, but everybody else didn’t understand
Quechua Nor did they want to understand, “country folk stuff” they saidT
hey who now publish his books, study him, celebrate him.
José María, the day you put that gun against yourself
Somebody was playing his violin on the heights of Andahuaylas
They expected you to do so to make a legend out of you
The big cultural legend of our country. They, who spitted at your songs
You took the gun with a hand, I was born when you were saying your farewells
Three days before you sang at get-together with friends
Someone recorded your voice and the recording was a joke on death
That always sneaked behind you it is was your victory
Over an offspring of intellectuals
One day before you went shopping for huayno records in La Parada
We got drunk listening to Jilguero“I’ll see you tomorrow, you are born and I die”, you sang
You would have had a flashback, your childhood among
The indigenous folk, a class at university, or something like a broom
That would make you doubt at the beginning
But push you forward instead with unrefrainable strength later.
José María, a woman is singing on the corner of my street, she comes from Ayacucho
Will I be in her song?Will my poems be in the palm of her mud-stained hand?
José María, you used to sing rock in Quechua at the bottom of my grave
I’m writing this to sing in you.

Translated by Anthony Seidman

A Mask's Confessions

I cut off an ear in order to better hear the sounds of poesy,
and in order to seem a bit like Van Gogh.
I dedicated myself to listening to all types of music until I discovered
Schumman in that urban sprawl, La Victoria.
I chewed the fat with the whores, and visited almost all
of the Lima brothels, in order to acquire a philosophy as
stringent as Cioran’s.
One night, I ran across Pessoa exiting a movie-theater,
his face was thickly whiskered. He remarked: Hey, it’s always
a good idea to set aside a few poems for posterity.
Saturday, I was off the shores of the Herradura, zipping along a chromatic wave and
Luis Hernandez surfed by me, reading Shelley and drinking an ice-
cold brew; I couldn’t make out the label on the bottle,
but I knew he was reading Shelley from that direct & easy
manner in which he did a hang-ten.
Poetry is written for your buddies.


The Secret Place of the Desert

An entire forest of sadness is an apt phrase
for the feeling of being nobody.
But it might just occur that Holderlin walks
on this silvery shore
beneath the murmur of the forest.
Many dreams would come forth like beasts to console your cheeks
just like the strange glance that resides high up
over the rooftops.
On the shore of a tree, light and shade are meanings
that have taken on their immensity, not alone but accompanied
in the open field by birds fashioned from words.
Only after having closed the road, no longer aspiring, to arrive
at the house of aspirations, in the silhouette of an absent flower,
Holderlin reclines on the tense edges of the night
which do not succeed in
touching the dream because the dream has another edge
like fingers
of blood boughs from which a dry leaf falls, one which has strayed
from the route
Here we see him smiling in a photograph of a garden
which also is a photo of many birds.
The cacti can no longer tolerate the noise, they await any
vagrant shadow in order to ask that it carry them off.
To describe this garden is no longer a mythology, the years that slice
the cemetery
gave the trees a humble abode.
The windows darken, the doors open.
On the other shore, our old words rain,
and there’s a light at the end for those who pause in order to
contemplate the silence.
Holderlin enters the fire of the perpetual forest
and there’s no room for his shadow.
From the eclipsed drowsiness of things, the rose of the winds opens.
Blind, like a tree, the old man closes his overcoat,
coughs and sets himself
into his own center. A Lady stripped of tears
on the other shore
and her leaves of gold dissolve in the water.