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Gonzalo Rojas
Against Death
I pluck out my visions and pluck out my eyes each passing day.
I don’t want to see, I can’t! see men dying every day.
I’d rather be made of stone and dark
than endure the nausea of softening myself inside
and smiling left and right to prosper in my business.
I have no business other than to be here saying the truth
in the middle of the street to the four winds:
the truth of being alive, uniquely alive,
with my feet grounded and my skeleton free in this world.
What do we gain from leaping toward the sun in our machines
at the velocity of thought, the devil take it: what
do we gain on dying without any hope
of living outside of dark time?
God’s good for nothing. Nothing’s good for anything.
But I breathe, and eat, and even sleep
thinking that I have ten or twenty years before I go
face down, like them all, to sleep in six feet of cement down there.
I don’t cry, don’t weep. Everything has to be as it has to be,
but I cannot see coffins and more coffins
passing, passing, passing, passing every minute
full of something, stuffed with something, I cannot see
the blood in the coffins still steaming.
I touch this rose, I kiss its petals, I adore
life, I am not tired of loving women: I nourish myself
opening the world in them. But it’s all useless,
because I myself am a useless head
reading for lopping, not understanding what it means
to hope for another world out of this world.
They talk to me of God or talk of History. I laugh
that it’s so far to seek the explanation of the hunger
that devours me, the hunger to live like the sun
in the grace of air, eternally.
—Translated
from the Spanish by John Oliver Simon
Once Chance Was Named
Jorge Cáceres
Once change was named Jorge Cáceres
and wandered twenty-five years on earth,
had two clear eyes and a dark glance,
and two quick feet and wisdom,
but wandered far, so freely far
that nobody saw his face.
Could have been a volcano, but was Jorge Cáceres
this living marrow,
this hurry, this grace, this precious flame,
this purest animal running through his veins
for short days, that entered and left all at once
through his heart, finally reaching the oasis
of suffocation.
Now he is in light and velocity
and his soul is a fly buzzing in the ears
of the newborn:
Why do you weep? Live.
Breathe your oxygen.
Jorge Louis Cáceres: Chilean poem (1923-1949). At
fifteen, he became
the youngest member of the Chilean surrealist group Mandrágora;
according to
Rojas, “the only poet who had a truly surrealist
angel.”
—Translated
from the Spanish by John Oliver Simon
Aleph, Aleph
What do I see on this table? tigers, Borges, scissors, butterflies
that never flew, bones
which did not move this hand, empty
veins, unfathomable board?
Blindness I see, I see a spectacle
of madness, things that speak
only to be talking, to throw themselves
into the meagreness of that species
of kiss that approaches them, I see your face.
—Translated from the Spanish by John
Oliver Simon
Farewell to the
Concubine
This is the last dialogue: up to here
I hear the rowing of your laughter
like a whore and all,
in war
you win or lose and I lost
and you lost too, there are no secret little hairs
to soften the riddle: uterus is uterus and phallus is
phallus, there’s no
aura nor distinction, not any Dance,
you do your number
in the show and split, it’s all business between man
and woman, no secret hairs and you are all the animals
at once, and for that matter who betrays whom, that’s
the beast
—you and me—we are.
—Translated
from the Spanish by John Oliver Simon
____
English language translation
copyright ©2006 by John Oliver Simon and Green Integer.
Gonzalo Rojas, the seventh son of a coal-miner, born 1917, in Lebu, Chile, is often introduced as "the youngest poet in Latin America." Author of 27 books of poetry, awarded the Premio Reina Sofía by the King of Spain and the Chilean National Prize for Literature, his work has been little translated into English. Gonzalo Rojas is a quicksilver poet, his thought a dazzling wriggle of lightning that strikes down the page in rigorous freedom. A new translation of his work titled From the Lightning, translated by John Oliver Simon, will be published by Green Integer later this year.