Poems of a Young Poet
"The Chinese masters said of sweet poetry/
that the poet came ill out of the bitter trance, with dark circles
under his eyes;/
but I beg you, generous little muse of the candid look,/
don't let my honey be made at the cost of my blood..."
Joaquín Pasos1997 marked the 50th Anniversary of Joaquín Pasos’ death. Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco are announcing the publication of a bilingual Anthology of selections from both his poetry and prose work. This anthology will introduce the remarkable range of this major Latin American poet’s work to an English audience
for the first time.
Here is a selection from this forthcoming anthology. The anthology is co-translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco, and will include a forward by Sergio Ramírez. Big poem about strong love
Poem on foot
Courtyard
Farewell
Four
Lovenote on a postcard (Liebpostal)Lullabed
Norway
Storm
Tremol hotel
An indian woman fallen in the market
Regreso a Dariana
My love hangs over the sea with open wings.
-Shoreline, water, foam.
My love shines like water on water.
The sea is round.
The sea is small.
My love is a seaweed.My love is like a bird.
My love is a pearl of light that grows as the morning grows.
I want to plant a tree with this illusion of mine.I want a sky big as a switchyard so I can roll my love around.
On the wind's rails.My love is blue and clear.
I want to make this rose bud bloom.
Which I have planted in my pocket.
Sun, sun! Sun!
And water.My love is a slender boy inside a jacket.
I grab him and put him on the table like a doll
and he's alive with huge eyes.My love is a little kid who imitates the wheeze of an automobile.
I take my love through the streets like a pet snake
leashed around the neck by a string,
and the snake hugs the street
and draws the profile of the ground.Grow, grow, little soap bubble,
round fruit1 at the end of a branch loaded with round fruit,
bottle of blown glass,
balloon in a child's lips.Everything. Because it is completely round
embracing itself.And because it is seamless.
Let my round love
bounce down the stairs
and fall into the water of your pond.(My love, it is light and soft like your loosened hair.)
My love, woman, is like you yourself.
Why did this flower bloom?
My love hangs over the world with its wings spread open.
My love shines like the world upon the world.
The world is round.
The world is small?
-My love is a world.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
Here I am, I smile big, very big.
On the five fingers of my liberty I lay out the accounts of my
travels.
Here I am, trembling and jubilant as a small boy's heart.
I like the way words laugh, and I'm dressed in an acrobat's
tights.
I smile and peer about like a bird.Look at my feet: they can't stop jiggling: they spend their
lives playing on the tiles.Look at my hands: they're excitements of air:
I have here the log of my joy,
here my poems shield me completely.And I have in my body the joy of the wind,
my young body, of green wood.The tree flirts in my ears
while the sky smiles before my eyes, small trains flung into
the empty blue;
but my arms tremble, downy woman, my arms... where my caresses
wait to be freed.
My neck too lifts and swings my head like the doves in the
entryways.
Here I am, here I am
reaching up my left arm, with the five fingers of my liberty.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
You must raise your right arm
because I want to remember you as a tree.
I want to know I leave planted on the horizon
your hand.Your hand that, remembered, may grow in the wind,
your hand which says it all. Nothing.You must raise your right arm
so I can see from far your heart in your fingers beating.
Your heart, seed fruit that planted in my memory
your hand.Your hand that raised, shall say to the wind
nothing. All.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
What position, what elegant and original pose might I take,
this poem being so near?
I'm asking you, oh, dextrous designer of fresh
smiles! - the only one
who can draw me a quick plan for the aptest architecture
of my present disposition.The chinese masters said of sweet poetry
that the poet came ill out of the bitter trance, with dark circles
under his eyes;
but I beg you, generous little muse of the candid look,
don't let my honey be made at the cost of my blood,
because a lot of blood has been spilled lately and milk is scarce
in mothers' breastsA poem that goes forth on foot, and since it is not published,
I will say to it: Until I see you, I don't believe you
first of all I intend to get these oppressive angel wings off me,
to see if by getting rid of all this plumage I end up tender and
virginal like a chicken
or at least with some of that slapstick disequilibrium,
as full of emotion and tears as the glass that is about to fall,
which doesn't quite fall, but knows it's going to.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
I'm shutting my body within the four walls,
the four windows that your body opened.
I'm left alone with my four silences:
yours, mine, the air's, and God's.
I'm quietly descending my four flights of stairs,I'm going down inside, deep within I,
where there are four times four enormous fields.
Inside, deep inside, how wide am I!And how small you are with your four coins,
with your four dresses made in New York. Before my eyes
you've stripped yourself bare and left yourself poor;
four times I loved you, four times no more.I'm closing up my soul, I'm not coming out to see you again,
You no longer resemble the one my love clothed in love;
I'm quietly descending with my four loves:
the other one, mine, the air's, and Gods's.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
This bedroom pleasure, so lineny, so full of sheets,
this pulsing of pillows beneath the sleeping temples,
this getting to the heart of the bed again
and then to know that my foot, my hand, what remains of my
heart seeks, speaks, writes, cries out your name,
and anyone would sense the time to come lie down and die.
What's all this if not the absence of your sleep,
the loss of your breathing next to me?
The imprint of your body is already gone,
which was the voice of your naked flesh in intimate converse
with the fresh bedclothes,telling them when my arm would be your pillow
and how your warm belly would quiver like a pillow alive,
nerves and blood in a silken pillowcase.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
Oh! This is Norway
soft as cotton,
land like a cookie
and ocean chewing its shores.All morning I've been on the bridge
and the fish carts have gone by.
A small factory shot through with windows
flings out a red diabolo each minute - streetcars.Oh! This is Norway
possessed of metal trees
and young ladies brought up in refrigerators.
Here a bird turns like a windmill
and the horses are tamer than in Holland.
The fjords rise like old theatre curtains.
Every six months the sun goes down.Fish-country on the North Pole's gaff,
white bear with a blue eye: Spitzbergen.
Whoo,oo,oo,oo,oo!All afternoon I was on the bridge
and the fish carts went by.
One of them dropped a dead codfish
and the streetcar guillotine sliced it in two.Oh! this is Norway
green and white,
white and green like an obscene old man.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
Our furious wind screams through the giant palms
dull bellows come down from the sky, flaming with leopard
[tongues
our furious wind falls from very high.Its body blows shake great trees to their roots
the black beetles crawl up out of the ground
and the fearsome snakes.Our furious wind follows its own wet way
the wild bulls drink it, dark juice of afternoon
it flails the fields.The men stand in silence listening to the wailing air
their souls cracked in pieces,
their feet and faces are mud.The young indian women run out to the courtyard,
tear off their shirts, offer their naked breasts
to the wind that undertakes to whet them like volcanos.
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
Waxen whores and young anabaptists
cross paths beneath this window in the Tremol Hotel.
I sleep here.
I eat in this gold and hibiscus dining room.
Every night I dance with Zulita.
Every morning the man at the next table wishes me good day.
This is in the Tremol Hotel, beneath whose windows
the paths cross
of waxen whores and young anabaptists.But I have a soul as tender as marshmallows,
and my eyes flash on and off like the intermittent neon
[signs.
That's why I love this hotel, this little rest, a locket of
serenity.Across the street, a sad sidewalk and a public clock draw
my eye each year,
and thereupon I invent a tenderness old and ripe.
In the Tremol Hotel, no one knows me yet,
in spite of my familiarity with its doors and its swallows.
No one, maybe not even aviators,
can treasure as I do
these post-card memories.
1937
translated by Chris Brandt and Yolanda Blanco
Return
Return
|