No-Man’s-Land
Daisy Zamora
No–Man’s–Land
to the poets I love
We are a minefield of clarity,
and whoever crosses the barbed wire comes back to life.
But who’s interested in crawling through undergrowth?
Who dares sail a tempest?
Who wants to come face to face with purity?
0That’s why we’re fenced off in this no-man’s-land,
under permanent crossfire.
from The Violent Foam
— tr. George Evans, Curbstone Press
A Photograph of Juan Gelman Dressed to the Nines
Sergio Ramírez
A Photograph of Juan Gelman Dressed to the Nines
I have seen the figure of Juan Gelman in formal attire bowing gracefully over a power that can be nothing other than the sacred power of poetry. Calm and barely smiling, he expresses a hint of the supreme disdain he has always had for titles, honors and other vanities in response to which, if provoked, he will burst out laughing. I ask myself, what is he doing, a tango singer who has plucked the lyre of misfortune, so elegantly dressed, as if he were a Godfather at someone else’s wedding, a Spanish lord, for example, but a man with a face so scored by pain doesn’t dress so elegantly if it weren’t for his own wedding with language: he has lived all his life in carnal conversation with words — a life of domestic disturbances, papers strewn on a bed of ink stained sheets.
The photo was taken in the cloisters at the University of Alcala the day he received the Cervantes Prize from Spain’s King Juan Carlos. It was the first time Juan bowed to anyone even if ever so slightly and with so much grace that it did not reduce him, he who has lived erect all of his life, and no one can boast about making him bow, no one or nothing, neither terror, nor insidiousness, nor misfortune. He has stayed upright before such sorrows — no guitar dares to play that milonga — his son thrown into the depths of a river by hit men who appear to be still at large, a river of dead bodies in cement blocks, an ocean of dead bodies thrown out of military aircraft, a vast and dark landscape of the disappeared, and his daughter-in-law kidnapped with a child in her womb, taken secretly to Uruguay, where they made her give birth then killed her. Who is there to mark her grave and to find his disappeared granddaughter but Juan, thanks to his tenacity, without ever bowing to the cruel winds of misfortune that score his face.
Barely bowing in the photo, a slight smile suggesting irony, and the dignity of a poet dressed in a jacket to receive the award for his lifelong love affair with poetry, so passionate, fierce and carnal, making love all night long, eyes wide open. So much has come from it leading to this moment that he says he never intended, but to which he bows today in this photo, his passion to bring to light the suffering of others, as well as his own, in words that can only be written in the blood that runs in the veins of tangos and boleros, and what I feel now contemplating this article in the Managua newspaper is a light tremor in my body and soul, before I also bow reverently to the figure bowing in the photo, he to poetry and I to the poet
— tr. Robert Arnold
Archilochos in Baghdad
Doug Anderson
Archilochos in Baghdad
There is less noise now except in your head.
The smirking rich have gone home with their take
and left you the rind and the flies.
The dead have gone home. The maimed
with their lolling tongues. All gone.
Children play in the empty husks of Hummers
and helicopters. Watch you through the dust.
When you have gone they will come out
to take what you have not used, have not eaten.
Cannot remember why you came to this place.
Now they tell you to pack.
Go back to a place you imagined as home.
That has moved on beyond you and changed the locks.
from Sleeping with Sappho
Stephen Vincent
from Sleeping with Sappho
36.
Andrew
The joker dropped
Melissa a dead letter
]
Out of Delphi — without a prayer
Indelicate Jane confuses seaweed with rope —
Burnt. Copper anklets and starched jeans
Without smell, varnished tools
Or white plates spare and smooth.
So she shut up. Soon after, her mother caved in.
No one hears anything, travel a naysayer.
Then, the daughters of Athena released the horses
Studs each gripped by the legs of Epidore’s finest
The young men with taut ribbed torsos
That they would climb mountains, traverse rivers, ravines [
]unlike to us
]not particular to the gods
To arrive Attica
What is bitter in the tambourine and snare
Ill-fitted to the false speech of outsiders
]
A chorus in which no one transforms the anguish:
Such sad, mean sounds
The streets filled with broken bricks
Folded down, broken statuary
Bitterroot and dry compost
The young on their horses in tears
The women in shredded pink silk
No one can call on anyone, absolutely
No one. The instruments fail. Every eye
And chin dropped: an ode for infinite loss,
Infinite forgiveness.
104.
Such large
Rain drops
So few
Fingers