Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
translated by Hardie St. Martin

XII

             My father came to America with one hand behind and the other in front to hold his trousers up.  I came to Europe with one soul behind and the other in front to hold my trousers up.  And yet there are differences: he went to stay, I came here meaning to return.

            But are there, in fact, differences?  Between the two of us we went, returned, and nobody knows yet where we’re going to end up.

             Papa: your skull is rotting, as a sign of the world’s injustice, in the country where I was born.  That’s why you spoke so little.  You didn’t have to.  As for the rest — eating, sleeping, suffering, fathering children — , they were necessary, natural acts, like someone’s who fills his notebook with the record of his life.

            I’ll never forget you, in the dining room’s semi–darkness, turned toward the clear light of your origins.  You talked with your country.  You had never really shaken its earth from the feet of your soul.  Feet full of earth like enormous silence, lead or light.

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

Commentary XXVIII  (saint john of the cross)

many ways of remembering rise
from you / intimate waves /
or movements like worlds
spinning toward you / in you / all yours /

earth of you I walk upon / my self
stretched out like a tiny root
your memory shelters from
the danger of the night’s animals

when distant stranger to yourself
you crackle / from you to you /
or dream yourself into my memory
that dreams remembering you /

or else i recognize your face
like memory in every face like
radiance from you / like a look in your eyes
where i see myself remembered

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

Commentary II (saint theresa)

with my love running over and spilling/
all around me the miniscule animals
grow fat feeding on your absence/
or is it your presence
makes me childish like feet crushing
sadnesses on the edge of what it is about to sing/
like a magnificent victory where
my souls are reflections of you?

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

Commentary I (saint theresa)

dear love going away like a bird
stretched out over the horizons is it right
to give ourselves to the whole / without
being a part of anything / not even of the flight
that takes you away? / do sisters and brothers think
flying in circles gets you anywhere / or that
going away and at the same time staying you reach
the oneness looked for like manna from heaven?
in other words / life is difficult i mean
the health i undermine to find you like light /
or word / twig where you may rest
like your hand on my heart