Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
translated by Hardie St. Martin

The Prisoner

gazelle / you’re far away /
yet you’re closer to my bones than even i am /
the world may think i’m a free man
yet each word from you is my mistress /
and though i may walk upright in everyone’s eyes
i am the prisoner of my loneliness for you /
without father or mother / without water or bread /
i walk naked in the sun of your absence /
joseph tsarfati

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
translated by Hardie St. Martin

XVI

            What really hurts me is our defeat.
            Exiles are tenants of solitude.  They may correct their memory, betray, disbelieve, conciliate, die or come out on top.  In this last case, they looked at their face as if it were theirs: it was filled with traitors, disbelievers, conciliators, the dead and also those compañeros who died with faith and burn in the night and repeat their anmes and won’t let you sleep.
            To make you see the distances no one lets you sleep.
            You rattle your bones, you.
            So be it.

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