the color of time on a ruined wall

 Five poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert.

Pizarnik           Siegert photo

Mendiga voz

by Alejandra Pizarnik

Y aún me atrevo a amar

el sonido de la luz en una hora muerta,

el color del tiempo en un muro abandonado.

 

En mi mirada lo he perdido todo.

Es tan lejos pedir. Tan cerca saber que no hay.

A Beggar Voice

by Alejandra Pizarnik

And still I dare to love

the sound of the light in the hours of deadness

the color of time on a ruined wall.

 

In my eyes I’ve lost everything.

Asking is so far away. And so close, this knowledge of want.

translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert
more>>

Los ojos abiertos

by Alejandra Pizarnik

Alguien mide sollozando

la extensión del alba.

Alguien apuñala la almohada

en busca de su imposible

lugar de reposo.

Eyes Wide Open    

by Alejandra Pizarnik

Someone sobs and measures

the lengths before dawn.

Someone punches her pillow

in search of an impossible

place of rest.

translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert
more>>

Cuarto solo

by Alejandra Pizarnik

Si te atreves a sorprender

la verdad de esta vieja pared;

y sus fisuras, desgarraduras,

formando rostros, esfinges,

manos, clepsidras,

seguramente vendrá

una presencia para tu sed,

probablemente partirá

esta ausencia que te bebe.

Single Room    

by Alejandra Pizarnik

If you dare to frighten

the truth out of this old wall—

and its fissures, its gashes

that form shapes and sphinxes

and hands and clepsydras—

surely a presence

for your thirst will emerge,

and no doubt this absence

that drinks you dry will leave you.

translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert
more>>

El corazón de lo que existe 

by Alejandra Pizarnik

no me entregues,

                tristísima medianoche,

al impuro mediodía blanco

The Heart of What Does Exist  

by Alejandra Pizarnik

do not hand me over,

            oh saddest of midnights,

to the impure whiteness of noon.

translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert
more>>

Sombra de los días a venir

by Alejandra Pizarnik

A Ivonne A. Bordelois

 

Mañana

me vestirán con cenizas al alba,

me llenarán la boca de flores.

Aprenderé a dormir

en la memoria de un muro,

en la respiración

de un animal que sueña.

 

 

 

 

Shadow from Days to Come

by Alejandra Pizarnik

For Ivonne A. Bordelois*

 

Tomorrow

they’ll dress me in ash for the sunrise,

they’ll fill my mouth with flowers.

I’ll learn to sleep

inside the memory of a wall,

on the breath

of a dreaming animal.

 

 

 

 

 

* Bordelois is an Argentine linguist (PhD, MIT), writer, and scholar, and one of Pizarnik’s closest friends and literary interlocutors. 

translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert
more>>

Out of the halls of books
Appear the butchers.

A new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s “1940,” by J.D. Knight.

1940

by Bertolt Brecht

I

Das Frühjahr kommt. Due linden Winde

Befreien die Schären vom Wintereis.

Die Völker des Nordens erwarten zitternd

Die Schlachtflotten des Anstreichers.

 

II

Aus den Bücherhallen

Treten die Schlächter.

 

Die Kinder an sich drückend

Stehen die Mütter und durchforschen entgeistert

Den Himmel nach den Erfindungen der Gelehrten.

 

III

Die Konstrukteure hocken

Gekrümmt in den Zeichensälen:

Eine falsche Ziffer, und die Städte des Feindes

Bleiben unzerstört.

 

IV

Nebel verhüllt

Die Straße

Die Pappeln

Die Gehöfte und

Die Artillerie.

 

V

Ich befinde mich auf dem Inselchen Lidingö.

Aber neulich nachts

Träumte ich schwer und träumte, ich war in einer Stadt

Und entdeckte, die Beschriftungen der Straßen

Waren deutsch. In Schweiß gebadet

Erwachte ich, und mit Erleichterung

Sah ich die nachtschwarze Föhre vor dem Fenster und wußte:

Ich war in der Fremde.             

 

 

1940

by Bertolt Brecht

I

Spring is coming. The mild winds

Free the ridges from the winter’s ice.

Shivering, the people of the north await

The naval fleets of the house-painter.

 

II

Out of the halls of books

Appear the butchers.

 

Pressing her children close

The mother scans the sky, dumbfounded,

For the inventions of the scholars.

 

III

The engineers sit

Hunched over in the design rooms:

One wrong figure, and the enemy’s cities

Remain intact.

 

IV

Fog envelops

The street

The poplars

The farms and

The artillery.

 

V

I’m living on the island of Lidingö.

But the other night,

I had troubled dreams and I dreamed I was in a city

And discovered the street signs

Were in German. I woke up

Bathed in sweat, and with relief

I saw the pine, black as night, outside my window and knew:

I was in a foreign land.

 

 

translated from German by J.D. Knight
more>>

Nicanor Parra:
Brand-new After 100 years

by: Iris Cushing

 

nicanor parraPhysicist, mathematician, artist, folk dancer, and (anti)poet Nicanor Parra turns 100 years old today. That he’s living to celebrate his own centennial could be a detail from one of his magnificently wry, aphoristic, self-mythologizing antipoems, which he has long characterized as a type of literary material analogous to antimatter. In her translator’s introduction to Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great (New Directions, 2004) Liz Werner writes that “…antipoetry mirrors poetry, not as its adversary but as its perfect complement…it is as opposite, complete, and interdependent as the shape left behind in the fabric where the garment has been cut out.”

Parra has been cutting vivid shapes from the fabric of Latin American poetry and poetics since 1937, when his first book, Cancionero sin Nombre, appeared (Pablo Neruda’s book responding to the Spanish Civil War, España en el Corazón, appeared a year later). He went on to study physics and cosmology at Brown and Oxford, and teach those subjects at universities in Chile. Parra’s deceptively plain, deadpan voice has long confronted the various status quos of pop culture, literary canons, academia and politics. Having lived and written through the 17-year U.S.-backed Pinochet dictatorship, Parra has penned postcard-sized lyrics and drawings responding to situations as diverse in time and space as the U.S.’s embargo on Cuba and the war in Iraq. Throughout all his work runs a compassionate entreaty to consider poetry as a means for rethinking the world. “A poet is not true to his word/If he doesn’t change the names of things,” he writes in “Changes of Name” (trans. W.S. Merwin, in Poems and Antipoems, New Directions, 1967).

To celebrate Parra’s birthday, Chilean press Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales is releasing a long-lost long poem by Parra, titled Temporal. Written in 1987, the poem was lost by Parra in the chaos of the end of the Pinochet regime. However, Parra’s secretary, Adán Mendez, recently discovered cassette tapes of Parra in conversation with critic Rene de la Costa in which he reads the entire piece aloud. Mendez transcribed the poem from audio. The unlikely survival of a great poem in the body of a now-obsolete technology seems perfectly appropriate to Parra’s style.

Saludos a todos– “hi to everyone”–is the ninth and final “note” of Parra’s “Notes on the Lessons of Antipoetry,” translated by Liz Werner. Issued from the position of a theoretical physicist, rigorous social thinker, and poet, this greeting reads as something that could be inscribed on the Higgs boson particle: a beautifully purposeless joke at the center of the world’s great mystery. At 100, Parra is still laughing.