Tango

by Idea Vilariño

Yo vengo por la calle

compro pan

entro en casa

hay niebla y vengo triste

tu amor es un ausencia

tu amor digo mi amor

amor que quedó en nada.

Subo las escaleras

repasando esa historia

y me quedo en lo oscuro

tras de la puerta

amarga

pensando no pensando

en tu amor

en la vida

en la soledad que es

única certidumbre.

Tango

by Idea Vilariño

I come down the street

buy bread

enter the house

there is fog and I arrive home sad

your love is an absence

your love, I say, my love

love that came to nothing.

I climb the stairs

reviewing this history

and I stop in the dark

behind the bitter

door

thinking not thinking

on your love

on life

in the solitude that is

the only certainty.

translated from Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval

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Idea Vilariño (18 August 1920 – 28 April 2009) was an Uruguayan poet, essayist and literary critic and a well-known member of the literary and intellectual group, the Generation of ’45, that included Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and, as an ex-officio, Argentinian member, Jorge Luis Borges. She was a high school literature teacher from 1952 until the military dictatorship in 1973. After the restoration of democracy until her death, she was a professor of literature at the la Universidad de la República in Montevideo. She was the author of twelve books of poetry; among the best known are Nocturnos (1955) and Poemas de amor (1957). Her collected poems Poesía completa was published in Uruguay in 2009. She was also the author of five books of essays and literary criticism.

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s poetry collections include Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press), World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and a Spanish language poetry collection Extranjera (Yaugarú) published in Uruguay. Her translations of the Uruguayan poet Circe Maia have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, the Boston Review, and American Poetry Review. The University of Pittsburgh Press published Invisible Bridge/ El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia in August, 2015. She is also the editor of América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets which is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also Director of the Program in Creative Writing.

Circumference

Poetry in Translation

Tango

Tango