Traducciones de Martin Adan al Inglés

Martín Adán :: 5 Poems

AdanMARTÍN ADÁN WAS BORN Rafael de la Fuente y Benavides in Barranco, Lima, Peru, Oct. 27, 1908.

Adán’s first published work was the legendary lyrical novel The Cardboard House, published in 1928, when he was only 20. After the novel, Adan exclusively wrote poetry, publishing eight major books over five decades.

Adán suffered a breakdown in the early 1940s. He was admitted to a private clinic where he was intermittently confined throughout his adult life, and where he died, January 29, 1985.

Although personally isolated for much of his life, Adan’s world included a vast resource of world literature, and his isolation and erudition combined to form a startling hermeticism. This visionary poetry is unique and, at times, eccentric, seemingly not part of any local conversation, more reminiscent of Mallarme or Wallace Stevens than any of the main proponents of modernismo.

Adán’s shifts and juxtapositions, grammatical dislocations and invented words, create a tension that can cause the intelligibility of the text to tremble, even as he weaves it into lovely song. His poems invite in energies from ‘beyond the limits of the normal world’ (Eliot) and allow the mind a glimpse of its own vast possibilities.

— Rick London

5 Poems :: Translated by Katherine Silver and Rick London

Katherine Silver has translated the works of many Spanish and Latin American authors, including Antonio Skármeta, José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Martín Adán (NEA award), Pedro Lemebel, and Jorge Franco. For her translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, she received the 2008 NCBA Translation Award. She has translated plays, screenplays, and a wide assortment of academic and other nonfiction books. She also works as an editor and publishing consultant/manager, and lives in Berkeley, California.

Rick London’s publications include Dreaming Close By (O Books, 1986); Abjections: A Suite (O Books, 1988); and The Materialist (Doorjamb Press, 2008). He is co-translator (with Omnia Amin) of works in Arabic by Mahmoud Darwish, Nawal El Saadawi and Ibrahim Nasrallah. He lives and works in San Francisco.
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Martín Adán - 5 Poems

O, if loneliness . . .

O, if loneliness were matter
and fit to its own measure,
how much one would have in this life,
so true, so clear, and so blessed

O, but loneliness is not a poem or a rose,
rather a soul, confused, without symmetry,
and is, and is not, yours, having been
your other, where Love plays

For all loneliness precedes Love,
of a moment and eternal,
summer, spring, autumn, winter . . .

And a lonely fate leads our love, which is loneliness,
through touches and pleasures and truths,
and the loneliness of your way is for Love

--

Nothing is anything . . .

Nothing is anything but dream and fate,
a sea of love that sustains and batters you,
and what Way will save you
from the final surge of the sacred vortex?

And you were someone once,
no more a neighbor of god than of the waters
that convey doubt, that fling you
upon the stormy port and wine.

Now you are everything and nothing at all,
for, awkward like a god, you remake beings,
ships and clouds, abduction and entry . . .

And to the eternal muted barcarolle,
the chords and rhythms of love,
you, like the useless thigh of a wave, leave nothing.

--

Dehiscence of the flame . . .

Dehiscence of the flame, already of the floral world,
the sustenance and deed of exalted desire,
sacred flower and idle root,
the male nightingale full-bellied to the female . . .

Impenetrable lucid embrace
of absolute inhuman ignition,
fountain of thirst that nestles the flowing animal,
hidden, the wellspring of a pleading voice . . .

Frond of a name, unbodied light,
a mass of ripeness and fragrance,
Philomela’s own nest of hardship . . .

The radical unrest of the hymenoptera, buried alive,
and the copulation that flies
to the harvested horn of a goat.

--

Night, don’t blind me . . .

Night, don’t blind me, so I may see
as I pour myself into your belly and am conceived
and the dense wave of my arrival
disappears along a shoreline in your mind.

So I can hear you, Night, and creating you I believe in you,
seeing you from my lasciviousness.
And meantime, Death, you can work out
my demise at the undying hand of the tide.

Such is my body, Night, you who are soul,
and at the end of the hand and sand and palm trees
my celestial fable begins.

Such is my life, Death, for you are night:
Your sea voice polishing my amber
and my blindness in the ripeness of seeing you.

--

from Diary Of A Poet

You, moving on, with a lively step
and death that follows you wherever you go
You, ephemeral as water from the wellspring
to the encouraging world, which is the whole of light . . .
Without the forbidding cypress or the saturated
rose or the shadow of a chimera . . .
You, moving on, O! Because the origin
pulses in every form and your dark
night already kindles the dawn’s spark . . .
Your brief life, that goes on and on
The death woe that swallows you, gasping,
the lively attention of your mortal quick-step . . .
Your expanding star, a sinister heavenly body
The dawn, interminably from your day,
wherein you, O myopic one, search for the human
footprint of some god . . . and find nothing

Or those skies that carry your breath
or some treasure on the unknown isle?
O! You, always by the wing of the vampire
and the greed of the shrew . . .

Unto indestructible eternity, Poet,
your time will be your house,
ample house . . . and neither perfected?
And you wander between the difficulty and the noise
of the city that settles in you
You, carried by a voice that’s not of it . . .

You move on, alive in this way to live, now slow,
now swift, now in a brothel, now in an office,
like a hound looking for food
All things: sufficient and divine Will . . .
Real when you see it . . . a wall in your dwelling . . .
The cruel swan . . . under the rose, the thorn . . .
Mind now without limits goes out to everything
seeking the latent touch
Sudden beast who knows nothing
Knows nothing apart from what’s lived . . .
The light of ashen dawn . . .
Of fire, excessive ember,
Death, which obstructs and tempts you
as would a flowering cactus . . .
In the hard particulars of first light,
incredible flower, at the summit and in the abyss,
will your spring, Cactus, shine with joy,
and your being, you that I am?

Do I live on eternally when I die?
And in the mire of a constant dawn
your verse flowers, sudden and porous . . .
Your own primal light stirring in the actual . . .
You create for yourself a marvelous reality . . .
Stubborn burning shadow, murmuring . . .
And crying out . . . listening in vain
Transparent and sad, that verse of yours . . .
A water lily, disrupting your swamp . . .
Dawn and a penumbra expand . . . rise up
perhaps...but you are painting clouds
on your wall with fire and a spatula . . .
That rapturous cloud of pure verse,
ship of light that becomes iridescent passing through it . . .
To live your danger . . . your safety . . .
You, Poet, are you flying with the halyard?

O, here each form carries a name,
and each name is simple, as if absolved . . .
Here, Poet, where an ordinary man
equals the square of his thinking!

And so, randomly with restless poetry,
obeying neither the real nor the subjective
you persist in inventing the World, Poet,
freed of limit and secrets
And your voice goes out to unheard voices,
your invocation from vacant chatter:
To the death you have yet to reach and is your life:
“You, Death, my life, my portal . . .”
Blind, you look for love by loving blindly,
persisting where you avoid yourself:
You always illuminate the tragic choice.
You continue your vain and awkward
thrashing of a shark in a lagoon...
The shark is perfect . . . free of the human . . .
The mind is momentary . . . the way is long . . .
And the soul is simply the body without disgust . . .

And this, the way each moment disappears . . .
And this longing for the eternal and the inexhaustible
that grows in you like a nail,
beyond memory and forgetfulness . . .
And the real world and its imagery,
that real bone your soul closes around . . .
Yes, you move on
over bones that lie deeply in this Earth


Translation copyright 2010 Katherine Silver and Rick London

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