Atlantean Poets

Venezuelan Poets, Poetry and Poetics "Only radical devotion could stray so far from fidelity." Atlantean Poets ©2014-15

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ANVP

A New Venezuelan Poetry

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Justin Wymer

José Barroeta (Trujillo, 1942-2006)

Art of Being Night

There’s an art to being night.

From the alms entering the body,

from the fog to its redundant

circles in the sky;

there’s an art to light,

a country where being night

is looking at life

with your body closed.

There’s an art to being night,

the day’s entering a descent

into complete obscurity.

An in-between where it’s necessary

to receive and learn everything not

the tremulous knowledge you deserve.

There’s an art,

a countryside amicable to fish,

sometimes fierce,

where ascent and descent are

accessories to the river’s matted cleanliness.

There’s an art to being night.

Whoever has lived or dreamed of forests,

their lucent demons,

I know him.

Sin Is Tulle

My assassinated father

won’t spy the women who make me drunk,

won’t see

my ovened cadaver thirty-eight years old.

The night of my death

we’ll reunite a minute in the sky; barely

I’ll pass by the immensity

and dawn will begin its speech-giving.

I’ll flee to Orion.

My father revised his history so shadows of men

passed as men:

no longer Carlos Noguera,

nothing in those shadows will have a thing to do with

Luis Cornejo, I can’t see either of them, and so

there’ll be no flowers for my brother in Pennsylvania.

I’ll forget roots;

the fragrance of seared breath in the gouty-bulbed bar;

Sary’s skin, which appeared gossipy in my eyes.

I won’t yearn for anything. Southern countrysides, I think,

were stimuli for this nameless sobriety.

Oh father,

no longer your vulture’s rosy water,

nothing of Marina, nothing of my youth, father nothing

will travel with you into death.

Your head has got to live

and in October we’ll remember it. I, absent, in your eyes

see the crawdad the sky proclaims.

Oh father,

my youth won’t sell home again,

we’ll be infelicitous forgetting that music rote

in our hearts and then erased.

The earth will prune you of your name. 

Fields of Playing Cards and Rabbits

Welcome to my mouth

to the star of my palate

big little bee.

Met you in plain summer,

when far from my friends

I was fleeing to Cádiz in search of Christopher Columbus,

my great brother of water and wind those ancient ones

that take up places in my flesh

like the faces of a thousand bells

newly dropped to the earth by the grace of clouds.

Welcome, welcome little one of mine,

to this earth for centuries prohibited

by theologies,

but which maintained the ebb of the domestic sky

in my eyes

while my father

               and

               my

               mother

               made love on lecherous

                                               roses.

Welcome you are

as the comets that sail from paradise,

that go down like you

raising their hands up like the royal fowl

watching over Saint Assisi’s ruin delirious

in the mist of Oviedo.

Similarly you

in bird-flight thirst in the atmosphere,

in the red wounds of my country at sunbreak.

Welcome bee

to the chalice of Granada which did not nurture any war.

Welcome to this my country,

my house,

my yesterday day and my today.

Welcome to the fluid leaving the rivers

for Noah’s arc,

for my daughters’ bellies,

for the poem of the red prodding I used to be,

for the bible-light,

for the fields of playing cards and rabbits.

Welcome for I am a lyric ant

for I go dressed in bitten forests.

Welcome

for days of summer leave the scent of sirens,

of Málaga’s grasses set against the moon.

I am the jewelry box:

they call me son of the bone-cup made from

                               the Gang of Lautréamont.

José Barroeta (Pampanito, Trujillo 1942-2006), known as Pepe Barroeta, was an  Venezuelan essayist and poet. A lawyer and PhD in Latin American Literature, he taught at the University of Los Andes. Barroeta was one of the central figures in mid-century Venezuelan poetry. He was member of the literary groups "Tabla Redonda", "Haa", "Tropico Uno", "Pandilla de Lautreamont", and "Sol Cuello Cortado," among others.  His work presents the quintessential hybrid creature of early and mid twentieth century urban/rural Venezuela:   loss and death are subverted by  dream and remembrance. His poetry was collected in Obra Poética 1971-1996 by Ediciones “El otro, el mismo”, in 2001.

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From the Editor

  “The literature of a country should be like a galaxy, in which past or forgotten authors move in alignment with the new heavenly bodies. I feel that there is a vigorous literature, a literature of Atlantis, hidden, of which we see only the tip of the iceberg -there are names such as Rómulo Gallegos, Uslar Pietri- but there is a great literature that is hidden to the world. In ten years, we will be talking of the momentum in Venezuelan literature in our age.” José Balza, Venezuelan novelist, critic.

Indeed: if the literature of a country could be compared to a galaxy. Venezuela would be Andromeda. Such is our remoteness, our invisibility -a mystery many have tried to solve, but none have unraveled. And our language, increasingly bound by totalitarian discourse and yet  simultaneously indomitable; both bound and unrestricted in its essential contradictory nature: that of a country that, as we speak, is erasing itself in chaos and, in the process, is both a newly risen  island while also a remote, sunken continent: as Balza unknowingly baptized us, we are Atlantean.

And yet Venezuela is home to some of the most vibrant, unexpected and brave poetry in the universe. It has a distinguished tradition of ground-breakers and intrepid explorers; it  is entrenched in its isolation, and yet strangely rooted in the world around it. Ours is a poetry of survival.

Atlantean Poets intends to explore how we are seen, interpreted and rendered by Atlanteans, our guest poets of other lands and continents, who will contribute versions-intervened translations-rewritings-recreations of Venezuelan poetry. We will also feature similar works from the original Atlantean poets, native Venezuelans who wish to revisit their tradition.

Regain all hope: This is a page for tribute, recreation, play, risk. We are all Atlanteans.

There is a church sunken in the depths of the Uribante dam, somewhere in Venezuela. When the waters subside, the church emerges from the water. The first thing you see is the tip of its cross as it rises. On the other side of the world, as a visitor observes the corn emerge from Midwestern fields after a flood, one thing is sure: we are all drowning.

Atlantean Poets is about drowning/submersion: one body into another, one text into the other, one voice into another. It is about rejoining lonely continents.

And not in ten, but in a hundred years, we will be talking of the momentum in Atlantean literature of the Venezuelan age.

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Chris Martin

Caupolicán Ovalles (1936-2000)

Do You Sleep, Mr. President?

                                                                 (1962)

When you dance

tango with your ministers

and secretaries of love

instead of sleeping

we hear it,

night after night,

hard fast heels

clicking like a Duchess.

We seethe with laughter

imagining your face,

its ridiculous hope,

awaiting applause

from the frantic police.

Of course you’re tired

and want a little diversion,

no matter

how monstrous, we

want to see you hung

by the neck

from a lyre, as a Roman

might, or an old

Roman woman, blinded

by the absurdity

of belief.

When you promise

the philosopher’s stone

can make bread

and twenty-dollar bills,

we see instead

how your arrogance

dedicates itself

to the hawking of rotten potatoes

and rancid maize,

while the Indians of this nation

rename you

Chief Pearl Eye.

  When, instead of weeping,

you finally die

one of these days,

like an elegant sow

full of fat

and imported from the North,

we who are tired

will dance the stones

from the street

and the manufactured fruit

right off the trees.

With your aging vertebrae,

good only for stuffing

rats, we will disgrace

a single place on earth,

Cave of the Cursed,

and ban all who wish

to see your remains, for fear

of waking a hysterical

tenderness.

  They call you

José, he of dreams, he

of the sacred cows,

which are always the most lean,

and President of

the “Condal Dream Society.”

Your friends call you

the Barbiturate.

  How long will you sleep, Mr. President?

  If you worship the cow, Sleep!

If you adore the calf, Sleep!

And if the General gives you his lunch,

sleep like a dormouse

or he’ll stomp out your dreams.

Clayface,

Eye for recognizing

Snakes, and we call you

Eye to make company

and burn

with the humility of Kerosene,

Eye to be at my service

like a waiter

at a hole in the wall café.

  Do you sleep, Mr. President?

I ask while I am handsome and young

and not like you, Mr. Siesta.

Eye of mud and Emergency Toilets.

    POEM 78

He swears he’s the youngest

of them all, an assassin of care.

No one can decipher

the gestures of this beloved man

because they are too busy

coughing semiotics

and when he passes they say

“There goes the world’s most

flirtatious shit.”

  When you’ve paid the electricity

and the telephone, the gas

and the water, been redeemed

like a newborn, between

peril and the springs

of the mattress, the old bitch

sleeps. You never wake up.

THE PRESIDENT luxuriates

in his palace.

  Caupolicán Ovalles (Guarenas, 1936 - Caracas, 2001) was an Venezuelan poet. He was the controversial founding member and representative of the literary and art collective El techo de la ballena. His poem “Duerme usted, Sr. Presidente”, featured here, led to the immediate incarceration of the poet and his editor, novelist Adriano Gonzalez Leon. They were released later, but remained under official surveillance. In later years, he became a symbol of the Venezuelan experimental literary movements of the sixties, and was Director of the Venezuelan Writers Association (AEV) for more than over two decades. Despite the eventual move toward institutionalism of his later years, Ovalles held a lifelong iconoclast attitude toward the formalisms of Venezuelan literary life.

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Ted Mathys + Judith Mathys

Eugenio Montejo (Caracas, 1938-2008)

 The Earth Turned In Us 

There in the doorway to the past

the earth turned to let us pass, turned

upon itself and in us, until finally it joined us

inside this dream, as in the Symposium.

Nights, snows, solstices; in minutes

millennia passed. A cart bound for Ninevah

turned up in Nebraska. A rooster sang

from afar, down through one of our ancestors’

innumerable bloodlines. The earth turned musically,

freighted with us. It didn’t stop spinning

for an instant, as if the miraculous

were an adagio written long ago

in the score of the symphony

we hear blowing through the door.

 The Slave

 To be the slave who lost his body

so word could dwell in it. To have for bones

innocent flutes played by an exile,

an unknown, or nobody. The only certainty

is breath and the anxiety of deciphering it.

Being the slave while others sleep

and the lamplight harasses space,

its hollow sister, with clarity.

In terror of being awake opposite stars,

unable to be still when they rouse,

irradiate, flood the world as night

darkens the page. To be the mercenary

alchemist of lead, boredom, and zinc

casting breath into agates, human clay into gold,

so that the stars won’t fling it to the dogs

once they deliver their part.

  Trees

 The trees are reserved, that much is known.

They while away life in meditation,

moving their branches. It is enough

to spy on them in autumn

when they gang up in parks:

only the oldest converse

in voices shared with clouds and birds.

Their voices soften as they travel over leaves

and reach us in silence.

There are so few insights about trees

they won’t fill even one notebook.

Everything about them is vague,

fragmented. Today, for example,

upon hearing the scream of a black thrush,

already on its way home, a terminal scream

that doesn’t expect another summer,

I understood that in its voice

a tree was speaking, one of many,

but I don’t know what to do with that scream,

don’t know how to put it down. 

  Poetry

 Poetry works alone. It crosses

the earth, rests its voice in pain

and begs for nothing – not even words.

It arrives from afar and without

time, never warning; it has the key

to our door. Upon entering

it always stops to stare at us.

Afterward it opens its hand

to deliver a flower, a pebble,

something secret but so intense

that its heart beats too fast

for us to sleep through it.

  Spider Velocity

 Swift, the spider that weaves us

from a remote star. Swiftly she spins

skin, voice, nerves, footsteps we follow

into nets of longitude, trailing white  

filaments of dream, inaudible music

behind us in ribbons, mixing

blood and void. Here, the digits

of my hand are letters already woven

into the paper my hand travels,  

eight fingers working a loom

so distant it has already converted me

into its scribe. My books, this lamp,

the paintings, what I am, have ever been,

smoke from the patio, my tacit death,

my eyes and those that manage to read me,

we are hanging by her threads.

Elegy

 Be quiet before the poem.

Circulate among its verses

but don’t interrupt its gait. 

It may be a godless oration

but it is oration nonetheless. 

And now that it’s been born,

men will gather and repeat its words

in their sleep. A mystery convenes

these words in them, as though

something sacred will remain on earth.

Perhaps you reject the whole ordeal,

the ritual that fills you with them

and them with you. But don’t speak.

Decipher each letter slowly,

as someone who overhears a rooster

and senses that its midnight wail,

instead of a scream, is an inquiry

into an obituary in which your name

may be mentioned, or maybe

for you the rooster already sang.

Inscription

 Sometime I will write with stones,

measuring each of my sentences

by weight, volume, movement. 

I am tired of words. No more pencil.

Instead, precision: an optical telescope

to measure angles in multiple planes,

to triangulate this foreign landscape

and tattoo the solar nakedness of feeling

directly onto rocks. With lines of pebbles

I will sketch my name, the story of my house

and the memory of the river within me,

how it delays in my veins like a wise architect.

With a living stone I will write my song

in arches, bridges, dolmens, columns

against the horizon’s loneliness, like a map

unfolding before the eyes of emigrants

who will never return.

  Return to Your Gods

 Return to your profound gods. 

They are intact, waiting at the bottom

with their llamas. The breeze of time

has silenced them. Silent, practical,

occult gods in the porousness of things.

You have rolled down the world’s hills

toward them, farther than any pebble.

You have eroded away your name,

your city, your acidic, fragmentary visions.

After so many stone hours, what do you retain? 

The music of being is dissonant

but life continues and certain agreements prevail.

The earth is round from the desire to gravitate.

The earth will round it all out, everything,

each at its time, to its end. So many trips

over the ocean, so many nights by your lamp,

and only these voices surround you.

Echoes of your gods are ciphered in them.

Your gods are intact, in the eyes of minnows

coursing through your blood.

 The House

 In the depths of the woman’s body

between murmurs and silence

the house is built. Shadows of stones,

virtual birds, scaffolds of light –  

it is necessary to follow them evenly,

down to the dream’s core,

so as not to wake her with movements

or disturb her gentle smile.  

On the dunes that cover sleep

with a wavering countryside,

it is necessary to erect walls,

to make them tall, create years

and years against rain, wind,

sand hammering from the dunes.

A gesture can fix a wall in place.

From a whisper a window is born.

Through it she sees us dismount,

tie up our horse, wander to her door.

Behind it the whole house waits for us

and the table is set with clean words

for living, or perhaps for dying,

we don’t know which

because once inside, one never leaves.

 Rooster Song

                                      – for Adriano González León

 The song is outside the rooster.

Drop by drop it blankets his body

now that he sleeps in a tree. Below,

night falls continuously, in shadows

across the veins of leaves and wings. 

The song fills the uncontainable rooster

like a jug. It fills his feathers, his throat,

his knifelike spurs, until it erupts

in a relentless cry that spills over the world.

Afterward the bird returns to his rest

and the silence solidifies.  

The song is outside again,

in air, scattered among shadows.

Inside the rooster there are only tendons,

muscles, and sleep, where a drop

falls through the deep night, silently

among the pitter patter of stars.

Eugenio Montejo (Caracas, 1938 - Valencia, 5 June 2008) was a Venezuelan poet and essay writer, founder of the literary magazine Azar and co-founder of Revista Poesía, a poetry magazine published by the University of Carabobo.In Venezuela he was awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1998 and in 2004 he received the International Octavio Paz Prize for Poetry and Essay. International interest in Montejo's poetry grew after his poem "La tierra giró para acercarnos" ("The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer") was used in the film 21 grams by feted Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. A few lines from the poem are quoted by Sean Penn's character in the movie.

Eugenio Montejo: A Note on Process 

by Ted Mathys

Eugenio Montejo’s poems possess a magical fluidity that breaks down distinctions between past and present, interior and exterior, quotidian life and dream life, voice and silence. That a rooster haunts so many of Montejo’s poems is no surprise. The rooster’s voice announces the transition between night and day, a bleed of light into darkness that upsets our most fundamental binaries. This indeterminate moment of rooster song is what we are after in these translations. Like Montejo, my mother speaks Spanish, but I do not. Montejo was a poet, and I am a poet, but my mother is not. My mother and I share an American idiom, but Montejo did not. In the swirling center of this Venn diagram these translations attempt their own refracted “mother tongue.” I am skeptical of the performed possibility for verisimilitude between source language and target language that governs much translation. I wanted place an obstacle between Montejo’s originals and my own tendency to get things right, but I wanted that obstacle to be human rather than algorithmic. So instead of turning to Google Translate, over the course of several months I sent my mother catalogued fragments of all ten poems in four discrete batches. Each batch contained some language from each of the poems, out of order and with all line breaks removed. Montejo’s diction and syntactical arrangements can be extremely difficult, but she translated each fragment without consulting a dictionary and without any contextualizing language at hand. I then reassembled her raw English text into prose blocks and used them as source material for these new poems. “The music of being is dissonant,” Montejo writes, “but life continues and certain agreements prevail.” In the end, our hope is that translation itself is one of those agreements. 

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Mark Leidner

Rafael Cadenas (1930- )

                                                                              Photo by Ricardo Armas

YOUR NAMES

    wet leaf, lonely flat at night, change

bell, young skin, full moon, crisis

cave, orbital ring, thousand petals

  cradle of civilization, sea urchin, garland, god with two faces, vessel, dove, the letter S, clover, birdlike, grape, fleece, petrification

  you could say

bed, sink, toothpaste, coffee, my first cigarette

and then later

  taxicab yellow, acacia, yes

you’d also call yourself acacia

  6pm, em, half past six, seven, beer, Shakespeare

  and be called back to the wet leaf, lonely flat at night, day in day out

  you have many names I cannot call, it’s true

  all as senseless as that empty tomorrow in the mirror

  that bathrooms bar our entry to

  the universe of lost names

ARS POETICA

    every word

said

a tremor supports

  a heartbeat

utters

no falsehood

  nor glittering

any sense

generated

  so i must listen

  what frightening

accuracy

words weigh

  that

fake trembling

is worn off by

  reciprocate

tell me I lie

panic me

  wait for me

in the evening

like my own eye

  distinguishing

scrutinizing

shaking

You

  you bare yourself

you walk in light

you awaken color

  you crown waters

you get time drunk

you blind riverbanks

  you predict peace

or apocalypse

and conjure land

to accommodate

slow lava

  you reign in the center

of conflagration

on the first of the seven

days your body is

an arrogant palace

tremors occupy

Rafael Cadenas (born 8 April, 1930 Barquisimeto, Lara) is a Venezuelan poet and essayist. Widely recognized as one of Venezuela's foremost poets, he is the recipient of the National Literature Prize (1985), the Perez Bonalde International Poetry Prize (1992), and the Guadalajara International Book Fair Prize (Romance Languages - Mexico, 2009), among others. Cadenas is a Guggenheim fellow and retired Professor of Literature (Universidad Central de Venezuela).

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Jessica Laser

Juan Sánchez Peláez, Caracas, 1979, by Vasco Szinetar

PERSISTENCIA

Ode to Persistence

In reality, without limit, but for measure and repose The snake and the bee would give up their stings. During the lecture on why, though the lit Transparency seems incoherent, a lullaby Threads its roots to the language Rumoring them to grow as I describe. Return the vessels through an immense Shy body littered with drunk evidence If by drunkenness my evidence is Brave enough to be of her, who opens up The cover revealing my amulets accidentally Guarded all this time against her Because she was anonymous and they Sought fame. Balancing my memory of her falling Asleep in a sleepless phrase punctuated by bones I lack diction. I would sleep but the human Moment’s an animal and to sleep is to vehemently Shut the grand cage. I would wake the gold leaf Adorning her cover, paralyzed but happy, pressed As life to death and face the years away from me That worry on abysses formed where others fell As I do for her by bullets from the arms we use By usufruct, till she’s too much, and when we have To hand them back, she leaves deep imprints on our Hands, where holding them we tried to grip the soul.

A MALENA

Amalena

I am my own neither When I lose the river And lose her verifiable sun Nor when I remove from The absolute the sea. But when I am red And you unoccluded Iris, I am all of the souls As they shine with men Women, valleys, ices, Mute eternal embraces, Tributaries, oceans, gulfs, Ditches, muses, fortune, Blessings, placelessness, Inlets, lovers, dreams, A mountain stream, each net, Line, hook, a crook, four Tenants, a double Bed, couches, flats, beggars, Granite, money, cuckolds, Boomerangs, catch-alls, Laughter, criers, operas, Plays, sordid affairs and One beautiful one, John Donne, His spirit, the Holy Three, Meter, rhyme, posterity, The Adriatic, Danube, Nile, Silver streaming British Isle, A cow, sheep, a denizen, a courtesan, Some outlawed Russian nobility Title that brings you no honor these days, The view from above, The one from below, shirts with English phrases worn all over untouristed Europe, glory, horses, Stone horses, covers, a bet, a lost bet, World Cup games, clover, six beers, One cigarette, three friends, different times, The same time, seven, nine, Livers, spleens, mummies Still containing them, a genuine Stone home, kids under Roman Arches, one big brass statue Of James Joyce, a cocktail Based on Ulysses, the Irish Word for this, checked jerseys, Striped jerseys, New Jersey, Love handles, skinny smokers, Cloud nine, cloud eight, cloud Seven, cloud six, cloud five And rain, rain go away, Air conditioning And what else what else Now what my little blue canoe My little blue

FILIACIÓN OSCURA

The Creation of Habit

The mayor sleeps at the threshold Of the kissing booth inside her home. She sleeps on the stone You stand on should you need to reach her. Thou shalt not cover it. And it came to pass that a silent film was being shot inside the mayor’s home And to the booth the host invited her guests To express a willingness to hold thy breath By grief at that which thou hast done And remember it not, nor tell of it, Lest thou be grieved again. Before, as ever, I’m taxed at that stone. The mayor is finally Calm in her love. Once, because I was quoting Dante To the mayor’s guests, I was taken by chance Up the spiral and asked To tutor her children For the town’s upcoming spelling bee. First, they tested me: “Think of another Name for stone.” I could only think of one. “Now you must spell the name on that stone If you can remember And spell without grief.” In the mayor’s home, thou shalt not speak.

Juan Sánchez Peláez (Altagracia de Orituco, 1922 - Caracas, 2003) published seven collections of poetry between 1951 and 1989. A precursor of Surrealism and member of the Chilean group Mandrágora, he was one of the founding fathers of contemporary Venezuelan poetry and deeply influenced generations of Venezuelan writers. In 1969, Sánchez Peláez was Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

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very soon

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Joyelle McSweeney

Florentino y el diablo, by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba

  Porphyria

  [Stage right, a table and stool. Here is seated PORPHYRIA, slumping, in her work clothes and work hair. She is a coatcheck girl at Club Nectarine. Downstage from her, PROLOGUE. Stage left, a ramp represents a dilapidated dock collapsing into a pond of wastewater. This might be outside Gary, Indiana.]

  PROLOGUE:

[smoking, because it’s cold.]

This story wants to cling and be prophetic; like the pathetic

girl-garment of the girl (Porphyria) who drapes her limbs

on the night tripod (Pythian) who drapes her hair

just so (veronica; lake) where the python rots

it wraithes out a raincheck claimcheck the coatcheck

girl (Porphyria) knows the future by its black roots; knows it down

to its protein coat; would know it anywhere Apollo-hair

knotted in a bow.

  [Porphyria begins to gather her things to leave work]

                                     In a pit called Nectarine: clutch clasp; a shell

crushed down makes a premonitory

stain on the lip of the cup of the sky eats enamel churns up a

(septic; peptic) ruby tide in cherubim inlet; poof; a lithe

benthic bacteria hardly and barely

laying down its deadzone cloak (for Porphyria) instep

wears away  the inside; opalescent; ulcerine; the uvula

pullulates; polyps populate; pus-pearls imperil the palate;

king hemoglobin tips his hand

-cart; the place is pulverized, ground white with rime;

like white mice; her knife of hair could

slice the face of Christ!

  [Porphyria walks slowly to the center of the stage and gets down on all fours]

  O summer & thy bummers thou art lost.

the key is broken in the lock. the lining’s ripped the

deposit slip

hath fluttered to the gutter. the hummer’s crushed the hive the panties

wadded up in the mouth of

no. Porphyria crouches

by the bumper. Has she lost something in the snow?

Strike one, one eye books a flight on the lam; lazy eye

take two second sight

Iliam. Goes Cassandra-wide as it

greets the tire iron.

the blood-brain barrier

lets out its breath, sags

like a girdle

-wattled sword-n-sandal

goblin opera’s purple -kirted

score. dumps a slushy slurry cell-o-phonic

business plan. symphonic dump, grey matter

like dandruff on the road’s

shoulder. a pigeony inkling

settles down like thought but

can’t clot.

            [Porphyria lies with her cheek to the stage but reanimates according to Prologue’s instruction]

  In a dead second, the reeds and rushes

stiffen: crown the ditch like spit

crowds the mastiff’s jaws like ocean drapes

the empire’s waist at the trireme. Bermuda Triangle. Lady Prince,

Prophyria. She sits up as for a portrait on a setee of blood.

A shard of skull upended like a visor.

Sword and buckler. Star of the see.

You have the second sight now, Porphyria,

you have a second shot

like an ingénue slouching through the days’ rushes in the

projection room. Get up and glide. The night’s so cold

and breathless no

breath holds

a mirror up to nature: huffs glue

from a ziploc locket

behind gym or Dumpster

a hum handholds

the first seconds of rot plot

like an engine ticking over

suspended for another ploy

opens a zone called ma

an end zone

wide as forever

corpse copse

hunch shouldered

spine snapping

huff huff

while one last wisp of breath

hangs around outside like a

a lab rat’s

white labcoat and will not disperse.

Porphyria

slips down the slip—

  [Porphyria moves regally to the top of the dock and begins shuffling down]

  Is the night a mind. Is anyone minding plot’s store tonight

the neverland ranch, the petroleum slick, the wastewater pond,

the welcoming ditch, the mouldering skiff, the icebound skip,

 the muddy shoulder, the brain-stained bumper, the closéd club,

the rippéd coat, the black tire iron, the lit-up trunk, the twinny blows,

 the half recline in snow floorshow bodydump.

                                                                                   Porphyria

stands where the jetty slumps

its shoulders like a mouth with its dentures out all

the way down to the frozen waste in the pond. The jetty

is toothless but the night is not. Half the stars are dropping

little blades on Porphyria, to loosen her footing. Yet her feet

are also knives. Sharp as lotuses, broken to this purpose.

The other half don’t care.

                                                Porphyria

stands straighter than she did in life. Not tired. Not alive.

Ripped down jacket furled like a cloak. Feathers stuck in frozen blood.

Her ripped brain crowned in broken plate. Her bowl-eyes

fill just now with a furze of greeny light—

  [The King of Hell floats in Stage Left on a cloud of green light]

    THE KING OF HELL

[In white; waving his hands on fluoride light]

Porphyria. You’ve travelled some way to see me.

You’ve taken a turn, my greening meat.

PORPHYRIA

If that’s a dig about my age you can forget it, King.

The name’s Porphyria, not Ophelia.

I’m not as young as I once was but now

I’ll be this young forever

and since forever’s getting older by the hour,

while I stay the same, you might say

my stock is gonna rise. You might say my odds are

evening. You might say they’ve improved.

  KING OF HELL

[performing a handful of slight miracles]

Dear girl-- shall we agree to call you that?--

Your new retinue is quite impressive.

Your regalia of roadside grime and brainy gore.

I like the locks that snake. Smart look.

But see how from swamp gas I produce little crankles of entertainment,

my own staff of gremlins,a gallimaufric crew? And now, by science!,

they make chemical chain

around your veiny ankle, and lock you to this place!

You are mine forever, girl, unless some tastier object comes

rootling after you.

  PORPHYRIA

I like this chain of demons, gracing my ankle

below my dolphin tattoo.

Already green, like the cheap jewlery I wore in life.

There are no surprises in hell.

After getting clubbed to death on the way home from the club, I feel

I already know the rules. Tautology’s

a fair deal, a ride on the circle line. I’ve had my ticket punched.

I want to sightline the sky line and the green lady

wielding her torch full of tourists

so like a club

forever. I like it here already. Where do I sign?

  KING of HELL

Uhm, that’s not how it works. You have to play for time,

beg for your life, answer some riddles, offer a ransom,

and attempt to be on your way, up to the bus station with your duffel bag.

  PORPHYRIA

O games! We’re both too old for that, King.

I’ve been evicted from my life into this trailer park

and I’m ready to make do.  I like Hell.

The heat is up, the gas supply is endless, and the rent

is never due.  But, procedures is procedures and rules is rules.

If you need answers for your intake from, fire away.

  KING of HELL

Very well. [rubbing hands together.] Question 1:

Which is brighter, the full moon or the cock’s crow?

  PORPHYRIA:

The cock was never very bright.

He’d crow at a lantern if you raised it in the night.

But once upon a time, a clever robber could hide jewels

in the goose’s gullet, slice the bird

to set the rubies free. Rubies, emeralds, ropes of pearls

sliding from its slit belly. So the answer is the goose.

  KING of HELL

What goose? The question was moon or cock?

  PORPHYRIA:

The answer’s goose. Honk honk.

  KING OF HELL:

Slippery!

  PROPHYRIA:

As a goose’s entrails! What do I have to lose?

Question two!

  KING OF HELL:

Question two. Where does the shadow stow his pack at noon?

  PORPHYRIA:

He stands on it.

Like his girlfriend’s back,

or like a stile! You know, on a rotary dial!

But what’s in the pack is a better question:

time, consequence, nothing but bad news.

Better to be suspended in that siesta forevah

than endure time’s liveblog--life.

  KING OF HELL:

Alright, Porphyria, you’ve answered two and now—

  PORPHYRIA:

And now I’ve got a question for you!

  KING OF HELL:

What’s this? This is quite irregular! I’m king of Hell! And you’re

Persephone- uh, Eurydice—uh, Porphyria—

  PORPHYRIA:

Oh King! You’ve got a lot more wrong than my name!

Question three is: What makes you think I want to flee?

  KING OF HELL:

Everyone wants to flee me. I’m King of Hell.

  PORPHYRIA:

Not me. On earth, I was exhausted.

By the morning, by the evening, and by midnight: tired out.

But here, I’m fired up! I have no desire to leave!

I’m looking good! I’m taller, I’ve grown natural,

horned stilettos on my feet, my makeup’s

grinded from blood diamonds and never in need

of reapplication, and my hair’s bright black as lit rags.

I’m smokin, I’m a van on fire!

My signal’s gathering strength!

The only thing that needs changing is the management, wink wink.

  KING OF HELL:

MEEEEEE?

  PORPHYRIA:

THEEEE! But don’t weep, King.

I hear there’s an opening for the hatcheck girl at the club called Nectarine!

  [She seizes him, shoves him up the slippery slip from which she came, hops onto his hovering green cloudcraft, and pulls away from the bank. Exit PORPHYRIA.]

  KING OF HELL:

Wait, wait, come back here!

Everyone knows the devil can’t swim!

Or work a dayjob, or a nightjob!

I’m srictly managerial material!

What, to clamber up this bank and clump back to town

on these two split hoofs? Oh I can’t do it!

I’ll perish! Oh, I can’t perish I never lived!

O rue! O bile! O enmity! I refuse to live—

Ah what a pickle! What a circus! What a clutch of bacterium

rutting in a dented can of baked beans! Oh ballpark franks! Ah fate!

Curse goose and shadow too! Whoever wrote me those riddles is

permanently demoted to—demoted to---

(stamps feet until embarrassed of the gesture.

smoothed his combover. huffs. straitens jacket).

You’ve outsmarted me, Porphyria. But remember,

I myself am Hell. I carry hell with me wherever I go.

I’m one hell of an elegant man. Earth’s not nowhere!

It’s a whole new pool of suckerfish where I can ply my tricks

dribble my snake oil

and peddle my blow. And when I’ve grown a ready army of souls

for the taking—for the undertaking—

I’ll be back to blow the doors off your two bit trailer park

of an Underworld

and take my kingdom back!

    PROLOGUE:

The devil turns his back and begins with slow, uncertain steps, to clamber up the bank to the shoulder of the access road and starts the slow walk into town. As he walks, the cloven hoofs at his ankles suddenly lift and take the form of cheap stilettos. His tail rises, widens and wraps around his torso, becomes a nylon bomber jacket with a fake fur collar. He is wearing nylons and a miniskirt. He hunches his shoulders in the cold. And as he does, the white rime that hung all about the scene, which was the trace of Porphyria’s last breath, rises about his head and ties itself into a crown of blond and dirty hair.

There.

That was just like Lycidas.

He’s quite reduced but he’ll press on like a press-on nail at the petting zoo, broken off in a feed bin, gobbled up, and currently making its way through some ungulate’s gut. He shall emerge as a glittering spore, tearing a gash in the fundament as he does

Of the hippo or  rhino or aardvark or tapir or warthog or peccary or musk deer or roe deer or elk or giraffe or muntjac or alpaca or impala or gazelle or dik dik or antelope or kudu or bison or barbary sheep or reebuck or reedbuck or oryx or kob.

  That’s allegory, poor ungulate. It cannot be survived but must be endured. It takes so much pain and bloodloss to exit the plot.

  [wailing] Porphyria!

  [unnaturally composed] The End.

  On A.A. Torrealba and Joyelle McSweeney

Editor’s Note

Translation is a Faustian bargain. You give up the ungivable to satisfy your heart's desires: banished be the lack of money, unrequited love; or maybe a spell with the dreaded block in those nights when the writing does not yield, you’re one blink away from plagiarism: damned be the unyielding words and foreign languages. How opportune that blocks were used to separate thieves from their hands in olden times. Faust knew this because he was a translator who suffered over his version of the New Testament. His obsession was to find the *right* way to say In the beginning was the Word. To him this translation was clearly incorrect, and one can see his logic: if the Word is the beginning, what is the translator? A violator? A liar? A thief? For if the Word is so essential to being, how can the translator even think of altering, uprooting, challenging the Original? You could go to hell for far less.

But the original is unfaithful to the translation, said Borges, that old devil. And McSweeney proceeds to shred through Torrealba’s Venezuelan llanos with her rendering of The Pact and The Duel, thus also altering the landscape of the dark suburban living rooms, the Appalachian trails, the sleepy Andean churches, Southern crossroads, bowling alleys, Medieval German villages, beauty parlors, Irish mountain passes, academic cubicles, Assyrian orgies, Red Lobsters in the deep blue sea and any other place where such mythical showdowns have been known to occur. In the tradition of the Atlantean Poet, McSweeney is unfaithful. She switches genres and sinks the text into its own drama. She invades the space and not its depiction. She steals the frame and tears the canvas. She takes over the essence and goes for the Origin of the tale, her Origin, the real Word. She goes for the jugular because what we proposed to her -by giving her a mid Twentieth Century Venezuelan poet, a national treasure who said that  *a great poet is the voice of the collective*; who held political power and reigned at the center of our art circles at the time, taking unto himself the task of retelling the vernacular version of the Faustian saga in so many pages of Venezuelan folk poetry, in Spanish-  all  this was indeed a showdown, a bilingual monster duel.

  McSweeney gives Atlantean Poets this impudent purple mess of a girl who belongs more in the underworld than the Evil one and claims it for herself with so much sass, her spike heels puncturing the searing slush. You have the second sight now, Porphyria, you have a second shot. You mean like a translator, Narrator? Meanwhile, the King is fixated on keeping his domain under control while lying on the burning Lake, thunder-struck and astonisht ; she, in turn, is fixing to stay forevah. This battle of wits is clearly unfair and fixed: how can a King hold his own in the face of such barefaced girlhood? If he were a mirror he would shatter. It´s unfair. It´s malefic. It´s the fairest malefice of them all.

One remembers the mile-long glittering braids of ­­­Gretchen spreading like snakes on the ground as she crumbles near the end of Murnau’s Faust, and how her hapless lover curses the youth he received in his bargain. It all ends in such a mess that one just swallows the cautionary tale thing like a spoonful of bat liver oil. It makes every traduttore-traditore choke and think of the way some writers seem to curse their own writing  - thou shall be untranslatable!  And like the Goethean silent screen couple, translators curse their own children by cautiously expecting the worst, which is silence. They live with it. They even grow to relish it, thankless task and all. In the end, the silence is broken and the task is done either though a pact with invisible forces or by a showdown between original and translation, mediated by the traditions and circumstances that define the mission. But who will win? Who will survive the duel? Who will prevail? Between Florentino and the Devil, Porphyria and the King, who is the best poet? Is there a winner?

Who knows? In the Beginning was the Deed. Whatever the outcome, in this Twenty First Century face off, our money is on Joyelle.

Alberto Arvelo Torrealba  (1905-1971) was a Venezuelan poet, essayist, lawyer and politician. He was Embassador and Cabinet Minister, and a member of the Language Academy. His works include Música de cuatro (1928), Cantas (1932), Glosas al cancionero (1940), Florentino y el Diablo (1940/1957) y Caminos que andan (1952), where he incorporated Venezuelan folklore and oral traditions in epic recreations. He received the National Literature Prize in 1966.

[atlanteanpoets]

Jared Joseph

Rafael José Muñoz

Migraine of the Souls.  June 27th pane of 1964 glasses

  Key rows violence in a lost column ovum

right the columns that are dreaming

thunderous for paper;

i have to return, to see if you can’t

with that amphibious march

April with its races isn’t black.

Before that sea Yesterday,

secret dome of three pointy wives

Wherefore, say legs to the abyss;

i have to go

it’s going to love

& i won’t have that gaze to use as key

that would describe itself inside this damned tree.

Columns have to look like me inside the knees

to see if there are crows on my odious

elbow my home my jaws;

i make examination on those molars

& those most ruinous walls

to see if There There, There There little flute.

Little flute let me be a man, brilliant that that cloud

turns tobacco off, know me; there

i mean love me see what’s there behind the curtains;

of the living ceiling mutes his bones

with a half-built Alm ighty & very much besides

with a built for all & i want to ruin his sides the realm

between pastors that voltage sparks the T’s

of their extreme rosters;

leave me to go there, to the other part,

to see if i encounter there the ankle

under which your goodness blesses lost welcome mats.

I am sad right now, this eye’s math

& i want to give him yogurt & an orange.

The autumn leaves eat my yogurt.

            The Elected

  I am the Elected

I am the Elected, he touches the flute

& puts in order houses in sporadic bliss;

i am the Elected, my Hoof on the Paragraph,

from the 7th Sunburn,

he that touches tombs turns them to the luminous bird

tracks Go Hawks

i am the Elected, for me the planets

don’t find where to go, libido dust

of bricks behind my ear;

ambulant son on my ear a psalm,

i give him for his turn the garlic

behind & before fair,

while the horse comes in my son, garlic

like kisses, cars & 55 business schools

a company of Hyundais, renaissance inside the Pope

he makes out with, the Gays vote votives

Afterward that i don’t brain i am a mage

The atmosphere to see the

Don’t speak for me little ear

nor of my forty years, (long as ten thousand)

    (October 7, 1964)

              1

A celestial day in the earth.  November 9, 1964

  I i went a day celestial here upon the earth,

a day for my eyes, making burn the tablets,

making contact is the Vulva.

I invent a day of Grack Patruck,

to flyy the various miles of the Disco Ball,

with the titmilk of Laakribi tribe turned lunar.

Because I am the more Powerful of the Key

that has the Disco of Enigma

nailed in the center of the Egg Truck –Ocle.

I am that,) who denigrates me,

who puts in doubt my capillaries

of making brilliant the eye of the mule that dreams?

His stare is here, mortal, to chuck the chuck;

She is here, between the nails of some somber Gabriel,

in the Citi Morsi of Innis Catis & in the little cinch;

He is here, in the foundered lubricant of time,

where certain birds are like, Catatonic

witches enmeshed (eunuched) & of the Black iguanas.

I don’t imagine it: 600,000 neologisms

fleeting UStuaries of the Sun, what tetanus torres:

nor can the cross of this august lamskin

nor with that other, ohsiill sihilllllllllllll.

  All of lift fled me in its day,

In its blank hour, in its profile of dew.

Life, that collation that was mind,

I left to its flower & its strew.

  She, that tied herself in gentry,

of perfumes aching in my gold palms;

& flies away & gets money.  & in oral weeping,

& goes away.  & prays a flame of runners’ alphae.

  All of life fled me in its Welsh

but, mounted on the mount, some un-Welshmen

abutted the sea that caesura’d me a man’s amen-ascent.

  i could lunar her, I touch her spume,

but neither era of flow, er nor era of plume:

Era of origen natural of the ceiling.

  Inseminating her I had some minutes

& she was a parochial woman of the piti

Her tongue was gold, it was not salubrious

life breeze of flish make arab flutes.

  I was inseminating her, in my guilt

where I would see a something like, unto an envelope;

but I cult some perpetuities, hard antelopes

that played clitoris in hashish.

  & i found a rosary seeming

that shadowy, moon & midday

of an abysmal pair, far off & mute.

  & I was there, beat constellation

Like a Thursday or a hero’s underwear

lcelestial Dürer

lost in judo.

On Rafael José Muñoz

Donde se ríe de las coordenadas telescópicas                          NA                                 FI                                   CA                                          NU

  are the last “five” lines of Rafael José Muñoz’s puzzling poem, cryptically titled SU ROSTRO KENO.  The title would roughly translate to HIS/HER KENO FACE.  The sex is never specified, & Keno is a lottery game, so the title is like a reference to a specific version of a game face, or an alternative to a poker face.  These guesses are educated, & so probably wrong.  Maybe they refer to the poet himself, but then again, psychoanalysis is always tempting for those in passive positions; it allows us the illusion of besting our masters, outsmarting our dealers, purloining the letters from the poet. 

 It is more likely, in fact, that the poem shows us the anthropomorphized image of a Keno game.  Not a gendered face.  So let’s go with “it”

Where it laughs at the telescopic coordinates

One is reminded of odds, of chance, of fate, of Gods, of space, of ungraspable dreams floating in impossible coordinates apparently (parallax-ly) in front of said dreamer’s face

& then we have an anagram split into 4 pairs.  I assemble UNA FINCA, & feel I win the game.  A finca is an estate, generally with rural connotations, like a plantation.  Imagine winning Keno & buying an estate alone dark enough to clear a sky of all the light but stars’ far-reaching light.  Maybe the stars are dead.  Imagine otherwise looking through a telescope & seeing your dream home.  We attempt to observe the universe & instead project our earthly fantasies.  Blank space is a screen.  We try to leave and are grounded in a desire sphere.  We’ll render Mars habitable some year, surely

Odds are, I did not win Rafael José Muñoz’s game.  Or, if I think I did, I didn’t.  But if I played it, found it gamy, & found much unanswerable, then I’ve read a poem.  The translation problems I encountered were not language problems.  They were poetry problems

Rafael (after translation, after a nice meeting, one feels the two are on a first-name basis) wrote beautiful, acerbic, learnéd, at times algorithmic but sumptuous & always beautiful, with a capital B, Poems.  He wrote neologisms so absurd they seemed more like no-logisms, nonwords, fake clues, sitting duck decoys so patient & well-varnished that they made conspicuous the high-quality of their wood.  Arrows targeting themselves.  The man/woman behind the Keno Face is named Casini.  Its head is made of Cola.  The aura is a fizz, the divine is the dealer, the word is Word®.  In Rafael’s poetry there is a faithful irreverence for the authoritative, for the numerical, & thereby one detects an obsession with the same subject.

I did not try to solve R’s games, I did not attempt in my translations to reproduce them nor to lay their mechanics bare in English.  My translations are exercises in infidelity.  That way they remain faithful to this man, whom I do not know.  Or better yet to the poet, whose keno face I haven’t bested, though I’d say I profited.

-Jared Joseph

Rafael José Muñoz (1928-1981) was a Venezuelan poet born in the rural town of Guanape, in the State of Anzoategui. He worked as a farmer, grocer and school teacher. In 1945 he left for Caracas and became immersed in political militancy and poetic experimentation. Between 1949 and 1950 he founded the literary group Cantaclaro with poets Jesus Sanoja Hernandez and Miguel Garcia Mackle. In the seventies, he was editor of the influential Venezuelan literary publication Zona Franca. His books incluide Los pasos de la muerte, 1953, and El círculo de los tres soles, 1968.

Photo by Vasco Szinetar

[atlanteanpoets]

Laura Henriksen

Antonia Palacios

  Secreto

  In this house, I don’t look to the heavens.  I look to the hard        

          length that around me

circles, listen to the wind battle in the distance.  Its limits

marginalize me in the open.  It’s a closed house, nothing in it

reveals itself.  There are no spaces nor columns nor eaves   

             where  worried birds rest.

A naked house without the deep tremble of secrecy.  I stick to     

            its walls, its desert-smell.  It’s my house.

***

  A house that’s boarded up and empty.  I sit by the window

and watch the wind as it tears the porch swing, paint from the

                    mailbox in flakes on the ground.

It’s a dark place lately, walk in solo before an opera on tv

broadcast from somewhere in Europe.

Common knowledge around here, but what about

what we knew when spreading preserves on bread

in the winter kitchen.

      _____________________________________________

  I’m in a place without exit.  A place walled on all sides.

I’m in an empty place, only me inside.  Outside, the eternity of

spaces.  This here, close through time, hours detached from

invisible heights.  I’m here in silence with eyes open toward

the darkness.

  ***

Something goes on but it’s a secret.  I tend

to my indoor plants and clean the bathtub.  One day

children will gather in my backyard and know eternity

is for young people.  It will start to rain

and it will bring up desert smells from under the ground.

________________________________________

Antonia Palacios (Caracas, 1904-2001) was a Venezuelan poet, novelist and essayist.  She lived in Paris for several years, where she met César Vallejo, Louis Aragón, Pablo Neruda and Alejo Carpentier.  Her first novel, Ana Isabel, una niña decente (1944), is a landmark in Venezuelan fiction. In 1978, she founded the poetry workshop Calicanto, which would influence a generation of emerging poets. Palacios was the first woman to receive the National Literature Prize in 1976.

[atlanteanpoets]

Lisa Wells

Hanni Ossott            (1946- 2002)     

  Only a Body

For Nena Palacios

    There goes the urn

though I have no tears

only kisses

and a fist, raised

for the mystery, the rage

  for the memory

of dance

of joy

of madness

  Oh love

you have been muted

  If there were a heaven

I’d be happy

but heaven is a word

a color, a few clouds

and you're not there.

  We are only a body, a bit of flesh, eyes

and this infinite capacity to feel

  The peace of the Lord and the peace of the Night

do not spare us this sorrow

  How I’d love to dance naked with you

to Chopin's Preludes

  and leap

to please this life!

    Ah, madness and death

how shameful you are,

how grotesque.

_________________________________________________________

Night & the Light

   The night is growing in me

deep

  escapable as a season                                  

the dark sphere of dark

  has flooded my field                                    

and closes

  like the kiss of two calottes.                      

Because I do not know my limits 

                             I am now entirely night.

I conserve words

  but today

they are not sufficient light

  they cannot guide me

they are no lantern

  no lamp at midnight.

I think of Delphi, I remember Delphi

  concave

illuminated

open

  I must focus on the brightest spot

in the world

  a nocturnal space

made ​​light

  it is necessary

it is necessary to make

a light at night

                                                                           April, 1982

_________________________________________________________

The Rare Prevails                                                   

                                                        To Rainer and Paula Ossott

    Mystery prevails

that there is love

that there is hatred

that bodies exist

  The rare prevails

connection, art,                      

the French horn

Gregorian chants

    The blaze of our devotion

the rare face of one who has not gone away

but remains

and insists

in love and hate

  Strange stares prevail

and bodies that cannot be touched

for dread

of strangeness

for fear

  The distance between friends

the unspoken word

the defensive gesture

silences

in the midst of drunkenness

  That there are others and the other’s    

"otherness"

is beyond my reach  

and beyond yours

the strangeness

of what can never be touched

  This rare full moon prevails

                                                                                 June, 1991

[atlanteanpoets]

Atlantean Poets: A poem submerged in another poem

At a conference some thirty years ago, one of our writers was asked about the notable absence of Venezuelan literature in the international scene, despite the excellence of its writers and the richness of its tradition. This writer, the novelist and critic José Balza, said that ours was the “(invisible) literature of a sunken continent”.  Possessed by the spirit of this depiction of our invisibility,  Atlantean Poets  was created.

  This page is about the immersion of different poetic traditions into a common language, where guest poets, preferably non-Spanish speakers, receive canonical Venezuelan poetry and are asked to revisit the space created by the original. The spotlight is on both the original text and the recreation: both the original poet and the *translator-recreator* are Atlantean poets .

What I intend to do is contribute to increase the visibility of the Venezuelan poetic tradition by establishing an intense intertextual relation with US poets; something beyond translation, nearer to co-creation or re-definition of the same text, which remains a space inaugurated by the Venezuelan poet. No matter how far you tread from the original, you will still be building -or burying- on ground that was consecrated by the original poet. It is an exercise on writing as it is on reading. For as the Atlantean poet struggles to recreate meaning from a foreign language and culture, she engages the original, delves into it; questions, examines, denies or affirms it; in any case, the resulting poem must be born of a deep identification with the other.

So, as we can see in the first poems by Chris and Mary, and later by the poets who have joined them, the Atlanteans end up producing something that exists by direct “contamination” from the Venezuelan tradition, which they may have not approached or even heard of otherwise.

It´s also a reversal of our role as subservient to the major literary traditions of the *metropolis*; as Venezuelan poets already have for decades by reading and absorbing the US poetic tradition. The Atlantean poet is a recreator, willing to drink from -or drown in-  an unknown source, carving his or her voice through a sort of shock treatment or intense exposure.

I am asking US poets to digest and then articulate a small part of a vast tradition that has been pretty much ignored -due to all of the reasons we are aware of as a poets and editors, especially regarding translations, which make up a tiny percentage of what is published in the US.

I am playing with the idea of accelerating the cross-pollination process whereby, in an ideal world, Venezuelan poets would have been widely translated and published here, and the obvious ensues: poets read, internalize, and the acorn is manifest: the text is inscribed into another language, bypassing translation.

I am not interested in preserving the original text as something authentic. I am aiming at essence. The world founded by the Venezuelan poet is amplified in unpredictable ways in a language and a poem totally foreign to the original. Emulsification of vinegar and oil -a domestic comparison, but there is something about the acidic and the fatty in the whole project. As the Venezuelan poet José Luis Blondet would say, it is about dressing. And undressing.

Or cross-counter-pollination, if you will. In addition to the reference to  Balza, I’ve also thought that the resulting work will be something completely alien and from a place you cannot point out in a map, and yet seems to have always been there-- it´s Atlantean. A poem submerged in another poem, subsisting on and through its myth. 

Meanwhile, other Atlanteans are on board and at work on more canonical Venezuelan poems. The results are stunning.

And as one texts sink into another, the myth prevails.

[atlanteanpoets]

Only radical devotion could stray so far from fidelity.

—      Chris Martin on Atlantean Poets

[atlanteanpoets]

Mary Austin Speaker

Miyó Vestrini (1938-1991)

THE BRAVE CITIZENS

  for María Inmaculada Barrios

  Stop thinking

each morning

and be not

afraid of death.

—Treaty of Hagakuse

  Give me, Lord,

a death that upsets me.

  A death as offensive

as those I offend,

  A death that stands in the rain

in Santiago de Compostela,

  and by the way,

please kill those who have offended me, too.

  Give me, Lord,

a death made of weather,

  a shock of reassurance.

Picture me, all lachrymose,

  begging for mercy,

wishing others dead.

  Lord, let the man

with the indelible skin

  recognize in me

the animal from the olive trees.

  Lay his body over mine

as we sweetly burn away.

  I promise,

you’ve seen everything.

  The guilt that birthed me,

the anger.

  Please Sir, listen to Vinicio de Moraes

and Maria Betania

  and promise that tomorrow,

Monday, I will learn to speak Brazilian.

  Let death come when you discover

my secret power,

  when your informants divulge

my ways of evading history.

  When they tell you, Lord,

that I have exhausted all resources

  without seeking pardon,

then, Lord, be merciless.

  Let the rhythm

driving me

  open the door

with its head

  and place it there

red,

  concussive,

dolorous.

  Suppose, Sir,

you are the Big Bang.

  That no territory escapes your vigilance.

That even the hot dogs are your dominion.

  That your desire for me is the obscene part

of your personality.

  Then, sir,

examine my bloated stomach

  for the spaghetti of Portofino,

the fabada of Guernica,

  the cauliflower cakes of my mother,

the long drinks of beer and rum.

  Spy, Sir, the faces of my reflection in the mirror,

I, craven and astute,

  with my finger in the air

fanning the dull crowd.

  You could come to the movies, Sir.

We would see Brazil,

  La Vaquilla, Un dia de campo,

The Postman and Gatsby.

  You would hear me shake

with fear and laughter.

  Allow me, Sir,

to consider how I am:

  rifle in my hand,

grenade in my mouth,

  eviscerating the people I love.

Lie with me in the morning, Sir,

  when my breath is the beat

of stones in the river’s rush.

  And you’ll see nothing.

Not even the milk of your songs

  can give me a death

that upsets me.

  TESTAMENT

  They ask,

to whom do you leave your things when you die?

  Then I looked at my house and its objects.

There was nothing to give away

  except my musty smell.

And the rat.

  Just this hostile silence

waiting to happen.

  It’s useless to feed him

or wash his sheets in bluing.

  Each night I waited

anxious to see

  how his long whiskers

no longer hid the sharp, predatory teeth.

  There he was,

his gaze astute

  and silent as a sphinx,

waiting for my blood to run.

  He waited in vain.

Death came from within

  for the first time

calm and definite.

  I wrote his name on the wall

with last beat of sunshine

  and entered this shadow in my will:

“the rat did not allow her to see the spring.”

  After I died,

I made a list.

  A dinner at the best restaurant

to Ángeles and Carlos.

  My books, my unpublished work to Jose Ignacio.

My dreams to Ibsen.

  My bank card to Ybis.

My car to Alberto.

  My bed to Mario.

My memory to Salvador.

  My solitude to la Negra.

My Ismael Rivera records to la Negra.

  My poem called “Granada In the Mouth”

to la Negra.

  My teenage grief and my mother, to Pedro.

My ashes, to Ernesto. My laugh to Marina.

  The night before,

I told Angeles and Carlos,

  if I cannot sleep,

I will choose death.

  The lamb shank was so good

they did not pay much attention.

  I remember

on a corner in Chacao,

  she hugged me and said,

this Friday it’s on me.

  His short hair, and his joy

at having it cut,

  led me to understand

that I was not Carlos’s calm mother.

  I rested my cheek on his shoulder.

It was only a few seconds, but I felt that

  with his hair shorn, something had gone.

Something that bore his name,

  about the nights of insomnia and drink

in his family’s neighborhood.

  Dying deliberately

requires time and patience.

  You can freely imagine

the death of a son

  if it never happens to you.

The loss of objects

  and the silence of a devastated house—

neither of these will happen.

  Your fiercest enemy calls you out

as being ruthless.

  It happens, but it’s not fatal.

Two births, ten abortions,

  and no orgasm.

One good reason.

  The silence of your partner when you ask,

why don’t you love me?

  What did I do?

What did I miss?

  And then those spaces

silent and empty

  with you, hunched,

awkward.

  You say, there’s no soap for washing

or softener for ironing

  and maybe even

these oranges might be rotten.

  Then you remember

a terrace at seven

  over the sea

and someone telling you

  I’m afraid of heights,

but I love you.

  Then,

return to the city

  and the dance of a man happily naked.

Think back to the deliberate.

  It’s not random.

It’s not revenge.

  It’s your hand

with its sweaty palm

  touching his thigh.

Reach a little further

  and you find

the uneasiness of your partner

  in the dank darkness

of your pleasure.

  Always there is a before

before dying.

  Before,

I want to eat tortellini in cream sauce.

  Or have a drink of Tanqueray.

Or be held in a strong embrace.

  Or, as Caupolican said,

place me before Maiquetia,

  the most beautiful city in the country.

Such deliberations inhibit death.

  No one

that I know

  deliberated about

his disappearance.

    Miyó Vestrini (Marie José Fauvelles Ripert, France, 1938-Venezuela, 1991)