Palabras Errantes Latin American Literature in Translation
Palabras Errantes in Nueva York
Ants, X
By Nuria Mendoza. Translated by Sarah Foster. Ants I know a man who has ants on his face. They show their little heads in the afternoons, across his cheeks, on his neck. They are black and white. If you don’t pay attention to them, they come out slowly, standing bristling and upright, at attention. It […]
Princess, Octopus Girl
By Nuria Mendoza. Translated by Sarah Foster. Princess I liked this boy. I closed my eyes when he came close: I thought, finally, he was going to kiss me. The pain cut through me by surprise. Now he keeps me in his bedroom, pinned to a cork board. And he doesn’t even look at me. […]
Boxed Past
By Nuria Mendoza. Translated by Sarah Foster. They say there was a beating of dirty grey wings, a bite suddenly sunk into plasticine flesh, and maybe a cry, or maybe he decided that children don’t cry, like Dad was always telling us. Someone must have gone to the teacher’s lounge to tell my mom– she […]
Landscape with Beasts
By Edgardo Núñez Caballero. Translated by Charlotte Coombe. Fuera de escena el ojo siente crecer el espacio desocupado. Hacia adentro lo oscuro se va poblando de objetos improbables. La ausencia de luz cada vez se parece un poco más a la promesa de un centro. Paisaje hacia adentro […]
Hebrew Horses
By Manuel Fihman. Translated by Roanne Kantor. I. In your river He churns Like a piranha You salamander You disappear in the sheets With the riding crop In a stranger’s house You say My angel’s name is crow Your eyes practically green A betrayal of the pale empire Of snow and […]
Prosemouths
By Ernesto Estrella. Translated by Chris Schafenacker. Start of Man In the beginning, too, nothing but dirt. Vast, inert and endowed with a certain depth. Continually collapsing afraid of the prowling dog that paces, probes, strikes, buries his bone in our shapeless earthen body. Opens furrows. Inserts the foreign. Walks away. Years […]
Thorns upon vanishing
By Isabel Cadenas Cañon. Translated by David Bendiksen. to build a pillar of smoke upward with no end in sight and declare it primitive and your own like a fiction like March to scrape away the concrete down to flowing water / mud convert it into burning immensity into reflected portrait into fear […]
Leisure (iv)
By Isabel Cadenas Cañon. Translated by David Bendiksen. First there are brief shadows, the space contained within closed windows. Noises from the fridge die down and then give way to trees and swings and Sunday dusk Little by little light comes in, thick. Like a quilt that overflows the slats and bathes it […]
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By Isabel Cadenas Cañon. Translated by David Bendiksen. It’s as if memory now only depended on us. I no longer accumulate ticket stubs from movies, nor the theater, nor boarding passes, nor the coins of countries I won’t go back to; or coins from places I will go back to. One day I just […]
AF 5962
By Isabel Cadenas Cañon. Translated by David Bendiksen. i. in 15 hours I’ve left my life in 2 planes 1 car some boxes i have no keys ii. they surround me in this Paris-Bilbao stray glances in the death rattle of some earbuds fixed-rate mortgages prematurely aged stability gregarious stability […]
Locus amoenus
By Isabel Cadenas Cañon. Translated by David Bendiksen. The whole of our halves The forevers The names of our future children The exclusiveness of our affections The excuses, the i’msorrys, the accounts The bank accounts The never befores The house The country house The country house and the dog and all the permutations thereof. […]
s/t
By Isabel Cadenas Cañón. Translated by David Bendiksen. on the eighth floor of the library beside me a man crying in another place of mine I’d scarcely turn enough to whisper are you okay? beneath this stranger roof i fear being indiscreet seeing too much breaking rules the man crying […]
Los días porosos
Written by/ Escrito por Urayoán Noel. we’re islands somos los lánguidos ejércitos of those that dance alone mitad sonrientes drunk desnudos en rasgadas pajamas of skin intercambiando psycho- dramas con la ciudad cielo rascada horizonte chorreando proclamations in the corner a nadie en específico resplandeciente como particles of light yet to refract
Untitled
Written by/ Escrito por Urayoán Noel. somos islas we are listless armies de los que bailan solos half smiling borrachos naked in torn pijamas de pellejos exchanging psico- dramas with the city scraped sky line spewing proclamas en la esquina to no one in particular resplendent as partículas de luz por refractar
Balada del exilio/Exile Ballad
Written by/ Escrito por Urayoán Noel. En tierra de todos tú y yo sobramos, quedan los apodos que ayer nos llamamos. In the land of all you and I are left over with the names we won’t call one another when sober. En tierra de algunos éramos aquellos dos inoportunos pescando […]
precipitation and its discontents
Written by/ Escrito por Urayoán Noel. precipitation and its discontents :: el malestar de la premura anticipation of blast retórica del torbellino wind (up?) polemics procesión de abrigos rumbo a nowhere excepto aceras blizzard visages consumption of something algo: ritmo where neuralgia meets nostalgia after work ¡date un trago! see some skin mira […]
1. Lyric Poetry is Dead
By Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. Translated by Robin Myers. versión en español 1. Lyric Poetry is Dead I. Lyric Poetry is Dead:[1] left marooned in a hypnotic backwater of sleep, while, beyond the final clot of consciousness, around the silver-canopied four-poster, beside the shoddy bed of wood and thorns, the family gathered, waiting for […]
2. What Love Does Unto Poets
By Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. Translated by Robin Myers. 2. What Love Does Unto Poets[1] isn’t tragic: it’s atrocious. A shameful ruin strikes the poets seized by love, which is indifferent to poetic preference or identity. Love drives them to the absolute catastrophe of sameness, the gay poets, the bisexual poets, the pansexual poets, the […]
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By Felipe Martínez Pinzón. Translated by Cherilyn Elston. For Laura I say mouth and I see yours make the brief twist of a kiss, timid, circular, complete, like a letter without a grapheme, a tactile language. We did not give each other in the word more than the pure word with which we […]
The Toucan and the Stars
By Felipe Martínez. Translated by Cherilyn Elston. It is winter and I think about the stars above the Plains like revolving mobiles in the purple night from who-cares-how-many years ago. That night made me want to scrutinize the sky, and in the thickness of the air sing to it the warm song […]
Like the Mangrove
By Felipe Martínez Pinzón. Translated by Cherilyn Elston. For Vivian Mourra, Patroness of his majesty, the mangrove swamp The mangrove is an iris of the jungle, a caiman that dozes, eyelids half-shut, delighting in the lukewarm water. The mangrove is a parrot under the sun’s magnifying glass. The mangrove is a […]
(very much like the 19th century)
Written by Felipe Martínez Pinzón. Translated by Cherilyn Elston. Open your hands beneath these pages, hold the poem like a wooden vessel, humid and thin. Now drink. Don’t let the water spill, take it expertly to your mouth, feel it thin below your eyes: remember the benediction of having been thirsty. […]
Guadalupe Salcedo…
By Felipe Martínez Pinzón. Translated by Cherilyn Elston. Guadalupe Salcedo escapes death on a sorrel called Oblivion Not even with death did they catch him, because how? if Guadalupe had dreamt about galloping the sky on a horse plane, looking down, planetary, at the curved Plains, docile, graceful, like a bow pulled by […]
There is nothing as rejuvenating as forgetting
By Felipe Martínez Pinzón. Translated by Cherilyn Elston. ‘There is nothing as rejuvenating as forgetting’ Walter Benjamin It is night with its alcohol cloths for wounds, it is night with its crochet needles hooting, insectile, the music of return. Shelled from the world we arrive home once again. Exhausted, we scratch our heads, […]