from Nakedly Obvious

Eduardo Milán

20

There's a worked void:
from this angle you see a butterfly
that seems to come out of nowhere, fine
that wingbeat corresponds
to a monarch

At this point it's all up for grabs
everything that awaits form — those
clouds, these hands, those mouths
swallowing everything, swallowing the void

So I put it into form, with periods
feelings
things distilling shape of erect flower
pistils

Nobody came by to tell me "look here"
nevertheless

You still pay on the first out of equity
for rights to the void
rights to the void of capitalism
rights to the Right and Left in a democracy

Poets work the terrain of the void
believing in working like oxen
or disbelieving in verse
free trip home





31

Come on, let's say two or three
well-said things
among hundreds of cubic centimeters of ice
melted to water, not floating
Return the Great Mouth's things to outer space
let them float free, in their daily
pasture — that last struggling Hereford
cow looks sad to me — all praise
to the cows of my happy days
to the milk machine, the Model T
of rumination, horsepower cow
their omnipotent maternal odor
undulating, pierced by dragonflies

between daily and thing
I suspect wartime complicity
defending territory hand to hand
palm to palm-tree, give their lives
if they have to — they never have to
Woven by chance, thread of the moment
connecting unforeseen with unforeseen
is not consumed: sets up eternal elasticity

And we go on, things stay, the road
we put ahead of us to say there is a road
hanging in time for passersby to see
dripping, in reality melting, stalactites
the moment subtracts from what's to come
the instant, sucking myrtle — stalactites





33

Circle the circus, rounds
spun in air to fall into same-old
Resembling outside event gets tired
Ferris Wheel has its own story to tell
loosey-goosey dance of chance gets old
or should I say randomness gives up
dragged too far along the tail of ruin
Certainty of return and passing Go
redeems itself with "I keep telling you"
without redemption for untold defeat
The circus tent gets tired from above
an awning sheltering its tiny tarps
wing folded back on arm
Papyrus unfolding from underneath
before the revolution, take a look:
micrologically the work
the ant does on the syllable
keeps its dignity on a war footing
the heron's dignity
Macrologically the world's
macro grazes on neon, the economy
follows it closely, counting wads of bills
Machinery surrounds the dawn
planning a sweatshop to produce sunrise


translated from the Spanish by John Oliver Simon



Read the original in Spanish

Read translator’s note

Eduardo Milán was born in Rivera, Uruguay, in 1952, exiled himself for political reasons, and has lived in Mexico since 1979. He has published sixteen volumes of poetry. His Selected Poems is out from Shearsman (2012) and he is featured in Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Uruguayan Poetry, edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echevarren (2011). This selection is taken from his book Obvio al desnudo (Nakedly Obvious), written in 2005-6 and published by the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (Monterrey, Mexico) in 2009.

John Oliver Simon was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in Translation for his work with the great Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). His translations form a large part of the Selected Poems of Elsa Cross and of Eduardo Milán (Shearsman). John Oliver Simon is Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out, a K-12 literary translation program sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation. One of his poems is set in bronze in the sidewalk of the Addison Street Poetry Walk in Berkeley, California.


Eduardo Milán is a difficult poet to categorize. He stands somewhat outside the national poetry scenes both of his native Uruguay and of his long-term residence in Mexico. Milán has been loosely associated, since the seminal anthology Medusario (1997), with the Neobarroco, the continent-wide aesthetic roughly cognate to our bloodless post-avant; yet he is an intensely political poet, sensitive to the reverberations of language and playful with the unexpected.

The challenge for a translator of Eduardo Milán is to mirror him in his acts of echolalia which transition from message to message and render him in an English as spontaneous and rigorous as his Spanish. Eduardo has always graciously insisted that my English versions are better and saner than his Spanish originals: "Lo que suena de locura en español suena de poesía en inglés."

Roberto Apprato writes: "one feels that [Milán's] lines, apparently disconnected, ascend into the space of the page in a single transmission, and therefore make the reader think of everything at once; such is the voice of Milán, first to the text and then the reader, leaving everything in the poem in view; this is what can be done, from a place that is Latin America, in an act both poetic and political, saying, and displaying, what is obvious in its nakedness." No less a personage than Mexican poet Pura López Colomé said to me, "Eduardo Milán is the best poet writing in Spanish today."