from Through These Five Years

Pepe Espaliú

Discover in a chemical daze
how evidence explodes
and you drowning in its echo
how sightless matter
confounds your glow with the empty

In fits and starts
something warps your conscience
into a snare of itself
letting sin speak
confused images.

I want to create a different death
another death, a death all my own
and offer you all—strange finale—
some suitable lie
AND HE DUCKED BACK IN THE ALLEY.
 



For the confused one, who sounds the trumpets of Jericho while standing in front of its walls, those collapsed things, and discovers his wounded, stained skin and, tangled up between the social and antisocial, the abject and lyric, the delinquent and lawful, love and murder, lets himself be dragged: to the outskirts, beyond this known circle, to neighborhoods of refined vice and boredom, nightlife and decrepit hotels, cheap movie theaters with twenty-four-hour viewings where the moribund audience never dies—always passing through—confusing day with night.




For the one who dared to turn the mirror around so as not to catch a glimpse of the reflection and lie shattered in a thousand pieces, ensnared in oneself, broken narcissus flowing in all directions. Bewitched in this falsity and fascinated by the “still not one” and “not completely other.” Point in which identity, without coming to fruition, exceeds itself, investing itself in something as multiple as it is ineffable. Prisoner of the oscillation between life and death, self and other, beauty and horror.


 

1992

Gone are the sappy crystalline days
and the walled gardens from which
to swipe fruit with a friend . . .
Now I am lost, like those turtles
who, after emerging, don’t return to sea
but in reverse bound inland
passing away wearied
at some random point in the horizon.

The sky has turned dense
like the mouth of black clouds
raining men with steel-cut profiles
and in its yawn I uncover
an evil I had thought long forgotten.
We’ve been robbed of light,
our fragile flame stomped out.
In an attempt to protect pieces
remaining of our disappearing world
now i know that the singular and terrible enemy
is this present, and that
it is only without living
that you come to live twice.

in this new, enormous well,
among the echo of other times
(open courtyard, blind mosque)
I await in no one’s house
in the threshold’s darkness
a damp, long call
. . . the final days.

translated from the Spanish by Ian Russell

Read the original in Spanish

The challenge of translating Espaliú’s poems is partly due to their living within a creative production that extends into installation, drawing, and performance, and I believe they should be read alongside this other work. Espaliú performed a haunting piece at the 1993 Sonsbeek Art Festival, El nido (The Nest), which takes place on a circular platform surrounding the top of a tree. For seven days, Espaliú walked the platform’s circumference while he stripped off a business suit. On the last day, after retracing his steps, Espaliú posted a sign that read: “AIDS IS AROUND”. As a translator, I take this circularity—both the circling of the performance and the aroundness of AIDS—to be fundamental to his poetic practice, and have tried to emphasize my process as a circling and a retracing. I often faltered trying to match the slight awkwardness of his words as they teeter between verse and prose, the mythic and the clinical. Ultimately, I try to use the translation to emphasize these awkward spaces and invite some of the others that Espaliú addresses—a Jorge, the Apostle Thomas, the confused ones—to occupy this space. In doing so, I hope to perform a conjuring of some of those that Espaliú invokes through this collection and repetition. Many thanks to Jesús Alcaide and the Espaliú Estate for the reproduction of these poems.

Pepe Espaliú (1955–1993, Spain) is best known as a visual and performance artist. The selection translated here comes from his only full-length published work of poetry, En estos cinco años (Through These Five Years; Estampa Ediciones, 1993). His installations and performance work often explored identity and embodiment, particularly in the years after his diagnosis. In Spain, he became one of the first public figures to openly discuss his HIV-positive status. He famously staged public performances that leveraged both affective community and media attention—a tactic learned after spending time in New York with members of the ACT UP Latino/o Caucus—and we see these elements reconceptualized in his written work. His poetry, both in verse and in prose, seems to work toward a balance between a theoretical lexicon and a yearning for community.

Ian Russell (b. 1989, Philadelphia, U.S.) is a teacher, researcher, and translator. His translations have appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Puerto Rico Review, and elsewhere. He received a Ph.D. in 2019, specializing in Iberian and Caribbean literary and performance cultures of the twentieth century.