Translation Tuesday: A selection from Poems for Michael Jordan by Francisco Ide Wolletter

fate is the phenomenon of the ball passing through empty space to arrive at your empty hands

Awarded first place in the CNCAs Roberto Bolaño Prize for Young Literary Creation in the Poetry category, twenty-seven-year-old Francisco Ide Wolleter stands out from the latest generation of Chilean litterateurs. His “Poems for Michael Jordan” are miracles of observation, imbuing quotidian life with existential drama. You won’t ever watch basketball the same way again after this.

I

 the ball’s porous plane

makes me think of human skin

 

a tactile nostalgia

though contact is always illusory

 

the facts are thus: we’re structured on emptiness

built of atoms,

atoms whose nature is to repel

and be repelled.

 

that’s why we don’t mix with things

that’s why when we touch

we haven’t really touched anything at all

 

V

the arc, precise distance, the power

ball in hand and control of the instant

 

as if nothing else existed

not hunger nor destitution nor blame

this is how one must approach it all

 

love is a discipline identical to that of basketball

and a game maintains the structure of life

 

you have to go mad with love while there’s still time

as if you’ve done away with everything else

 

I always played that way

and when my teammates understood this

they hewed tunnels through the air

for me and my master’s move to pass through

 

X

the ball in the air, fruit-like:

 

an orange suddenly bobs upon the waves

 

an eye seen through fogged glass

 

fate is

 

the phenomenon of the ball

passing through empty space to arrive

 

at your empty hands

 

Translated from the Spanish by Tim Benjamin

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Francisco Ide Wolleter (b. 1989, Santiago) has published Observatory (Corriente Alterna Editions, 2011), Yakuza (Cinosargo Editions 2014) and Poems for Michael Jordan (Luma Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland; Ajiaco Editions, Santiago; 2014). He was awarded a scholarship by the Fundación Pablo Neruda in 2010. His texts were included in the anthologies Tea Party, Tri-national anthology of poetry: Peru, Bolivia, Chile (Cinosargo / La Liga Editions, 2012) and New poets from America: Young poetry from Chile to Nicaragua (Fundación Neruda, 2013). In 2013 he was awarded second place in the Lamas Médula International Poetry Contest (Buenos Aires, Argentina). In 2014 he was awarded first place in the CNCA’s Roberto Bolaño Prize for Young Literary Creation in the Poetry category, and honorary mention in the Novel category; he also won the Toribio Larraín City Prize.

Tim Benjamin writes and translates from a new home base in Philly, publishing reviews and commentaries from time to time on both U.S. and South American culture and politics. He recently returned from just under half a decade living and working in Santiago, Chile.