For this week’s Translation Tuesday we bring you a selection of poems from Carmen Boullosa, one of the most dynamic and prolific writers in contemporary Mexican literature. The haiku-esque “Dry Rain” discovers a scene of natural beauty in Brooklyn, leading to a final image that is both concrete and abstract. In “Puy de Dôme,” our speaker addresses the seemingly ageless French volcano which has outlived its ancient temple—and perhaps even the temple’s gods. And in the elegiac “The Match,” our speaker witnesses the tragic death of Italian footballer Piermario Morosini, whose final moments on the field are recounted with profound sorrow and admiration. As with her novels, Boullosa’s poetry (here translated by acclaimed writer and translator Lawrence Schimel) spans an eclectic range of aesthetic styles and sociocultural themes, traversing national borders in pursuit of a shared humanity.
Dry Rain
Rain of flowers in Brooklyn.
Minute white petals fall
heralding
the spring,
bathing us
without water
in fresh hypothetical laughter.
The Puy de Dôme
You, volcano Puy de Dôme, were
the ear of the gods.
Gallic pilgrims
offer you ex-votos.
From the hand of the divine you rained good fortune.
Age left you deaf.
Old like you, the gods
also forgot the existence of men.
But your skin remains the same, youthful each summer, and you’re standing,
you wear a new dress each dawn,
every afternoon your perpetual childhood.
The gods, on the other hand . . . in their bed night and day,
listlessly while away their days without noting the time.
Of them, it’s better not to speak.
The Match
On the pitch,
Piermario Morosini
in his red uniform,
gaze fixed on the ball.
Near him is the longed-for target, the goal, the net,
Glory.
For Piermario alone,
a miracle is staged:
the world shakes.
Earth is a ball in disjointed flight.
The illuminated celestial sphere
is a sudden shot.
The cosmos trembles, the planetary spins jerk.
Piermario Morosini stumbles.
His right hand rises to his chest.
His knees fold.
A short intense buzz,
spat into Piermario’s ear,
parodying an excited “gooooooal!,”
anticipates the most perfect silence.
Piermario falls.
“A sudden collapse,” says the announcer describing the scene.
Her words don’t follow the action:
the player’s muscles disobey, nerveless,
they don’t perceive the ball,
they don’t recognize the pitch,
the sun, the warm air, the crowd,
the uproar, not even their own immobility.
In a seat in the stadium,
the pale beer of a glass shines in the sun,
stock still,
rhymes with Piermario’s heart.
Foamless,
no longer bubbling.
On the pitch, the ball rests,
imitating Piermario’s heart.
The green pitch and the celestial sphere are suspended,
static amateur photograph
of the soccer player’s blood and lungs.
He’s put on a stretcher,
they adjust his oxygen mask,
and a second movement takes place:
in the air, Piermario Morosini,
inert, unbeating,
is a flightless object,
carried from hand to hand.
He is a bundle,
disinflated.
Nobody makes that tremendous pass,
there is no goalie.
They slide Piermario into the ambulance,
wrap him up like a message written on a used envelope.
The rubber of the tires rubs the pavement.
The recorded siren sings
a brief, repetitive, cloying ululation: u-u-u.
The tires brake abruptly.
Rough hands extract Piermario’s gurney, lugging him
as if they were playing football.
With a brusque pass, like scoring,
they push him into the Pescara hospital.
Just through the door, the player dies.
Oh!
Trusting in the power of the monosyllable
that challenges (or evokes) God,
this is how Piermario would have wished to die,
in action,
on the field,
playing in the soccer National Selection.
As we’d all like to die:
with the pitch for our tomb.
Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
Carmen Boullosa (Mexico City, 1954) is the author of nineteen novels, two books of essays, eighteen collections of poetry, and ten plays. Several of her novels have been published in English, including Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum) and The Book of Anna (Coffee House), both translated by Samantha Schnee, and Before (Deep Vellum) translated by Peter Bush. Her first poetry collection to appear in English is Hatchet (White Pine Press) translated by Lawrence Schimel, winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.
She is the recipient of many prizes, including the Xavier Villaurrutia in Mexico, the Anna Seghers and the LiBeratur in Germany, and the Novela Café Gijón, the Rosalía de Castro and the Casa de América de Poesía Americana, in Spain, and she has also been a Guggenheim and a Cullman Center Fellow. Her show “Nueva York” on CUNY-TV has won five NY-EMMYs.
She has been visiting professor at Georgetown, Columbia, NYU, and Clermont Ferrand, was a faculty member at City College CUNY and now teaches at Macaulay Honors College.
Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 120 books in many different genres—including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics—and for both children and adults. His books have won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), the Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, a White Raven from the International Youth Library in Munich, and other honors. His writings have been translated into over thirty languages, including Icelandic, Maltese, Farsi, Kurdish, Basque, German, and Japanese.
In addition to his own writing, he is a prolific literary translator, contributing regularly to Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, Latin American Literature Today, Pleiades, Guernica, PN Review, and other journals. Recent poetry book translations into English include the poetry collections: Destruction of the Lover by Luis Panini (Pleiades Press), Bomarzo by Elsa Cross (Shearsman), Impure Acts by Ángelo Néstore (Indolent Books, finalist for the Thom Gunn Award), I Offer My Heart as a Target by Johanny Vazquez Paz (Akashic, winner of the Paz Prize), Itinerary of Forgetting by Nelson Simón (Skull & Wind), and Hatchet by Carmen Boullosa (White Pine, winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation). Honors for his translations include a PEN Translates Award from English PEN, a Highly Commended Award in the UK’s CLiPPA for children’s poetry, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, an Eisner Award finalist, a residence at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and translation grants from FONCA/Conaculta in Mexico, Camões Institute Portugal, the Latvian Writer’s Union, and others.
He has lived in Madrid, Spain since 1999.
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