Pedro Mir (1913–2000), former poet laureate of the Dominican Republic, is often compared to Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott for his lyricism and social engagement. Yet, as Jonathan Cohen demonstrates in his award-winning essay (selected by J.M. Coetzee for Asymptote’s Writers on Writers contest), Mir remains relatively obscure in the Anglophone world. In his essay, Cohen introduces us to this “Whitman of the Caribbean” who, at home and in exile, sang resplendently of the multitudes of islands and peoples in his fiercely political register. Ahead of Mir’s death anniversary on July 11, we are proud to showcase four poems translated by Cohen that reveal another face of Mir’s diamantine poetic personae, this time: the passionate lover, the rhapsodic suitor, the ecstatic agonizer. With surrealistic turns of phrases that surrender to an impassioned dream logic, these verses from his 1969 collection, Poemas de buen amor . . . y a veces de fantasía (Poems of Good Love . . . and Sometimes Fantasy), are charged with an eroticism not only for his beloved subject, but for language too and its capacity for image-making. They attest to why Mir should be counted amongst the best poets of the twentieth century.
“Translating Pedro Mir’s love poems into English is both a critical and creative challenge. Like all his work, these poems are finely wrought constructions. The task for me was painful at times because discerning the exact meaning of certain words racked my brain, especially in surrealistic passages. The translator must often choose one over several possibilities. Not only that, the rhymes and metrics of the traditional poetic forms that Mir uses so beautifully, as in his ‘Sonnet of the Grateful Girl,’ are impossible to recreate without padding. Translation of these poems, at best, is an approximation. Yet it still is possible to make real poems in English, using Mir’s work as a blueprint, that are faithful to his verse—poems that give Anglophone readers the experience of the potent lyricism and originality of his voice, poems that sound like him and convey his intent. This has been my goal.”
— Jonathan Cohen
Invitation
To begin I offer you
a bouquet of words
as an illustration and firelight and bubbling of a spring.
Then I give you the warmth of my hands
for the shiver of your belly.
Then I give you the chemistry of my blood
coursed through all the viaducts of oxygen
and the lime and nerves of my teeth.
And in addition my nutrients
my iodine and my magnesium
my phosphorus and my salt
my albumin and my sand.
And plus I give you
my face dissolved
at the temperature of my genes
or my family.
And you won’t need anything more to receive
and keep forever
and maybe sob over for a brief moment
so as to acknowledge that now
that now you are saved from oblivion
and you are invulnerable to death.
Sonnet of the Grateful Girl
Babe, where you going?
“To the jasmines.”
“No kiss?”
“With my mouth in the morning.”
Sunshine flared in her eyes.
Bugles were crying in my blood.
“And you?”
“Wherever you are.”
“And your apple?”
“In you.”
It already was in me. Jasmines
bloomed sweetly in the gardens of her breath
and sunshine roared in her body.
With the sun and solitude, on a tiny rug
lying there by its corner of shade
I won out over the jasmine that withers.
There was a warm peacefulness on her hip . . .
“Babe, where you going?”
“Wherever you want
where your shade can be my pillow.”
Seafaring Date with an Imaginary Woman
The sea burned in blues
with a white cloud of smoke.
You wore your foamy dress.
I my sailing pants.
The whole afternoon smelled
of clams and fishermen.
Of netting and schooners.
Something like a well-timed shipwreck
shuddered in our veins—and then
closing our eyes tight and being swept away
we’re suddenly conjugating the verb sand.
Residence in Fruit
Will you admit you gave me a home
in the very inside of a fruit?
It happened
at the moment of a shiver.
There I pledged all my blood cells to you
including the weakest,
the last to escape,
the one that never comes back
except in the taste of bitter roots.
If it was in a shiver,
how could it last so long, how
could it be unforgettable
without lasting longer?
Translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Cohen
Pedro Mir (1913–2000) is the Dominican Republic’s foremost poet of the twentieth century, named the country’s Poeta Nacional (the equivalent of Poet Laureate) by the Dominican Congress in 1982. He continues to hold this high poetic status there. The poems published here come from his 1969 book of erotic love poetry Poemas de buen amor . . . y a veces de fantasía (Poems of Good Love . . . and Sometimes Fantasy). He believed the ultimate aim of love is not poetry but the procreation of human beings. Though not well known in the United States, he is in the same league of Latin American poets as his contemporary Pablo Neruda. For more about Mir, see Jonathan Cohen’s essay “On Pedro Mir”—winner of Asymptote’s 2020 Writers on Writers contest.
Jonathan Cohen is a poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. He is the translator of Pedro Mir’s Two Elegies of Hope (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and, with Donald D. Walsh, Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems (Azul Editions, 1993; Peepal Tree Press, 2018). Other translations include Ernesto Cardenal’s Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, 2009), Enrique Lihn’s The Dark Room and Other Poems (New Directions, 1978), and Roque Dalton’s Small Hours of the Night (Curbstone, 1996). He is editor of William Carlos Williams’s By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959 (New Directions, 2011). His edition of Williams’s translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella (proto-modern fiction) The Dog and the Fever, by Pedro Espinosa, was published in 2018 by Wesleyan University Press. For more about Cohen’s work, see here.
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