The Ultraist literary movement—of which Jorge Luis Borges was one of its most prominent core members—was an early-twentieth-century avant garde literary movement in Spain that, amidst the influences of multiple European literary trends, promoted the use of imagery and references to new scientific ideas and technologies in poetry. This Translation Tuesday, we are delighted to present two poems by a major figure of the Ultraist movement, Ernesto López Parra, in James Richie’s translation. The poems’ energetic typographic style and evocative metaphors combine to create a new field of perception that reflect how new-fangled technologies from airplanes to electric balloons had begun to shape the literary imagination. The poems of López Parra—who has hardly been translated into English—enhance our appreciation of an influential experimental movement that shaped Spanish poetry.
Color does not exist
Color does not exist. Color—
A vice of the retina
Everything is white
Like the moon and the stars.
If we see the sky as blue,
It’s because Hugo told us,
“And foolishly, we followed his trickery!”
From afar, blue is the summit
Up close, the summit is gray,
But the only truth is that it is white.
The Sacred Books would tell us
That God made the colors.
Flowers are not red nor green
Nor yellow nor purple
The carnation and the violet
The rose and the daisy
Are white . . .
(The fire
of the love with which we see things
Makes us see them with different colors.)
Therefore, snow is cold
And we see it always as white . . .
(in LIFE, truth, and snow
White and cold)
God did not create color . . .
He (Ecclesiastes) tells us nothing
The commentaries silence . . .
Man invented color
To play the roulette!
The Electric Balloon
(To my Dear friend Eugenio Montes with all my admiration)
Autumn
October melts
On fringes of glass water
One, single, enormous cloud covers
The whole LIGHTHOUSE
The raindrops hang from the low clouds
The descending pearls of the evening!
Glass timbales . . . Toothpicks in boxes
Of cement drums
It burns.
Only one street, the golden forge
All the embers have dried out.
Enough of the sun! Only she has saved us
Under the impenetrable façade.
It looks like the heart of the City.
The heart of the fire of the forge
Debating its impenetrability
Under the sterile will of the water
And in the autumnal deterioration
Crackling the iron and tin
Forging perhaps a hermit
With a SUN in his conscience
Autumn! Absence of light. Humidity.
Shadow planes in the air.
Showing the shamelessness of the City.
As such . . . with carelessness
And suddenly from the PUPIL
Of a house covered by a black hood
That hesitates in a corner of misunderstanding
A GREAT EYE OF LIGHT has jumped onto the street.
Translated from the Spanish by James Richie
Ernesto López Parra (1895–1941) was a poet and playwright from Spain. He was a major member of the Ultraist movement, contributing to several avant-garde periodicals including Grecia, Ultra, Gran Guignol, and Cervantes. López Parra frequently used themes of science and technology in his poetry. Despite his innovative poetry, when his first play, Paisaje de abanico (1921) debuted, it was deemed too traditional and not in line with the Ultraist movement. This caused him to be banned from the journal Ultra. He continued to write poetry, publishing the volumes Imagen Iluminada (1929) and Auroras Rojas (1936). Politically, he was a radical socialist. After the Spanish Civil War (in which he sided with the Republicans, against the Fascists), he was arrested and sentenced to death. His sentence was changed to life in prison, and he died of tuberculosis.
James Richie holds a Master of Arts in Language, Literature, and Translation from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He translates works from Italian, Spanish, and Russian into English. His translations have also been featured in [sic] – An Online Journal of Literature, Culture, and Literary Translation, Four Centuries, Russian Poetry in Translation, and Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Louisville.
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