This Translation Tuesday, time acts as the grand cipher that the Salvadoran poet Lauri García Dueñas seeks to decode from its twenty-first century entanglements. Originally published by Proyecto Literal in 2012 (one of the forerunners in promoting experimental works from Latin America today), these three poems from Time is a Cryptic Text begin with simple propositions about time’s essence and nature. But as they churn on, the poems’ words shudder like atoms trying to break loose from their bonds with each other, and time turns out to be completely polluted and punctured by the social and political world. Olivia Lott’s translation brims with this accelerated energy; each poem, like a movement in a grand symphony, contains its own music and cacophony.
“As García Dueñas’s title indicates, the book’s fifty-two poems (or single poem in fifty-two parts) departs from an obsession with time as a conventionally unquestioned organizer of existence. Through avant-garde formal devices––like stream of consciousness, relentless enjambment, and the absolute defiance of capitalization and punctuation––the texts seek their own encryption, asking the reader to look between the cracks. There, they’ll find many things: from an x-ray deconstruction of Mexico City (where García Dueñas lived for several years) to a love poem that doesn’t want to be one. In translating these poems, I have privileged their rhythm, opting for a sped-up English to match their urgent political drive and to keep the poetic experiment front and center. This is especially important, I think, when translating a writer from El Salvador, given the expectations for neo-realism and testimony historically placed on Central American writers—not to mention the exclusion of the region’s avant-gardes from both Latin Americanist and comparative conversations. Time is a Cryptic Text is both politically committed and formally innovative.”
—Olivia Lott
2
time is also nervation african bees searching their honeycomb for death this frenetic pleasure of parallelepiped writing uninterrupted this dark swollen-cheek sun the wind lacan flipping through books in the gandhi on miguel ángel de quevedo the telephone rrring sounds like a naked body two naked bodies thorns fish gliding on the sidewalk pedestrians walking over the fish the young musician yelling out to people to please stop stepping on the fish you’re hurting them but people never understand anything the fish are the foundation of this lacustrine city sky turned to water madness tip of the scar i spread infected words not one period instead of the other you’re not real i can’t find the syllables or the start of the nervation it means nothing i walk fast a type of solitude burrows a nest in me nothing touches the ground i don’t want anything from you i say it again i’m not convinced i’m always late peach flowers intersect the eyes of other eyes petals time grinds its teeth when it sleeps the young musician builds spaces to live in sounds of bold colors it all escapes our own volition but i want to play with death and yell burn burn i’m peeling you off of me you’re hurting me phrases in the darkness time isn’t real (i don’t think it is)
3
time is a sun setting on avenida universidad nineties music accelerating at the stoplight spring dismembered in containers of dirt flowers microscopic explosions i almost never have money to buy flowers marguerite duras crosses the riverbed her body cries and i cry mine the blue crosses the sky water a swan is stuck at a car dealership the swan cries because he was once a bird too he had the face of a child the sun is falling on avenida universidad and i can’t get around it the celestial vault is analytical delirium periods rain i say light and light becomes light we are dust whoever invented the material way of measuring things had no idea of the consequences around me my will turned into circumstances and me tethering my cords to earth and hot-air-balloon me letting go of the tethers open sky train uninterrupted course legs like multiplication of fish the city is made of water i’m thirsty and the city is also crashing down
4
time is a machine a little music box that doesn’t spin anymore poor little music box left there in a dresser drawer to fill up with dust time is more and more social protests listened to less and less people complain about traffic caused by the marches but people don’t know that this country is falling apart that countries are falling apart that countries are drying up oh poor countries and elisa sends emails about saving the planet reduce reuse recycle a girl in pajamas crosses the street because her neighborhood has no water social struggles pyrrhic democracies your body is the best thing about this country he said and the march outside and capitalism savage this country wasn’t like this four years ago she said the room was dark her eyes shined at the edge of the lamplight thoughts thought is a long avenue with traffic issues time is a machine that mass manufactures illusions music reproduces us we’ve been alone a long time and we didn’t realize it we were happy in our prehistory birds were flying helium balloons were flying postcards handwritten letters were flying now it’s late binary codes programs two point zero pencils dug into skin suffixes unfinished sicknesses of the soul 3D animations i want to be a purple cartoon i want to dance naked and monochromatic inside a little music box free of dust and breath into my lungs an afternoon in parque hundido or in coyoacán
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott
Lauri García Dueñas (San Salvador, El Salvador, 1980) is a poet, playwright, novelist, and journalist. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Del mar es el ahogo (2011), winner of the 2009 Navachiste Inter-American Poetry Prize, and El tiempo es un texto indescifrable [Time is a Cryptic Text] (2012), from which these poems are selected. She has also published several poetry chapbooks and plays, and she has co-authored two books of investigative journalism. She has been a recipient or finalist for literary prizes in El Salvador and Mexico, and her work has been partially translated into Arabic, Catalan, English, German, and Italian. She earned an MA in Communication and Culture from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) through a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. She lives in San Salvador.
Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018), the co-translator of Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene (CSU Poetry Center, forthcoming 2022), and the editor of Poesía en acción on the Action Books Blog. She is a Marilyn Yarbrough Fellow at Kenyon College and a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is completing a dissertation on translation, revolution, and 1960s neo-avant-garde poetics in Latin America.
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