This Translation Tuesday, dive into three poems by the Dominican poet Mateo Morrison, recipient of the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Drawn from Morrison’s collection titled Hard Equilibrium, the poems here exhibit a form of night vision that navigates the reader through a world of emerging outlines. Rendered by poet and translator Ariel Francisco in a language that evokes through its understatement, we are thrilled to share these alluring poems with you.
Scene of the Dead
Night arrives,
my home becomes
a democratic cemetery
everyone free to choose their tomb.
We lay bare our vocation
of living cadavers.
Not even a whisper is heard
and sometimes
—the neighbors know—
we play at death.
Our flowers no longer grow
their yellow’s become
one with death’s playful touch.
The gnawed doors are rigid
the moths have decided
to cease their gorgeous woodwork.
Nails rust
and faster than ever
everything we’ve learned
enters my home
the urgent scene of the dead.
I Draw My Surroundings
I draw my surroundings
transgressor of love
in those dark places where life is born
tracing those breath giving lines
a cloud of pigeons defying the air
a visible-invisible hand
experiments with their form
until they’re left
in perfect possibility.
May someone claim them
and border what was said
making of color a language
of cities and outlines.
Displaced Voice
I
We all aspire to tenderness.
A voice displaced without hurting us.
An almost imperceptible hand in our skin.
Whistling that splits the morning into two
timeless spaces.
A singular look on our faces.
The odor of defiant nights.
We all pretend at a tenderness
we often neglect
in a city that accepts us one by one
while couples alter between stillness.
II
Lonesome city
the beginnings of a tree
trapped in a memory
staged in lights
our auspicious encounter
prolonging spaces
while you create
a day for me
agendaless.
III
Morning’s pulsing eye
watery eye of salts
where’s the sea
where the fish bath
in huge violent waves?
Asks the transient
where’s the sea?
A finger points to the horizon
where’s the sea?
A head spins on an enormous table
again a finger points to the horizon
and the sea appears
misting the infinite eyes
of the future.
Translated from the Spanish by Ariel Francisco
Mateo Morrison was born in Santo Domingo in 1946 to a Dominican mother and Jamaican father. A poet, lawyer, essayist, and author of more than ten books, he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 2010, the Dominican Republic’s highest literary honor.
Ariel Francisco is the author of Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press, 2022), A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017), and the translator of Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud’s Poet of One Island (Get Fresh Books, 2023) and Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez’s Routines/Goodbyes (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Louisiana State University.
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