Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from So to Speak by Ricardo Cázares

I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you excerpts from the award-winning Mexican poet Ricardo Cázares’s 75-page serial poem So to Speak. With a cinematic eye that hones in on the materiality of everyday experience, Cázares’s speaker leaps from image to image with dazzling grace and wonder. And, in replicating this sensation of poetic propulsion, hear from translator Joe Imwalle the process of working with a poet whose work is always already imbricated in the net of translation.

“In addition to his poetry, Cázares has translated Charles Olson and Robert Creeley into Spanish. These poets are clearly an influence on Cázares’ attention to breath and syllable. Olson’s statement in “Projective Verse” that “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” was ringing in my head when I first began this project. Surely, Cázares has carried this statement around too. Reading his poems aloud has a palpable energy with a forward momentum. The poems are open ended and each flows into the next. They enact the poetic moment that boils up from a quotidian event leaving the speaker on the verge of understanding something transcendent.

Translating these poems presented plenty of enjoyable challenges. So often the associative leaps being made are sound-based, pesa slips into pozo. Cázares also plays with ambiguity. I often had to choose one meaning over another when both were intended to resonate.”

—Joe Imwalle

I look at my hands

at the fingers of my hands
        at the yolks cooling down on my skin
and falling to the plate

____________I see the trace
                                        see the sun in a burner
                                        where someone’s boiling a stock

I look at the bread with compassion

                                               once
____________________
on that same table
____________we studied the nervous system
____________of a frog

I look at the flames

                            boiling flowers
                                    dry leaves

                in the golden liquid steeps a tea
                for insomnia 

I look at the ceiling
                        a DC-10 lands
                        on the table’s edge

                   I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam
                  there’s fine weather a breeze
                  scent of diesel and apples 

I see my hands
____________I scan the radar verify the instruments
________and fine tune their touch

I look at my hands
I look at water that’ll overflow
I look at the pot’s rim 

                                                 how it blurs out 

and you 

I look at your eyes 

from your eyes
your sight glued
to the bowl of broth
the voice
removed twenty years
from your warm seat here
at the edge of adulthood
you         still seated
at the kids’ table 

you look to the tumblers
you taste the tongue that softens
the vision         the taste
of alcohol 

almost never music   

but a flat table
some pliers
some metal strings
on hardwood
on the hand
a pain that soothes itself
in bed
against the temple
a pillow wet with drool
for dreaming and tuning
by ear
in the dark
whatever
beauty you sense
in the air

something in the air

      something new
__________something ambiguous in the water
            because it falls
                      without seeming to
______but in Punta Gorda the sudden ripening
________of thousands of oranges

something abstract seen traced in the dirt
and to say
                how lovely this is or
                that reminds me
             of some painting I saw once
____________some time ago a Kline in San Francisco

and to see the form of grooves
      the irrigation canals

                            something widespread
                                    and propagated like legs
             like orange blossoms the sipped flower
                                                       steeping in the cup 

something packed in satchels
and folded in two
                             opening up
breaking apart 

                                       something squeezed between legs 

something real sweet or smooth
         some fleeting scented thing 

something in the air on the tip of the tongue something real
____
it’s true

                           we barely talk
                           you and I 

Translated from the Spanish by Joe Imwalle

Ricardo Cázares is the author of (Palas vol. 2), (Palas vol. 1) (Joaquín Xirau Icaza Poetry Prize), Es un decir (Tierra Adentro Editorial Fund, 2013) and Drivethru (Publishing Company, 2008). He translated into Spanish The Poems of Maximus and Poems of Maximus IV, V, VI by Charles Olson, Be With by Forrest Gander, Robert Creeley’s Pieces, and Truong Tran’s Dust and Conscience, among others. He is an editor and founding member of the Mangos de Hacha publishing house.

Joe Imwalle is an educator, musician, poet, and translator who lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and daughter. He holds an MFA in Poetry from St Mary’s College of CA. He plays in the ambient americana band, Aux Meadows. His poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Streetlight Magazine, Plants and Poetry Journal, No Contact Mag, The Courtship of Winds, and elsewhere. An additional excerpt from his translation of Es un decir by Ricardo Cázares is forthcoming from Chicago Quarterly Review.

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