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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