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 READ MORE…