This Translation Tuesday, a poem from the Canary Island poet Félix Francisco Casanova charts a journey from exhaustion to the brink of a balmy doziness. A page is turned, and the process begins. All the forces of wakefulness are surmounted by the dreamy, inexorable course of a perfect poem read on the cusp of dawn.
Midnight falls like a bird
wounded with sleeplessness,
tediously you turn the page
and the poem wends its course
like a river without end,
it dilates and narrows the eyes
enrages and pacifies you
while the wood’s burning wanes
drowsiness arrives with the dawn.
translated from the Spanish by Adelaida Vida
Félix Francisco Casanova was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, in the Canary Islands, in 1956, and passed away in 1976 at the age of nineteen. In 1973, at the age of seventeen, he won the Canary Islands’ main poetry prize, Julio Tovar, with his book El conservatorio. In 1974 he won the Pérez Armas novel with Demipage’s reissued work, El don de Vorace. A month before his death, he won a contest sponsored by the newspaper La Tarde for his poetry collection, A suitcase full of leaves. The translated poem, “Midnight Falls Like a Bird,” is from Félix Francisco Casanova’s book, Cuarenta contra el agua, compiled by Francisco Javier Irazoki, and published by Demipage.
Adelaida Vida is a writer, translator, and student in San Francisco, California. She first read Casanova’s work when she was living in the Canary Islands.
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