Confusión
Ella dice: “confundía los gerundios con geranios”.
—Una broma.
—No, una confusión.
Un cuerpo flotando en el agua no es un gerundio
aunque se hinche.
—¿Se lanzó al río?
—Sí. Estaba confundido.
El cuerpo en el agua se hincha,
igual que los gerundios.
GERUNDIO
Dícese de la persona que habla o escribe en estilo hinchado,
afectando inoportunamente erudición e ingenio.
Cuando el grano se hinche, cuando reviente
brotarán las hojas; los ojos
aunque se hinchen, no florecen.
Florecerán los cuerpos y la palabra gerundio
será un geranio.
Los cuerpos de los ahogados no son cuerpos,
son
semillas. Pronto serán
ramos.
Están siendo, renaciendo, yendo
a llenar el agua con las flores nacidas de su vientre.
Campos movedizos serán
los ríos. Bosques huyendo de la tala.
Florecerán.
Y bajo el agua
bailarán los hombres nacidos del río
con un geranio en la cabeza.
El río es lo que está siendo.
Ella dice: “Entonces, ¿el río es un gerundio?”
Cowboy
El mundo ya no alcanza
para un montón de poemas
La gloria ya no alcanza
para un montón de poemas
La vida ya no alcanza
para un montón de poemas
Los poemas ya no alcanzan
para un montón de poemas.
Insistimos en inventar algo siniestro. Pequeños seres implantados, embriones remplazando a las falanges, miembros remplazados por oblaciones, partes autosustentables, tubos hipodérmicos, cables flexibles, hipersensibles, intercambiables, análogos. Insistimos en escribir extremidades falsas. Prótesis que suplan la carencia.
Yo no quiero escribir una prótesis, mi poema falange, yo no quiero escribir una prótesis, mi poema meñique, yo no quiero escribir una prótesis, mi poema brazo, yo quiero escribir un muñón amarillo, un muñón largamente acariciado, no la extremidad faltante sino la conciencia de lo ausente, los reflejos involuntarios y el miembro fantasma, quiero escribir la amputación. .
escribo lo que No:
Hay cables amarillos en su dermis, hay cables amarillos en sus cócleas, hay cables amarillos en sus nalgas, hay cables amarillos en su concavidad cifrada, en su huequito.
Hay caballos en su pubis, hay caballos en su vientre, en su pelvis hay una gaita algebraica, hay unos engranajes de volteo, hay galápagos, en su vientre. Hay galápagos y golpes: galopes. .
(Dicen que eso es una metáfora). Dicen que eso se come así, así se dice, se dice bolsa, vesícula biliar, balsa, se dice membrana, bilis, se dice que ando en una balsa sobre un mar de bilis, se dice que hay que cruzar con dos monedas en los ojos, yo prefiero arrancarlos y llevar sólo las cuencas, lo faltante.
Voy en este mar llagado por las costas, sobre una balsa que se puede partir a la mitad y hacer con sus dos partes una cruz que ondee como bandera, como las olas de este mar de bilis, de este mar de donde se desprenden las costras de un cuerpo sagrado, de un hinchamiento. Esta balsa en la que ando es un muñón y voy montando, a lo cowboy, montando mi muñón sobre la bilis, dirán que me vieron montado en el lomo de un cisne blanco, dirán que me vieron, pero será mentira, será mi balsa, mi balsa de muñón en la que monto, y yo también soy un muñón, una falange extirpada del vientre de mi madre, y también soy una extremidad faltante, soy una mutilación, soy el pedazo de un brazo flotando en el agua, amniótico, flotando en la bilis. Dirán que soy un cisne y que mis plumas son doradas, dirán que soy un ave mitológica, pero será mentira, será mentira que me vieron sobre un cisne, será mentira que yo mismo sea un cisne. Sólo un muñón flotando en el agua. “Para esta ausencia no existen prótesis”, no hay poemas, no alcanzan los poemas para esta ausencia, ni todo el amor alcanza. No hay falange. Nadie verá al muñón porque está muy dentro, en mi estómago, en mi bolso oscuro, hay un muñón flotando en mi mar, pero el mar está aquí adentro, lo siento, y yo también estoy adentro montado en el lomo de un muñón, un muñón sobre otro muñón: una cruz. Este vacío, este frío en la espalda, esta ausencia, ¿es ausencia de Dios?, esta ausencia es un muñón flotando en el agua. Dios, entonces, ¿es un muñón o ese cisne que pasa frente a mi ventana, blanco, blanco como la nieve?
Confusión & Cowboy
Alejandro Albarrán
Listen to the poems read in the original Spanish by the poet:
Fierce, unrelenting, always keenly attuned to the play of language and where it leads the tongue, Alejandro Albarrán’s poems speak of violence on a national and a brutally intimate level. His poems are also philosophical, as they seek to understand the self, alone and in society. His is a poetry of the news: it critiques state-sponsored violence and private attitudes that lead to the sanctioning of violence.
Albarrán is one of the most dynamic and exciting of the new generation of Mexican poets. These two poems, “Confusion,” from Ruido (2012), and “Cowboy,” from Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (2014), are drawn from collections that show his remarkable ability to shift poetics and conjure a plurality of voices.
Translation is problematized in a series in Ruido called “El Automatista”: a text is translated from English into Spanish, then German, back into Spanish, into Chinese, and finally back to Spanish, via Google Translate. The process is a metaphor for the complications of international communication, even as it features humorous touches like the transformation of “André Breton” into “Andrea Gordon.” A series Albarrán creates through erasure (“Intervenciones” or “Interventions”) likewise highlights the inadvertent meanings hidden within public, informational language.
Ruido (Noise) cites a range of English-language writers such as Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, and even Barack Obama, and includes a tip of the chapeau to French writer Jacques Roubaud, a member of the Oulipo, whose words serve as the book’s epigraph: “When a change in metrical form is first formulated, its new disposition isn’t understood: everything new is initially perceived as noise.” This glosses the book title and provocatively frames its sonic experiments.
Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (I Have a Lung That Is Not the Sky) is comprised of what may seem to be more conventional lyrics—Albarrán coaxes rhyme to bloom, and self-reflexively inscribes himself (“Alejandro”) in a poem. Yet the collection also shows he is a pyrotechnician: one word bursts from another word’s etymology or cluster of phonemes (reminiscent of Oulipian experiments). The sequence of prose poems, “Cowboy,” is an ars poetica that contrasts the iconic white swan of nineteenth-century modernista poetry with a vision of a contemporary poem made from the remains of an amputated limb. The visceral imagery emblematizes the collection’s poetics of pathology, of the failing and suffering body, of nerves jangled by mortality. In Albarrán’s somatic imaginary, somewhat like César Vallejo’s, the body both gives birth to a text and is a text itself: poetic language arises from violence done to the body and is, in itself, a damaged body.
Albarrán is one of the most dynamic and exciting of the new generation of Mexican poets. These two poems, “Confusion,” from Ruido (2012), and “Cowboy,” from Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (2014), are drawn from collections that show his remarkable ability to shift poetics and conjure a plurality of voices.
Translation is problematized in a series in Ruido called “El Automatista”: a text is translated from English into Spanish, then German, back into Spanish, into Chinese, and finally back to Spanish, via Google Translate. The process is a metaphor for the complications of international communication, even as it features humorous touches like the transformation of “André Breton” into “Andrea Gordon.” A series Albarrán creates through erasure (“Intervenciones” or “Interventions”) likewise highlights the inadvertent meanings hidden within public, informational language.
Ruido (Noise) cites a range of English-language writers such as Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, and even Barack Obama, and includes a tip of the chapeau to French writer Jacques Roubaud, a member of the Oulipo, whose words serve as the book’s epigraph: “When a change in metrical form is first formulated, its new disposition isn’t understood: everything new is initially perceived as noise.” This glosses the book title and provocatively frames its sonic experiments.
Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (I Have a Lung That Is Not the Sky) is comprised of what may seem to be more conventional lyrics—Albarrán coaxes rhyme to bloom, and self-reflexively inscribes himself (“Alejandro”) in a poem. Yet the collection also shows he is a pyrotechnician: one word bursts from another word’s etymology or cluster of phonemes (reminiscent of Oulipian experiments). The sequence of prose poems, “Cowboy,” is an ars poetica that contrasts the iconic white swan of nineteenth-century modernista poetry with a vision of a contemporary poem made from the remains of an amputated limb. The visceral imagery emblematizes the collection’s poetics of pathology, of the failing and suffering body, of nerves jangled by mortality. In Albarrán’s somatic imaginary, somewhat like César Vallejo’s, the body both gives birth to a text and is a text itself: poetic language arises from violence done to the body and is, in itself, a damaged body.
Alejandro Albarrán was born in Mexico City in 1985. He has published three collections of poetry, Ruido (Bonobos, 2012), Tengo un pulmón que no es el cielo (FETA, La Ceibita, 2014), and Persona fea y ridícula (FETA, 2017). He has received grants from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas, and Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura. He is a founding editor of the press Canón Accidental, co-director of the radio program Radio Rara, and is also a musician and conceptual artist who works with textual, visual, and sound poetry. Alejandro’s performances, installations, and artist’s books have been featured in numerous contemporary art exhibitions. His poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Polish, and Swedish. His musical project “Forastero” can be found here and other work can be viewed at his Tumblr page. His books are available in pdf for free download at Poesía mexa.
Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her books include Pulleys & Locomotion (poems) and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s Courir les rues (Hitting the Streets), which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. A new book of poems, Lost Property Unit, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Alice James Books’ Kinereth Gensler Award, and will be published by Green Lantern Press in 2017. A translation of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry (with Harris Feinsod) is forthcoming from Open Letter Books. Rachel is also the author of a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 (Oxford UP, 2018), and co-editor of Auden at Work (2015). Her scholarship appears in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MLN, and Modernism/modernity, and her poems and translations appear in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
