The Golden Cypress
There is a lemon-colored cypress tree
behind the pool. It’s noon
and the air shimmers in the summer heat,
the steady glare. The grown-ups
have left for mass
to pray to God, invisible and holy;
meanwhile, we cousins leap into the water,
we stretch out with our laughter in the sun.
Later, I went into the golden cypress. It was
another world in there, like seeing
a different side of things, sustaining them. Beyond,
the yellow plumes in the hot air; inside,
a frame of branches slick with resin and the light, the cool
and sifted light, which remains.
If You Go and Look at a Hen For an Hour or Two, You’ll Find in the End That the Mystery Has Not Diminished but Rather Increased
Its feet yellow and strong.
Its walking rhythm with that kind of ludicrous efficiency,
halting from time to scrabble in the dirt.
Its compact structure in bright feathers, black,
nearly blue when the sun strikes.
Crowned in red, with its beak
exactly the same yellow as its feet,
eyes quick.
As it moves forward on the ground, it scrapes and pecks,
it lifts its head every so often, moving it a bit:
an inexorable atavism
for spotting potential predators.
And now it stretches, flapping vigorously in place.
To perk up, maybe,
to get its circulation going, or something of the sort.
Joy
The sea crept up the shore and yielded stalks and trunks,
the branch that stretches out, its pears seeded with pear trees,
but seeking, too, new fruits and flowers,
as the fish egg longs for swallows.
As, engendering, rotting,
the ancient shrews bore dromedaries,
dolphins, elephants of extravagant
trunks. As the strange tide,
slowly venturing new forms
through centuries of desire,
sculpts hands,
wings, the vivid peacock’s tail,
the rabbit’s ear, the tadpole
that becomes a frog to lay
new eggs tomorrow,
red grapes,
the thistle,
the lion’s eye
and the dragonfly’s,
what makes a tree
reach for the light;
its leaves, their female thirst,
the limpid, pungent sap,
your sea-salt blood.
from Chesterton
Alejandro Crotto
translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
Listen to "If You Go and Look at a Hen . . ." read in the original Spanish by the poet:
These three poems come from Chesterton, Alejandro Crotto’s second book. The poems in this collection share a focus on landscape, internal and external; on the natural world, and the human form within it; on transformations of matter and meaning over time; on faith, a word I use loosely to invoke the diverse expressions of praise laced through these poems; and on the gleaming moments of clarity that flash up from the slow spread of experience and observation. Crotto constantly explores the poetic traditions that have both generated his work and empowered him to break away from them—or to play with them, a special talent of his. Many poems in Chesterton make explicit use of form: there are traditional sonnets; modified sonnets; meters embedded in other meters; and other hybrids, splicings, and permutations (some looser than others) of established verse patterns. In the original Spanish, the poems published here—“The Golden Cypress,” “If You Go and Look at a Hen . . .,” and “Joy”—are all rigorously metered and unerringly intentional in their formal fabric. But they are also graceful and direct. When translating them, my challenge was to try and honor both things: on the one hand, the poems’ formal and metrical armature; on the other, their clear voice and gentle address. Their simplicity, in a way—the simplicity that shines through, despite (and maybe because of) the latticework behind them.
Alejandro Crotto is the author of Abejas (Bajo la luna, 2009) and Chesterton (Bajo la luna, 2013). He has published poems and other texts in the journals Diario de Poesía, Fénix (both in Argentina), Letras Libres (Mexico), Alba Londres (England), Desenredos (Brazil), Exit (Canada), Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and the Beloit Poetry Journal (both in the US), among others; his poems have been widely anthologized in Argentina. In 2015 he published a book of translations from the English entitled Once personas. His latest book of poems, Francisco, will be published in October 2017 by Bajo la luna.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. Her translations have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry International Web, Waxwing, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and LUMINA, among others. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Offing, Tupelo Quarterly, Big Lucks, the Sonora Review, and New Millennium Writings (as the poetry winner of their forty-first contest). Her poetry collections have been published in Mexico, Spain, and Argentina. She was a resident translator at the Banff Literary Translation Centre in 2014 and a resident writer at the Vermont Studio Center in 2015.
