5
I am right
Perhaps again
looking
I know the true peal is
on the lips. The strange
The dead
The seen
And to look is not possible.
And all the things I've done in the past have been
good.
The proof
the sun
45
Solitude is:
illustrious.
Descended from
name
of act
where there is only
what to do today
act,
name.
Delicate there:
air
thing which
hardens
in air
61
To divide the window is to see the same fog
the weight is the same, the parallel
interrogation, localizes, not divides,
on the contrary traverses the brow of he who looks at my
brow.
Parallelism.
Road.
In my place no one
moves.
Never once blood
always man. Never once blood,
the measure.
Sleep. A
strongbox. The
other. Man.
Always
one in those places
75
To not know
To wait for example
breast
Retain: the smallness infinite
of breath
of a lip or
that slow religion in the only physical
resistance:
in two weights,
(See.
how earth is the gesture
79
Ebbs
What is spontaneous. Walking
the past is ahead
a single time is now memory
two spaces one gesture
the eye
the book
the spontaneous does not arise in the
gaze in the blood. It dies
of effigies
from Apparent Breviary
Gastón Fernández
translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia
Listen to:
The poems are certainly but strangely religious, imbued with the faith people often find in foxholes. They question nearly everything, from God to the alphabet to themselves, in the way a person might question God in the face of tragedy. The hush of a cathedral during a sparsely attended afternoon mass pervades them. Somehow they seem lit as through a stained-glass window. They are psalm-like in form and consist mostly of emptiness, of silence, of blank white space. They call to mind, beyond the Psalms, liturgical prayer and the poetry of Sts. Francis and Claire.
Yet for all that, they are not explicitly Catholic. And while they appear to be Christian in tradition, there is little in the text to suggest that beyond a few gestures, any of which might well be read by adherents of other traditions as pertaining to them. One can easily imagine a Muslim or a Jew finding much familiar in them, and little to nothing that raises the question of the man from Nazareth. If there is consolation in them, it is that of a desert hermitage. The religiosity of Dostoevsky is probably the closest well-known parallel.
Yet for all that, they are not explicitly Catholic. And while they appear to be Christian in tradition, there is little in the text to suggest that beyond a few gestures, any of which might well be read by adherents of other traditions as pertaining to them. One can easily imagine a Muslim or a Jew finding much familiar in them, and little to nothing that raises the question of the man from Nazareth. If there is consolation in them, it is that of a desert hermitage. The religiosity of Dostoevsky is probably the closest well-known parallel.
Gastón Fernández (1940–1997) left Peru as a young man. He went to Belgium, where he studied and later taught art history. What he published in his lifetime was mostly professional work in his field, written in French. In Spanish, there were only a few scattered stories in small but important journals, all of them published before 1988. He had more writer friends than readers, but he wrote steadily in Spanish for himself and those friends, leaving behind two major manuscripts when he died. One was a collection of thirty-three interlaced stories titled Relatos aparentes (Apparent Stories; Lima, 2002); the other was a group of one hundred cryptic poems called Brevario aparente, (Apparent Breviary; Lima, 2006). The selection here is from my translation, Apparent Breviary, forthcoming from World Poetry Books.
KM Cascia is the translator of the Mexican modernist Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems (World Poetry, 2023). Born in Michigan City, Indiana, Cascia left school at the age of seventeen and picked up Spanish working in restaurant kitchens in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Calque and Asymptote, they have published four collections of their own poems, and their translations of Latin American poetry have appeared in numerous magazines, including Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous.
