5
Tengo razón
Quizás otra vez
mirando
sepa el verdadero repique está
en los labios. Lo extraño
Lo muerto
Lo mirado
Y mirar no es posible.
Y todas las cosas que he hecho ayer han sido
bien.
La prueba
el sol
45
La soledad es:
ínclita.
Descendiente de
nombre
de acto
donde hay sólo
que hacer hoy
acto,
nombre.
Leve allí:
el aire
la cosa que
se endurece
en aire
61
Dividir la ventana es ver la misma niebla
el peso es el mismo, la interrogación
paralela, localiza, no divide,
recorre por el contrario la frente del que mira mi
frente.
Paralelismo.
Camino.
En mi sitio no se mueve
nadie.
Ninguna vez la sangre
siempre el hombre. Ninguna vez la sangre,
la medida. El
sueño. El
arca. El
otro. El hombre.
Siempre
uno en esos sitios
75
No saber
Esperar por ejemplo
el seno.
Retener: la poquedad infinita
del soplo
de un labio o
aquella religión lenta en sola resistencia
física:
en dos pesos
(Ver.
cómo la tierra es el gesto
79
Reflujos
Qué cosa es espontánea. Caminando
el pasado está adelante
un tiempo sólo ya es memoria
dos espacios un gesto
el ojo
el libro
lo espontáneo no surge en la
mira en la sangre. Muere
de efigies
de Brevario Aparente
Gastón Fernández
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.
