Waiting
In the dream there is a house with a gable roof. I have a premonition that something will suddenly start to fall. Amphibians? Blood? Dismembered bodies? Plastic dolls? Canned meat? Plastic wraps? Newspapers someone has slept on top of? All the dream, I’m there watching. The house is the Revolution: immense, with a fake gate, with caryatids, with fluorescent bulbs. And all the time, I’m waiting for something to slowly fall: like a baptism or a desecration, I don’t really know. Nothing ever falls, but I know that at some point it will happen.
The dictator
The dictator as a nineteenth-century invention.
A beautiful invention,
magnificent,
attractive,
but useless.
An invention that’s beyond the laws of the marketplace,
to be admired in a museum of wonders,
in an exhibition of curiosities,
to be seen for a few seconds,
and be left behind
and forgotten forever.
The dictator as a wind-clock or a steam piano.
Don’t stop it
Imperialism is a gum
vending machine.
Cigarettes stubbed out
after three puffs of smoke.
72 small plastic stars.
Paranoia.
Blue and red rows for playing hopscotch.
Little old ladies crossing the street
with a shotgun for a cane.
Imperialism is a meaning-making machine.
Unstoppable.
The three automatons
The three celebrated automatons of the eighteenth-century seem crude to us today, their mechanisms simplistic. However, they still speak to unalterable conditions. The act of writing is immortalized. No one doubts that we will continue to write eternally, no matter on which surface or what characters, or what code we use: in essence, the act of writing will be the same. Then there’s the drawing one: the visionary, the sublimation of the visual sense: an affirmation that we have to continue looking in search of what is here below. And finally, the feminine figure in the ensemble, who, most generalists have affirmed, plays the piano, or others, with a little more specificity, the organ. In truth, she is a harpsichordist: she is the performer of an instrument that very few of us now know. A figure that forces us to redefine the world again and again each time we listen to her notes.
Four Poems
Gelsys García Lorenzo
translated from the Spanish by Maria Grau Perejoan and Loretta Collins Klobah
Cuba, her island of birth, is at the core of García Lorenzo’s acute, condensed, and subtly ironic—mostly narrative—poems. Her lines are concerned with issues such as politics, human nature, and expressive arts throughout the passage of time. The selection of poems translated here are four of the five by her that we also included in our bilingual anthology of over a hundred poems by thirty-three Caribbean women writers, The Sea Needs No Ornament/El mar no necesita ornamento (Peepal Tree Press, June 2020). These poems are political in the sense that they refer to imperialism and dictatorship. She draws parallelisms using both artefacts from past centuries and cheap, throwaway consumerist objects. Architectural details, such as caryatids, and other wondrous items poetically retrieved from curiosity cabinets create a fantastically foreboding dreamscape of the revolution. Automatons like those crafted by Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz in the late eighteenth century and a wind-powered clock, complex inventions seen as emblematic of modernity in their day but later relegated to museums as outdated, as well as vending machines, are incorporated into poems that do not offer easy answers or certainties about the present moment or the Cuban social experiment, but exquisite chiaroscuros of the Caribbean island, critiques of imperialistic global forces, and reminders of the role of the writer-artist. Translating García Lorenzo’s short poems has been a joyful exercise of precision, a watchmaker’s precision.
Gelsys García Lorenzo (b. 1988) received her doctorate degree in filología hispánica from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2016, and her licenciatura en letras from the Universidad de La Habana in 2010. She has published the poetry collections No te afeitarás en vano (Hypermedia Ediciones, 2016) and La Revolución y sus perros (Leiden, 2016), among others. She has also compiled an anthology about Bible-inspired theatre pieces, Anuncia Freud a María (Leiden, 2017).
Maria Grau Perejoan holds a doctorate degree in cultural studies with an emphasis on Caribbean literature and literary translation from the University of Barcelona, and an M.Phil. in cultural studies from the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She was a visiting lecturer at the UWI, St. Augustine Campus for three academic years, she then moved on to lecture courses in translation and Caribbean literature at the University of Barcelona. Since 2020 she has been a lecturer at the department of Spanish, modern and classical languages at the University of the Balearic Islands.
Loretta Collins Klobah received the OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry for her first book The Twelve Foot Neon Woman (Peepal Tree Press, 2011). It was also short-listed for the Felix Dennis Prize in the Forward Prize series. Her second book Ricantations (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a National Poetry Day selection. It was long-listed for the Bocas Prize. She has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Earl Lyons Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Pam Wallace Award for an Aspiring Woman Writer. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. She lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.
