Seeing the particulars
the wonderful woman she was that evening lodged in her sweetness oh how
she would yield
of herself tender of herself along the remotest of streets the trees the patios
faces as if surrendered to the scandals of forgetting
the whore the most lovely so full of sudden women
like regrets like guilt spattered about the air
seamen beckoning storms would dream them up in cabins
ever rocking concocting them with backs to the brine
tall women black and beautiful mothers the salvos of their flesh
breast-rich thigh-rich those child-bearing sufferers traveling through Dakar
it was Dakar precisely
the sergeants of l'armée coloniale and the stevedores cloaking their rage
with their bodies
yvonne enfolded in flames pursued by golden boars
the whore the most gorgeous
with barely her mulatto flesh to counter the world her celebrated body
acclaimed in borneo caressed beloved yvonne the capital of diverse
catastrophes and oblivion
written on the walls of all that booze
yvonne who loathed the french
through her eyes all the blind men in the bazaar would walk
pustules of the medinah the worldwide pustules
sad furies falling from the coda of her breasts
For now
twilight slithered in through the window the motionless masts
huddled all quiet to keep from annoying this twilight
that had entered from behind the market inching toward the counters
where men lingered searching within their wine involving themselves
besieged by women from the south
edicts from their breasts like so many mellow foghorns
twilight was anchored in that port with a hazardous languor
arriving from africa the great devourer
offloading beasts of sadness guns traps bogus ebony
twilight lord and master
advanced winding through the old marketplace meting out intimate blows
binges of love above all catastrophes of sweetness
faces beneath the wine
that rolled in around dusk to grow like some unease
like the odor of hags sifting through the trash in the port of Santos
and it was 11 in the glory of this soaring day but not above this grand woman
among women
the soft honey lost in the saliva of so many of these men
torn to bits and pieces devoured grown old with eyes gone dry like
the evaporation of longlastkisses
the plunders of the shadows hags
foraging for oranges rotted fish leftovers from the show
close to their dust hags avid for the doors of the dance hall
where fabulous sailors smelling of monsters blindly swayed
against those dead breasts exchanging the sea for the beer-whores
where do these things happen
where do these things where will the dregs of love wind up
how will they echo in the ages to come
answer if you please grand children
cruel in your compassion
Heroes
the suns are sunning and the seas still seaing
the druggists are specific
dictating delicate prescriptions for shock
breaking fast in their great beakers
my thing is to gelman
we have lost our fear of the great stallion
successive hatchets are upon us
and it always dawns upon our testicles
it's no small thing that this should happen to us
in light of the love misdealt these days
the decks of catastrophes the debts
beloved be those who loathe
progeny that peck about at my livers
and their disgrace and grace is to not be blind
great mother marie
great father steed
giddy up gelman on i say
go gelmaning on to meet the most beautiful ones
those who launched victories in their great defeat
Other questions
what was i to find in the country of wine?
who? what faces or what face?
the engineer who was lost at sea forty engines ago?
dylan thomas's donkey?
your body so desired beloved unexpected? what body would i find
consumed emberbraced by night like some long donkey
that brays like machines like the sea
who knows how that goes but ten centuries ago
leif ericson founded this vikinged belching country of wine
rather brutish he likewise fornicated beneath the celestial glory
and you miserable souls hide away your pallid finales in bedrooms
shielding your bodies with shadows like milkless jennies
yes
something in this world has changed and your body is as strange as forty
engines
and the engineer lost at sea was shining
phosphorescent like leif ericson when ten centuries ago
he pinned a woman to the earth
and the earth took on the color of their bodies
and your body was the only land where i was overcome
from Oxen Rage
Juan Gelman
translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford
Listen to "Other Questions" read in the original Spanish by the author:
A bull awakes one day to the realization that he's a castrated, brow-beaten ox but is then briefly abstracted from this sorrow as the morning sun gently warms his hide and lifts heady aromas from the grass; meanwhile, a man graced with human cogitation delights in gorgeous women walking through flowery plats, who fleetingly offer distraction from the general suffering that surrounds him: this ambivalent oxen attitude encompasses much of Juan Gelman's Oxen Rage. Rife with speculation and uncertainty, this is book of ruminations, written in language at times unorthodox and full of quirky coinages, often playful and paradoxical, always musical and richly imaginative. As such, Oxen Rage presents stubborn obstacles to the translator, which perhaps explains why it had remained, apart from a few brief excerpts, untranslated into any language. Moreover, to translate the entirety of this work means rendering a range of modes since this collection poses a testing ground for voices that begin to combine in a style of condensed word play, neologism, concatenating rhythms, intertextualities, surprising imagery, and a syntax that includes little or no punctuation or capitalization and few conjunctions.
Recipient of numerous awards including the most prestigious Spanish language prize, the Premio Cervantes, Gelman is Argentina's foremost contemporary poet, but ironically he has lived in exile since 1976 when a military junta instigated a "dirty war" that led to the "disappearance" of up to tens of thousands, among them his own son. All but a handful of the 20 volumes he has written since the coup were published in Spain, which has distracted some readers from the poetic legacy that he had established before his exile began. His first volume, Violín y otras cuestiones, appeared in 1956 and with it Gelman grew to be the master and promoter of the "Generation of 1960"—known for its colloquial language, its attention to everyday life, and its leftist ideology and social commentary. However, in 1962 he embarked on a period of questioning and experimentation, which culminated in this watershed volume, Oxen Rage. Originally published in Cuba in 1965, it was not finished until '68, finally appearing in Argentina in 1972,1 and, within this book, his previous poetics of a socialist-realism bent begin to be probed, gutted, even parodied, in order to test new modes of writing that have since established his reputation as an extraordinary poet.
1Editions of Cólera Buey: La Habana: La Tertulia, 1965; Buenos Aires: La rosa blindada, 1971; Obra poética, Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1975; Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994; Poesía reunida Tomo I 1956-1980, Seix Barral, 2012.
Recipient of numerous awards including the most prestigious Spanish language prize, the Premio Cervantes, Gelman is Argentina's foremost contemporary poet, but ironically he has lived in exile since 1976 when a military junta instigated a "dirty war" that led to the "disappearance" of up to tens of thousands, among them his own son. All but a handful of the 20 volumes he has written since the coup were published in Spain, which has distracted some readers from the poetic legacy that he had established before his exile began. His first volume, Violín y otras cuestiones, appeared in 1956 and with it Gelman grew to be the master and promoter of the "Generation of 1960"—known for its colloquial language, its attention to everyday life, and its leftist ideology and social commentary. However, in 1962 he embarked on a period of questioning and experimentation, which culminated in this watershed volume, Oxen Rage. Originally published in Cuba in 1965, it was not finished until '68, finally appearing in Argentina in 1972,1 and, within this book, his previous poetics of a socialist-realism bent begin to be probed, gutted, even parodied, in order to test new modes of writing that have since established his reputation as an extraordinary poet.
1Editions of Cólera Buey: La Habana: La Tertulia, 1965; Buenos Aires: La rosa blindada, 1971; Obra poética, Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1975; Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994; Poesía reunida Tomo I 1956-1980, Seix Barral, 2012.
Juan Gelman (1930- ) was born of Jewish Ukrainian parents in Buenos Aires and grew up amid a myriad of languages, acquiring a fascination for words early on in life. With the publication of Cólera buey (Oxen Rage, 1965/71), his strange blending of social engagement and wordplay expressed in a colloquial language marked an unnerving irony and poignancy that would continue to characterize his poetry, which now includes more than 20 titles. After actively participating in the movements that brought back Perón in 1973, he was sent to Europe in 1975 to work in public relations as a journalist. After the military coup of 1976, he remained in exile in Europe, denouncing human rights abuses, which by August of that year involved the personal loss of his son, Marcelo, and his pregnant daughter-in-law, who were "disappeared" during the military dictatorship. Recipient of numerous prizes including the prestigious Premio Cervantes, Gelman is considered to be one of Latin America's foremost poets. Having worked as a journalist and a translator in Argentina, Spain, France, and Italy, he is presently living in Mexico City.
Lisa Rose Bradford was born in Dayton, Ohio. She teaches Comparative Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata and raises horses and cattle in Madariaga, Argentina. Her doctoral work was completed at the University of California at Berkeley, and since then she has edited two compendiums on translation and cultural studies, Traducción como cultura and La cultura de los géneros, as well as two U.S. poetry anthologies in Spanish, Los pájaros, por la nieve (RIL, Chile, 2010) and Usos de la imaginación: poetas latin@s en EE.UU (EUDEM, Argentina, 2008). Her poems and translations have appeared in various magazines and journals, and she has also published two volumes of Juan Gelman's verse, Between Words: Juan Gelman's Public Letter (National Translation Award, 2011) and Commentaries and Citations, with a third, Com/positions, to appear in 2012. She is presently completing, under the auspices of an NEA grant, a fourth book by Gelman, Oxen Rage.
