Day 2
The signs multiply the moments. The sign and its repetition form a current of confidence, of liberation. In that current I should learn to drown my anxiety. I imagine a new space in the mind, born from this material point, tough and rocky. It’s an inorganic, undefined point, like the beginning of a possibility. The beginning of possibility is not even the beginning.
Tonight, sound will be replaced by the eye. Breath will be replaced by the eye.
Day 4
My obsession isn’t the stroke, but the stroke enacted, which begins with the dawn, with an insomnia schooled in the light of yesterday’s images, of a different afternoon.
I exile myself in webs of dust, I drown myself (but hide in the indifference).
No: I multiply my body, I multiply my mind, and where there was limb and hand, and where there was thirst, I abandon the idea of person.
Day 5
In silence, I sketch fragments of signs, strokes, like exercises.
Through repetition, I began to forget my hand. But even the path will be outside before long.
The curve shelters ways of shrouding the white.
Day 6
Behavior unsteady; perhaps as a defense, my brush frees itself in answers to the moon.
I chase an impossible room, to concede the spoken to another ear, another rule.
Day 8
Night of storms. Not in the sky or the air, but a storm that travels in roots, from breath to breath in the living, painting doors.
It’s the spell of this unsteady hour beneath the flow of a symbolic blood.
I should invent another hand. As in a dance, to make the movements of known choreography, to put yourself on the bridge with a view of the action.
Absent it was in the ascent—my hearing let itself sing.
Never will I free myself from these moorings.
The mouth seals itself in water, the unwanted shout silenced in bits of words. And yet nothing moves.
The storm splits the dusk from September, converting it into moments of anxiety, of delay, of empty traces—that you already knew how the curve opens into silence, how the watery blackness makes willow branches and the powerful blackness cracks in rocks and clouds.
Toward the west, metallic trees stayed motionless—they were moving through alleys, brushing the air. Beneath the skin, the lunar light entered. It entered and was the beginning—not wanting to remember and shielding in the blackness this insipid and painful cloth.
Day 11
Monotony. From one piece, to search for another piece. From him, another. To progress, dividing space and time, the eye distancing itself until blankness occupies the hand.
In front of the paper, the body inclined, the arm extended. But my mind is too tied to the wood.
The river, steady line, creates a moving horizon.
Day 12
From the direction of the force you can infer a virtue. To resist, in the other direction, allows you to discover imitation, parody. But for now you can only remain in the center, considering the nebula of habit.
I don’t know how to crouch like an animal, or like a flower, to gradually close my organic leaves.
The words supported in my throat—arid, lost—are thinning. The dodged glance hurries not to model air, evaporates.
I write each line without a guide. I write slowly, like a debtor.
Day 14
Spirits change your hand. Your voice is emotional, excessive. The story reasons in memory. It doesn’t deny the thirst, the brief, the bravery of the sea, the profile of the trees, the shadow of the rock.
Spirits change the eyes. They threaten to bind another body to the skull.
Your voice has created threads that grow in the pupils.
I write. I write signs. I write death. I write another. I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.
from Fudekara
Liliana Ponce
translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea
I first encountered Liliana Ponce’s Fudekara in Libreria MiCasa, a Buenos Aires bookstore whose name I later realized was more literal than I’d imagined. The shop was in the back room of a house in Villa Crespo, stuffed floor to ceiling with the thin spines of poetry collections. It was early 2015, and I’d just arrived in Buenos Aires on a Fulbright grant. I didn’t know anyone in the city and knew even less about what I was doing there: ostensibly I’d traveled across the hemisphere to teach English. I’d heard of Liliana by way of the indefatigable Reynaldo Jiménez, who had graciously fielded my cold email about contemporary Argentine poetry and replied with (among other things) a list of seven key names. Ponce’s, of course, appeared on that list: nearly every inch of the back cover of Fudekara is filled up by Jiménez’s blurb-cum-micro review, in which he declares Ponce’s broader body of work to be, “without exaggeration, one of the most personal to have appeared in Spanish in decades.”
Fudekara is both an exemplary and an exceptional text in Ponce’s oeuvre. It continues her practice of composing poems in sequences, a habit that dates to her first book, Trama continua. Yet where previous collections are constructed from multiple segments, some of which speak back to each other, Fudekara contains just one fourteen-poem cycle. And where earlier series like “Diario” toy with the idea of using a calendrical form to structure Ponce’s obsession with memory and nothingness, Fudekara engages more fully with the conceit. The collection presents itself as a record of a fourteen-day course in calligraphy, a setting that haunts the poems when it doesn’t directly structure them. As the author notes in her accompanying essay, the collection’s title is a neologism composed from two Japanese words that roughly translates to “from the brush.” For Ponce, the physical act of writing has never been more centered than it is here, as tracing the dark strokes of the ideogrammatic characters opens onto a meditation on the limits of art and embodiment.
I prepared my first translation of the sequence in the summer of 2016; since then, I’ve gone through countless drafts, tweaking and pruning the lines. I wanted to share these poems with Anglophone readers, but more importantly, I wanted to live inside her language. Translating Ponce’s work is—like the work itself—an exercise in attention. The materials she builds with are often delicate and understated, especially in contrast to those of her flamboyant contemporaries in the large and heterogeneous category of the neobaroque. As a translator, I’ve attempted to center the poems’ indeterminacy and the fleetingness of her images and to position the original text as my own “moving horizon.”
Fudekara is both an exemplary and an exceptional text in Ponce’s oeuvre. It continues her practice of composing poems in sequences, a habit that dates to her first book, Trama continua. Yet where previous collections are constructed from multiple segments, some of which speak back to each other, Fudekara contains just one fourteen-poem cycle. And where earlier series like “Diario” toy with the idea of using a calendrical form to structure Ponce’s obsession with memory and nothingness, Fudekara engages more fully with the conceit. The collection presents itself as a record of a fourteen-day course in calligraphy, a setting that haunts the poems when it doesn’t directly structure them. As the author notes in her accompanying essay, the collection’s title is a neologism composed from two Japanese words that roughly translates to “from the brush.” For Ponce, the physical act of writing has never been more centered than it is here, as tracing the dark strokes of the ideogrammatic characters opens onto a meditation on the limits of art and embodiment.
I prepared my first translation of the sequence in the summer of 2016; since then, I’ve gone through countless drafts, tweaking and pruning the lines. I wanted to share these poems with Anglophone readers, but more importantly, I wanted to live inside her language. Translating Ponce’s work is—like the work itself—an exercise in attention. The materials she builds with are often delicate and understated, especially in contrast to those of her flamboyant contemporaries in the large and heterogeneous category of the neobaroque. As a translator, I’ve attempted to center the poems’ indeterminacy and the fleetingness of her images and to position the original text as my own “moving horizon.”
Liliana Ponce was born in 1950 in Buenos Aires and is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature and writing. She holds a degree in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and has published five books of poetry in Argentina: Trama continua (Corregidor, 1976), which was awarded the Primer Premio Fondo Nacional de las Artes; Composición (Ultimo Reino, 1984); Teoría de la voz y el sueño (tsé-tsé, 2001); Fudekara (tsé-tsé, 2008); and Paseante y Huésped (Club Hem, 2016). Her poems, essays, and translations of Japanese poetry have appeared widely in both Argentinian and international literary journals, and her work has been selected for inclusion in numerous anthologies, including Antología de la poesía argentina (Casa de las Américas, 1999), Poesía Erótica Argentina (Manantial, 2002), Antología de poetas argentinas 1940–1950 (Ediciones del Dock, 2006), and 200 años de poesía argentina (Alfaguara, 2010). Her work has been previously translated into French and was included in Voix d´Argentine (Le Temps des cerises, 2009).
Michael Martin Shea is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. He was the 2015 Fulbright Fellow to Argentina. His translation of Liliana Ponce's Diario (Diary) was published as a bilingual chapbook by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018. Additional translations from Fudekara have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast and New England Review. He is also the author of three chapbooks of poetry and hybrid writing, and his writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fence, jubilat, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia, PA, where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
