Día 2
Los signos multiplican los instantes. El signo y la repetición forman una corriente de confianza, de liberación. En esa corriente debo aprender a ahogar la ansiedad. Imagino un nuevo lugar en la mente que nace de este punto material, duro, pétreo. Es un punto inorgánico e indefinido, como lo que inicia la posibilidad. El comienzo de la posibilidad no es aún el comienzo.
Esta noche, el ojo reemplazará al oído. El ojo reemplazará a la respiración.
Día 4
No es el trazo mi obsesión, sino esto actuado que se inicia a la madrugada, con un insomnio puesto en la luz de imágenes de ayer, de otra tarde.
Me impongo un exilio en redes de polvo, me ahogo (pero ocultándome en la indiferencia).
En realidad, multiplico mi cuerpo, multiplico mi mente, y donde tenía brazo y mano, y donde había sed, abandono la idea de persona.
Día 5
En silencio, dibujo fragmentos de signos, trazos, como ejercicios.
Al repetir, empecé a olvidar mi mano. Pero aún el camino será exterior por mucho tiempo.
La curva refugia maneras de envolver el blanco.
Día 6
Inestable la conducta; acaso como escudo mi pincel se suelta en respuestas a la luna.
Persigo una habitación imposible, conceder lo dicho a otro oído, a otra ley.
Día 8
Noche de tormenta. La tormenta no está en el cielo o en el aire, sino que viaja en raíces, de soplo en soplo en lo animado, y va dibujando puertas.
Es el hechizo de esta hora tambaleante bajo la corriente de una sangre simbólica.
Debo inventar otra mano. Como en un baile, hacer movimientos de coreografía sabidos, ponerse en el puente que va del saber a la acción.
Ausente estaba en el ascenso—mi oído se dejaba encantar.
Nunca me soltaré de estas amarras.
La boca se sella en el agua, inesperado grito se acalla en los pedazos de las palabras. Nada se mueve, sin embargo.
La tormenta desgaja el anochecer de septiembre, lo convierte en instantes de ansiedad, de espera, de huellas vacías—que ya supieras cómo la curva desemboca en el silencio, cómo el negro acuoso hace ramas de sauce y el negro intenso se agrieta en rocas y nubes.
Hacia el oeste, los árboles metálicos quedaron quietos—iban por pasadizos rozando el aire. Bajo la piel entró la luz lunar. Entró y fue el principio—no quiere que recuerde y resguarda en la oscuridad esta tela insípida y dolorosa.
Día 11
Monotonía. Del pedazo, buscar otro pedazo. De él, otro. Al ir dividiendo el espacio y el tiempo, el ojo se va alejando, hasta que el blanco ocupa la mano.
Delante del papel, el torso inclinado, el brazo alargado. Pero mi mente se ata demasiado a la madera.
El río, línea mansa, crea un horizonte móvil.
Día 12
De la dirección de la fuerza puede inferirse una virtud. Resistir, en otra dirección, permite descubrir la imitación, la parodia. Pero ahora no puede más que permanecer en el centro, considerar la nebulosa del hábito.
No sé agazaparme como animal, o como flor, gradualmente cerrar hojas orgánicas.
Las palabras apoyadas en la garganta, áridas, perdidas, se adelgazan. La mirada esquiva se apresura a no modelar el aire y se evapora.
Escribir cada trazo sin guía. Escribir morosamente.
Día 14
Fantasmas cambian la mano. Tu voz es emocional, desmedida. El relato razona en la memoria. No desmiente la sed, lo fugaz, la bravura del mar, el perfil de los árboles, la sombra de la roca.
Fantasmas cambian los ojos. Amenazan ceñir otro cuerpo a la cabeza.
Tu voz ha creado hilos que crecen en las pupilas.
Escribo. Escribo signos. Escribo muerta. Escribo otra. Escribo para no hablar, para no mirar.
de Fudekara
Liliana Ponce
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.
