Enerxía secreta
1
Paríchesme. Traía ás.
O sangue dos mortos estaba gardado
na artesa.
Era entroido. Eu cría na sinceridade aberta dos acordeóns.
Hai neve, moita neve nos campos e na lingua que falo,
dentro do estómago político das vacas.
2
Paríchesme golpeando con suavidade
na percusión difícil do meu corpo.
As paredes teatrais das fontes rebentaban
no cristal da noite.
Eu voaba.
3
Tiñas catro fillos, e corenta anos.
O parto foi na cociña dunha casa con chan de terra.
O meu sangue era un lazo co teu ventre avultado.
4
Bailabas, e sachabas na leira.
Eu tiña a tose ferina e
morría nos teus brazos.
5
—Teño dúas madriñas. Dous prados. Dúas historias. Dous trens. Son dúas mulleres, dúas irmás, dúas veciñas, dous barquiños.—
6
—Naquel bautizo, no ano 1972, estivo presente a miña madriña Marisol e quixo poñerme o nome dunha pequeniña virxe daquela igrexa escura, fría e preciosa. Tamén estiveron / presentes e ausentes / a miña madriña Virtudes e o meu padriño Antonio. Eles vivían en Alemaña, na emigración das flores.
Os ollos de Vritudes son camelias azuis, grandes. Antonio de Hermida era íntegro, elegante. Morreu, pero seque facéndome regalos.—
A noite é a memoria . . .
7
Nai camuflada. Niño dos paxaros.
Aloumiño. Apertas lingüísticas.
Eu cazaba aves.
8
Quérote, cos meus dedos mutos.
Coas bolboretas do aire fago para ti un encaixe.
Coa forza cega dos meus ollos tristes
ensaio para ti unha obra de teatro.
Co meu amor fágoche
un bosque.
Aprendo a escoitar as nubes, a traballar a terra e a ler o ceo,
no teu colo.
9
—Paríchesme, e o teu home mirábate en silencio, sentíndose por dentro cheo de alegría e árbores. Eu traía sombras eléctricas.—
10
Berrabas,
comías sopas,
bebías Sanson.
11
Do teu corpo naceu o meu,
como se en min compartises
o misterio das pegas.
12
Ti non tiñas soños
porque as mulleres na aldea non soñan.
O atraso económico de Galicia
era unha forma de vangarda artística.
de Camuflaxe
Lupe Gómez
Gómez uses a deft minimalism and condensation of vocables, making possible an enunciation of story in the poems with just a few juxtaposed images, sounds, and spacings, utterly uncluttered. Hers is a poetry that ignites both fact and affect in a tender and tenacious salute to the riots that shore us up as beings in memory: our culture, nation, language, and the light that glows from each, illuminating us to one another. Her work has always been feminist; it has always affirmed the female body in all the difficulties it encounters in living in the world, doesn’t shy away. Her Camouflage is a gorgeous book-long work of grief and mourning, in tune with the ways of the ancient Kaddish and other prayers in that it serves too as a way to praise life. The challenge in translating Lupe Gómez is to retain the lightness, the feel of words in the mouth and their echoes and relation, the gentle movement, all without overcharging the text in English.
Lupe Gómez (b. 1972) is a Galician poet, dramatist, children’s writer, fiction writer, and journalist born in the village of Fisteus in A Coruña province of Galicia in northern Spain. She has published fourteen books, and her work has been translated into English and Spanish, among other languages. She is a meticulous commentator on village memory and on the lives of women, young, old, in family, alone. Camuflaxe (Camouflage), her newest book of poetry (Chan de Pólvora, 2017), is a gentle and loving elegy for her mother and for the rural village life into which she was born but which no longer exists as it did even in the seventies.
Erín Moure recently released a collection of poems, The Elements (House of Anansi Press, 2019), “a book of Dad.” In it, poems about and for Moure’s late father—accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers—are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. “The Face of the Quartzes” is her sixth translation from the work of Galician poet Chus Pato. In spring 2020, she published two new translations: a sequence from Juan Gelman’s Argentinian “translations” of the English poet John Wendell, Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Eulalia Books) and, from the rich mountain Galician of Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands, Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books). Forthcoming in fall 2020 are: a translation of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug), and Toots fait la Shiva, avenue Minto (Le Noroît, tr. Colette St-Hilaire), the French version of her memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star Books, 2017). A forty-year retrospective, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press.
