Waking Candle
A candle lit, a little flame
A little birthday candle, insignificant
In the night not even immense
But only night, all of it night
Without the limits of light or time
Without wind, immobile, only the immobile air
Not dark, only night, all of it night
No stars, no surface on which to rest
A little birthday candle without a birthday
Only a little flickering candle consuming itself
Not even flustered
In the only always night
Not even immense
Smoke Signals
I raised a monument perennial like the air
The air corrupted by the years
By factories of voices that exhale it
And the wind is ever carrying
The air tainted by breaths
Exhaled by factories
Always of ephemeral modernity
Just more durable than voices
Exhaling the tainted air
Of words united in sentences
Sometimes wavering in questions
And great works of modernity
That the corrupted wind whirls up
It whisks the words and toxic smoke
Exhaled in unison
Papers the wind will turn to dust
Monuments of sweeping air
Visible if at all as indistinguishable mist
The smoke from factories of perennial nothingness
The Scene of the Crime
Our dead return to life in dreams
And then, upon awakening, death comes again
A bittersweet mingling of the cruel bliss
Of being with them again and the perpetual forlornness
Of their never remaining not for always
The maternal ghost embraced like air
Water between fingers blood
The dream desire of living with them again
And the terror of reliving death
Upon awakening to this awakening
The knife back at the scene of the crime
To open yet again the wound
No One Answers The Calls
Pablo Ingberg
translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Pablo Ingberg (Argentina, 1960) graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a degree in literature and the best grade average in his class. As a writer, he has published five volumes of poetry, one for children, one novel, and one collection of essays. As a translator, he has translated nearly hundred books Ancient Greek, Latin, English, and Italian (including Sappho, Sophocles, Virgil, Catullus, Austen, Melville, Whitman, Wharton, Joyce, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Svevo, and Pirandello). His poems, fiction, essays, and short translations have appeared in literary reviews and supplements in the Americas and Europe. He was the general editor of Shakespeare's Obras Completas (Complete Works; half of which he translated), and the director of a collection of Greek and Latin titles for Editorial Losada. He has received grants from Argentina, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, and Ireland, and the following awards for his translations: Theatre World (2000), Konex (2014), Aurora Borealis (2017). He has given seminars, lectures, and readings at universities, fairs, and festivals in several countries. He coauthored two translators’ rights bills, and organized an international conference on comparative translation. His poems have been translated into English and Italian.
Sarah Moses has published her translations and stories in Brick, Event, Slice, and Wasafiri, as well as in the chapbooks as they say (Socios Fundadores, 2016) and Those Problems (Proper Tales Press, 2017). She co-translated (with Carolina Orloff) Ariana Harwicz’s novel Die, My Love (Charco Press, 2017), which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, among other prizes. Her translation of Tender is the Flesh (Pushkin Press; Scribner) by Agustina Bazterrica was published in 2020, and her co-translation (with Tomás Downey) of Sos una sola persona (Socios Fundadores), a selection of poems by Stuart Ross, is due for release in late 2020. At the moment, she is working on a full-length collection of stories, the translation of Fernand Deligny’s writings on cinema for Leiden University Press, and Death By Water, poems by Alberto Manguel for Quattro Books. Originally from Toronto, Sarah has lived in France, Peru, and Brazil, and now spends much of the year in Buenos Aires.
