from precipitations

Mateo Díaz Choza

this drop
was
 
thrown
 
into the world
of objects
 
precarious and
durable
 
 
 
 
now it
is one
 
 
among chairs
shoes
bicycles
mounds of paper
 
 
 
 
nobody
saw it
drop
from the mouth of the sky
 
 
nobody knows
who squeezed
the celestial trigger



*
 
there is so much that nobody knows
 
yours and mine
for example
 
                                                                        the children
                                                                        in the car with
                                                                        their feet
                                                                        on a crate
                                                                        of garlic
 
the alleyway
seen through
the rusted
iron
of the lock
 
 
                                                                        a mouth
                                                                        is thrown
 
                                                                        into a world
                                                                        of speaking
 
                                                                        objects
                                                                        that deceive
 
                                                                        el río rímac
                                                                        alberto hidalgo
                                                                        academia
                                                                        for example
 
 
 
 
 
thus
you must love the bullet
 
 
                                                                        thus
 
                                                                        this urge to write
                                                                        yours and mine
 
                                                                        thus
 
we call durable
what one day
ceases to endure
 
about the other thing
we don’t know
 
 
a drop
endures
while
 
it rains
 
then
devours itself
in the depths
of the page
the white
sink
 
 
                                                                        your words
 
                                                                        on a crate full
                                                                        of garlic
                                                                       
on a little soldier
who knows a song
 
                                                                        your words
                                                                        endure
                                                                        so long as you squeeze
                                                                        the trigger of your mouth
                                                                        into mine
 
 
                                                                        my mouth full
                                                                        of your words
                       
 

*
 
a body
is not consumed
 
as an object
is exhausted
or a drop
is reconfigured
into air
 
                                                                        when a body
                                                                        is consumed
 
                                                                        words are
                                                                        called for
 


*

what we know
we learn from
 
the distance
 
through which
two bodies
 
recognize
each other
 
                                                                        this drop and that one
                                                                       
                                                                        the sung drop and the written
 
                                                                        the red drop and the white page
 
                                                                        the red drop and my mouth
 
                                                                        your mouth and mine
 
thrown
 
into the world
of indifferent
 
material
 
enamored garbage
ashes
precipitant sky
 
 
                                                                                    with the words
                                                                                    I have gathered
 
                                                                                    yours
                                                                                    no one’s
                                                                                    words always come from no one
 
                                                                                    I built
                                                                                    a simple house
 
 
a house
 
a roof of words
 
pitched against the storm of the actual
 
 
 
 
*
 
and when we stepped out of it            into the weather
we sank           our boots into the spume
of oceansnow    waves spilling onto the avenue replete
 
 
and salted                    no one will say how it sounded
the trill            that the flakebird snatches on the wing
and sings into the frostwater               ocean of ice
 
 
no one will say           when words fall from the mouth
  of the sky           snow-mute
beautiful & therefore         void of consolation
 
 
& that’s why
we went out into the weather       to listen
to no one
 
 

*
 
build yourself a house
 
wait for the storm
 
abandon it

translated from the Spanish by Lowry Pressly

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the original read by the poet:

These selections are taken from a much longer, book-length poem, called precipitaciones, which will be published in Lima this August by AUB (Álbum del Universo Bakterial). The full poem is formally quite daring and various, full of thematic, linguistic, and philosophical concerns that emerge gradually through an almost fugue- or jazz-like course of citation and transmutation. (Díaz Choza is also a jazz pianist.) But Díaz Choza goes about it somewhat contrarily: the subject, as it were, doesn’t instigate the complexity in the poem but emerges from it. Like the rain that appears frequently in its lines, the poem is explicit in each of its simple precipitants yet resists one’s efforts to delimit or comprehend the whole all at once. 
 
The first challenge was to cull a selection from that longer work that displays its versatility while also maintaining some degree of organic coherence and progression. The result is a selection that comes from three of the poem’s six sections that are, broadly speaking, concerned with the sorts of precipitation that most readily come to mind: “rain,” “snow,” and “fog.” The other three are “lightning,” “leaves/pages (hojas),” and “sand.”
 
The importance of repetition in the original posed several problems for its translation into English. We went back and forth, for instance, about whether to translate the frequent appearance of “nadie” into a consistent correlate (“nobody,” “no one,” etc.) or to vary it where necessary to preserve certain qualities of the Spanish prosody. In the original, “nadie” is used both to indicate the absence of people as well as a positive entity, like a palpable absence or Ulysses’s answer to Polyphemus. My hope is that the slight conative fissure between “nobody” and “no one”—the first calling attention to the absence of bodies, which, as with lovers and lost ones, doubles as a kind of spectral presence; the second invoking a sense of ineradicable connectedness, even in solitude, loss, and absence—will help English readers to hear the ambivalence and multitudes in Díaz Choza’s “nadie.”
 
And then there are lines and phrases, many quite simple, whose meaning could be unproblematically conveyed by a literal translation but whose rhythm and sound have a sort of magical conjuring effect that does not survive a direct translation to English. To take an example almost at random, the inner tension of the stresses and vowel sounds in the lines “tú has escrito palabras/ yo he escrito palabras” disappear entirely in the English “you have written words/ I have written words.” What in Spanish conveys a condensate of love and distance in the simplest of phrases sounds, well, stupid in English. A comparison of the translation to the original will reveal many such instances, where a bit of literal meaning was sacrificed to convey the effects of sound, meter, and image available in the original. This challenge is especially prominent in a poem like this one, which pulls a great deal of beauty, meaning, and complexity from a relatively simple, unshowy vocabulary.
 
Every translator is faced with similar decisions, I am sure. These are just a few I have tried to think carefully about and come to some agreement on with the poet. The challenge of a translator’s note is to avoid standing too long in the poem’s light.

Mateo Díaz Choza is a poet from Lima, Peru, whose work has been translated into multiple languages. His collections of poetry include Libro de la enfermedad (Book of illness; Paracaídas, 2015), Monólogos desde Babel (Monologues from Babel; Alastor Editores, 2020), and precipitaciones (precipitations), forthcoming this year from Álbum del Universo Bakterial. His recent collection of essays El poema es una cosa que circula: 8 ensayos para discutir la producción poética en el Perú (The poem is a thing that circulates: 8 essays to discuss poetic production in Peru) was published by La Balanza Taller Editorial in 2022. He currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is a PhD candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University.

Lowry Pressly is a writer of fiction, philosophy, and criticism who lives in Providence, Rhode Island and teaches at Harvard University. His work appears in a broad range of publications, including recently in Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Political Theory, and Public Books. He has two books nearing publication, one on privacy for Harvard University Press and a novel called The Foreigners.