de precipitaciones

Mateo Díaz Choza

esta gota
ha sido
 
arrojada
 
al mundo
de los objetos
 
precarios y
duraderos
 
 
 
 
ahora es
una
 
entre sillas
zapatos
bicicletas
rumas de papel
 
 
 
 
 
 
nadie
la ha visto
desprenderse
de la boca del cielo
 
 
 
nadie sabe
quién ha apretado
el gatillo celeste
 
 

*
 
nadie sabe muchas cosas
 
las tuyas y las mías
por ejemplo
 
                                                                        los niños
                                                                        sentados en el auto
                                                                        los pies
                                                                        sobre una caja llena
                                                                        de ajos
 
la quinta
vista a través del
metal oxidado
pintarrajeado
de la cerradura
 
 
                                                                        esta boca
                                                                        ha sido
 
                                                                        arrojada
 
                                                                        al mundo
                                                                        de los objetos
 
                                                                        parlantes
                                                                        que decepcionan
 
                                                                        el río rímac
                                                                        alberto hidalgo
                                                                        la academia
                                                                        por ejemplo
 
 
 
 
 
por eso
ama la bala
 
                                                                        por eso
 
                                                                        tú has escrito palabras
                                                                        yo he escrito palabras
 
                                                                        por eso
 
 
decimos duradero
a lo que deja de durar
en algún momento
 
de lo otro no sabemos
 
 
una gota
dura
desde que se
 
precipita
 
hasta
que se consume
en el fondo
de la página
el lavabo
blanco
 
 
                                                                        tus palabras
 
                                                                        sobre una caja llena
                                                                        de ajos
                                                                       
                                                                        sobre un soldadito que sabe
                                                                        una canción
 
                                                                        tus palabras
                                                                        duran
                                                                        desde que aprietas
                                                                        el gatillo de tu boca
                                                                        hasta mi boca
 
 
                                                                        mi boca llena
                                                                        de tus palabras
 


*
 
un cuerpo
no se consume
 
como se
gasta
un objeto
o se evapora
una gota
 
                                                                        si un cuerpo
                                                                        se consume
 
                                                                        hay que inventar
                                                                        palabras
 


*
 
hay un conocimiento
que procede de la
 
separación
 
de la distancia
en que dos cuerpos
 
se reconocen
ajenos
 
                                                                        esta gota y aquella
                                                                       
                                                                        la gota cantada y la gota escrita
 
                                                                        la gota roja y la página en blanco
 
                                                                        la gota roja y mi boca
 
                                                                        tu boca y mi boca
he sido
 
arrojado
 
al mundo
de la materia
 
indiferente
 
bosta enamorada
cenizas
el cielo que se precipita
 
 
                                                                                    con las palabras
                                                                                    que he recogido
 
                                                                                    las tuyas
                                                                                    las de nadie
                                                                                    las palabras siempre son de
                                                                                    nadie
 
                                                                                    he construido
                                                                                    una casa
 
 
una casa
 
un techo de palabras
 
para resistir tormentas verdaderas


 
*
 
y cuando salimos        a la intemperie
hundimos        nuestras pisadas en la espuma
del marnieve       olas derramadas sobre una calle repleta
 
 
de cubos de sal            nadie nos dice cómo suena
el trino            que el copopájaro captura en pleno vuelo
y sumerge en el aguaescarcha           el océano de hielo
 
 
nadie nos dice             cuándo de la boca del cielo
  nos caen las palabras                 mudas de la nieve
hermosas & por eso           vacías de consuelo
 
 
& por eso
salimos a la intemperie                para a nadie
escuchar
 
 

*
 
construir una casa
 
esperar la tormenta
 
abandonarla

Read the English translation

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.