If I whip you or you whip me, in your red-bandana crime,
in the atmosphere of a torch-lit pavilion,
in the rock garden, police raid of destiny
in a black night near the sea,
an ancient remorse for having murdered the brother
precisely for wearing a red bandana
relentlessly embedded in matte flesh, burnt on the island.
Toward the paradise of my dreams, in the bow, he, the bulky man,
with melancholy grin at the diagonal cumulus,
she, with golden hair and sailor’s cap,
whose short visor cuts her face diagonally;
if I love you, it’ll not be for the rudder nor fear nor an oar;
in the next scene the angel considers suicide.
But leave the Caribbean and head for the Golden Gate.
There green light shines in the backlight of the streetlamp,
and the wolf, with its teeth, cuts out its prey.
The sea turns you red as it does the red instrument,
foreskin first, shark or seabass
become dolphins on a shield; the city and the whale,
heraldic lineages affix you to the wall.
But, if we say goodbye between sudden dusk like an interference
of the climate and the timetable,
the civic abyss will make life
a question of coughing or ice, the virgin lad
deeply buried by the hungers of a knife.
In support and in delight
the blind man seeks his seasoning;
although a greedy windfall
upsets reason.
The blind glance, the empty pond,
and where I look for gold marrows of forearms
have been put in debt up to my ass.
So the lesson in anatomy parts muscle and nerve,
marinates between fingers dried cords on hooks
that tomorrow we’ll have to endure on the gray chopping block or pig meat.
Endure them like a loan made by the state,
following the law of greatest profit
or the abstract law of the largest number,
infinite like an ox prod.
So the dying to one side
and on the other him for whom they kill the heifer or call the thing off.
To study the stars with the geometric method
or to weigh down the dragging foot.
If you snug the necktie around your throat,
or, if you don’t wear a necktie, you make from the luminous Adam’s apple
citronella at the edge of the mirror, phosphorescent,
in the foyer of your nakedness,
in both cases you will leave in triumph.
Because the battle has not been decided with your own cremation.
Finally, knowing that thefts occur at night,
that sunrays only gild the last stages of sensation,
already at early dawn you will have fled.
A fish grabs your penis, a hook your neck,
a kingdom your waist, the flood of your teeth your ancestry,
the whitewash of torture the needle,
the rigidity of jade your eyes,
the bag of your body thread,
the tree upon the blazing up of your thread,
wind-tousled bushes, your new consistency,
as green grass your falling body.
The Lady from Shanghai
Roberto Echavarren
translated from the Spanish by Donald Wellman
Is there a creature for whom gender is not a transformative conundrum? Consider the adolescent who wishes never to grow up. Many harbor a secret Peter Pan. Wendy does too? Still the age of polymorphic bliss may prove to have been an adult projection. Peter, after all, is circumscribed by certain male attributes, his attraction to swordplay and feats of prowess that excite other boys. Still, like any eight-year-old, he is sexless. In performance he is often she, flying on guywires over the arena. When did the use of weapons become gendered? Kristeva writes about this somewhere. Is Joan of Arc a transgender figure or a girl who saw herself as unconstrained by gender?
Roberto Echavarren engages images that originate in a celebrated androgyny. He’s in love with boys who are girls. He has written of “we, men by definition / but not from taste or comportment” (“Inquest” in The Espresso Between Sleep and Wakefulness, Cardboard House, 2016). These men refuse sexual assignment at the level of genitalia and stage androgynous performances, like Jim Harrison or David Bowie. “The Lady from Shanghai,” first published in 1980, flirts with images in which genders are crossed, indecisively enchanting and androgynous. In Echavarren’s poetry such frames or actions are moments of fetishized fascination, images of inversion, of liminality, invested with transgendered intimacies and celebration. The stream of allusions troubles the surface; the baroque surface of the poem neutralizes gendered codes while celebrating phallic and androgynous excess.
Roberto Echavarren engages images that originate in a celebrated androgyny. He’s in love with boys who are girls. He has written of “we, men by definition / but not from taste or comportment” (“Inquest” in The Espresso Between Sleep and Wakefulness, Cardboard House, 2016). These men refuse sexual assignment at the level of genitalia and stage androgynous performances, like Jim Harrison or David Bowie. “The Lady from Shanghai,” first published in 1980, flirts with images in which genders are crossed, indecisively enchanting and androgynous. In Echavarren’s poetry such frames or actions are moments of fetishized fascination, images of inversion, of liminality, invested with transgendered intimacies and celebration. The stream of allusions troubles the surface; the baroque surface of the poem neutralizes gendered codes while celebrating phallic and androgynous excess.
Roberto Echavarren has several prize-winning books of poetry to his credit, most recently Centralasia (Xalapa, 2014; bilingual edition Sao Paulo, 2014) and El monte nativo (Buenos Aires, 2015). Recently published in English translation by Donald Wellman and the author is The Espresso between Sleep and Wakefulness [El expreso entre el sueño y la vigilia] (Cardboard House, 2016). A native of Uruguay and professor of world literature, long associated with New York University, Echavarren is the co-editor, along with José Kozer and Jacobo Sefamí, of Medusario: muestra de poesía Latinoamericana (Medusario: A Survey of Latin-American Poetry), the leading anthology of poetry in the Neo-Baroque style. Echavarren’s critical prose addresses the distinctive characteristics of innovative Latin American poetry. His poetry is definitive. Rooted in both surrealism and contra-constructivist practices, it employs both dislocation and disjunctive series.
Donald Wellman is a poet and translator. As editor of O.ARS, he produced a series of annual anthologies of experimental work, including Coherence (1981) and Translations: Experiments in Reading (1984). His poetry is projectivist and works with sources from several languages. His collections include Roman Exercises (Talisman House, 2015), The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres, 2013), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009), and Fields (Light and Dust, 1995). He has translated books by Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, Yvan Goll, and Roberto Echavarren. Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages is forthcoming (2016).
