Tres poemas de Un libre favor

These poems are from Un libre favor (The Face of the Quartzes), the sixth book (not counting the essay At the Limit) by Chus Pato that I’ve translated in the past eighteen years. The first four books held the challenges of her prose forms, which were prose but not-prose, poetry in prose, and included interviews, plays, computer scrolling imitations, letters, radio shows, and invented women characters moving in histories of Europe and its migrations and changes, through cities and men and each other, in ways that I, a Canadian, had to learn. Pato’s run-on sentences, comma splices, and other sedimented syntactical effects both interfered with and intensified semantic values, or meaning, which was insolent, refractory, sincere, hilarious, and wise all at once.

Her most recent two books of poems turn again to the use of condensed “lyric” verses with line-breaks that draw syntax tight in all its possibilities, resulting in what I call a “compound syntax,” built of particles and absences, which in itself has semantic value and resonance. Meanings vibrate, never quite settling down.

With these poems, I have to translate not just the meanings of words but their weights, register. I aim to both sense and “situate” their multiple and paradoxical meaning-values in a language that is differently structured, that carries ambiguity and presence in different ways. The result, to a reader, appears very simple! Yet the resonances in English are necessarily different, as readers in English do not share Pato’s Galician history, and “The Face of the Quartzes” is a book of nativity, of grounding in a native land—in the birds, waters, bridges of her native city of Ourense.

Without that grounding (though I hint to it here), the poems read as more eerie, more sombre, more symbolic, more ominous. I am intrigued by this passage of weight and register, as much as I am in “meaning.” The poems come across as sombre but lively, as prophetic and postapocalyptic, stark but humane, rooted in the here and now.

The final poem, “Night is falling,” is for Francisco Cortegoso, a young and vital poet who left our poetry-earth in October 2016 at the age of thirty-one, leaving his own incredible body of work. No selection of Galician poets today would be complete without invoking him, and Pato’s poem does this beautifully, in a funeral march that is a cry of life and language.