Ten Poems

Eva Veiga

This is the mineral hour of twilight
when the crystal
dreams
of being the incandescent bubble
of defeated metal.
Dreaming is the extreme temptation to become confused.
On the back of horses
the mountain goes down to the plains.
At the foot of the path a tree
against the light
the fruit hangs the way a moment
flares
flower of time.
The world is the shells’ secret.

from Landscapes of the Void (Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 1999)




I believe in the hope
that redeems the present from being past.




This salty flower
doesn’t fit
inside my chest.
My mother laughs or cries
like a river,
and saves me.
I am a girl,
and she is well aware
that the sea
doesn’t flow,
it floods.

 
 

One day you reach this extension
of the look.
You don’t know where you’re coming from
because you’re not coming from a place.
Time brought you as the wind brings
opportune chance.
You’re here
for good now
ring of forgetfulness or memory.
Impossible, though,
not to be light and its scar.

from Light and Its Scars (Sociedad de Cultura Valle-Inclán, 2005)




And they gave you a name
to which existence could cling
like ivy running across
a crystal void.




Light
is a butterfly
opening and closing
in your eyes.
The honey
made by flowers and bees
in their secret chambers
in the dark.
The voice
that dissipates the mists
of fear and makes the heart
leap for joy.
The wind
that comes from beyond the sea
and suddenly opens the door
to oranges and lemons.
The ring
of time in your fingers
weaving a dream in the mirrors
as the sun and moon do
when they’re coming up with the night and day.




Mother,
the ships are leaving and I must go
until the fingers of the dream stop
weaving the waters.




I go down to the river
and in the depths of its transparency
gaze at the pebbles arranged
in random, barely disturbed order
and summoned by the intimate glare
of the current.
Apparently unconnected, the polished stones
enact
their deep existence
each
sheltering a fish or an absence.
And I wonder
if someone will be capable of distinguishing
them all by the truth of their sound:
We could then decipher
what the water says,
what time says.




In which part of the journey did
your laziness and the one now
kneeling down to pray for you nest?
We are little more than an indecisive breath
in the velocity of light.
How to erect and take possession
of such a strange identity?
Who do my teeth recognize
when they bite that star you carry on your forehead?
The water leaps among the stones,
but remembers nothing of a dark spring.




Beautiful
this light that has just arrived
in this moment still free
of word, stone, or blue
that might signal it.
Light that tinges nothingness
with immense transparency.

translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne

Read the original in Galician

Listen to the original read by the poet:

For some strange reason, I decided to translate these poems by starting with the last one in each book and working my way backwards. This seemed to me to gather them up as the tide gathers stones on the beach, rakes them up in its fingers. Translation is a voice, the voice of the author interpreting the poems. Translation is hearing, not doing. Being open, not closed. It is not about activity, which is how I understood it in the beginning, when I would lug large dictionaries around and flick my way through them. Now I know most of the words and can afford to leave the dictionaries be, let them settle, so that I can hear the wind. The wind is what carries the translation to our ears. For me, the beauty of these poems lies in “deciphering what the water and time have to say.” Poetry should speak to us like the environment. This means we are in communication.

Eva Veiga (b. 1961 in Ombre, Pontedeume, northwest Galicia) is the author of eight poetry collections to date, including Paisaxes do baleiro (Landscapes of the Void, 1999) and A luz e as súas cicatrices (Light and Its Scars, 2005), from which these poems are taken. She studied English at university and has had an intense and successful career as a journalist on the Galician newspaper El Ideal Gallego and on Galician TV, where she is known for directing and presenting cultural programs. She presented the TV documentary on the history of Galician art, Galicia no tempo (Galicia in Time), which received an honorable mention in the Media Save Art 91 meeting. Her poetry has been similarly recognized. In 2014 she received the Galician-Language Writers Association’s award for best work of poetry and in 2016 the Spanish Critics’ Award for Galician poetry.

Jonathan Dunne translates literature from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. His translations of work by the Galician writer Manuel Rivas are published by Penguin Random House. He directs the publishing house Small Stations Press, the largest publisher of Galician literature in English, which includes the poetry collections Galician Songs and New Leaves by the Galician poet Rosalía de Castro in Erín Moure’s translation. A list of their publications can be found on their website here. He has written three books on the English language: The DNA of the English Language (2007) about English word connections, The Life of a Translator (2013) about coincidence in translation, and Stones Of Ithaca (2019) about the connection between language and the environment.