from claus and the scorpion

Lara Dopazo Ruibal

we’ll leave the city devastated
with its dead fish and their eyes out of their sockets
and their guts exposed to be read
and scorned by the whole world.
we’ll lay down our tired bodies at the outskirts of the city
while it burns
and we’ll spit over its ashes
so we are part of the city forever.
with the debris we’ll make a dress
to protect ourselves from the fire.
with the debris, a dovecote of insects
a barn for the dead cattle 
a funeral
for each city dweller that we ourselves
strangle in the tremor’s frenzy
                                                                                    
in the tremor’s frenzy
the earth will fissure and
from the top
we will look at how the fissure devours everything


 
sometimes i dream that amador exists
as if amador could exist;
him, his conditions of possibility.
amador has two names
one is amador
the other is guadalupe
and i dream of calling him from the middle of a meadow
on a sunny afternoon
by his two names, amador guadalupe
and my voice makes the grass tremble
 
i love him like you only love
the flesh that comes out of you after bleeding

but i know that amador will never be
because the process of being seems so painful
like a sweltering afternoon
like the pangs in the chest after working too many long hours
for a miserable wage

it makes me incredibly sad to think about him
about his immense eyes
full of night
with the placenta tattooed on his iris.
it makes me anxious to think about him
in the stone emptiness
in a meadow that does not exist. in the docile sheep
that sleep at my feet
with their whiteness made of memory
 
loss, and all those things.
i want to write him dozens of letters
that I never will
for fear of being called crazy

so i make a flower crown
and braid my hair and gather it above my eyes
but since i have no hands, i can’t fix it well
and i flutter aimlessly tangled in the walls of the room.
i crash into the windows, smash into the doors of this house
that has no doors

my eyes absorb light
but they don’t identify forms
 
amador, it’s so sad that you don’t exist, i cry
it’s so sad
that empty chest. that empty womb.
to keep your name embroidered in the linen
as if you were dead
the shroud, the sheets, the rags
the tablecloths and the cutlery with flower designs
the scratched dishes from washing them so much
in the sink where the cows drink and i
clean the front part of my eyes
my mouth
 
but you don’t know what cows are
you’ll never look at a cow
 
amador, what a pretty name i gave you
what chest i bestowed on you, if not for
this fury. this hatred
this love, so unknown.
i cry out your name across the meadow and the neighbors
walk to the door of their home and look on
in fear
their feet full of wounds.
but beyond the meadow lies the sea
the calm mussel socks, the islands.
and beyond the meadow and the sea is you
painful amador. womb in flower.

 

i planted a fig tree inside my body
its roots are so strong they go through me

i sharpen the ax and i swing
with all my strength
but those roots never break

they only give in to fire
 
the fig tree grows inside me while the scorpion
hunts the ants coming out of my eyes
and eats them as if they were flies

translated from the Galician by Laura Cesarco Eglin

Read the original in Galician

Listen to the original read by the poet:

This is a selection of my translations of poems into English from claus e o alacrán (claus and the scorpion) by the Galician poet Lara Dopazo Ruibal. This poetry collection won the 2017 Fiz Vergara Vilariño Award, one of the most prestigious poetry competitions in the Galician language. In 2018 it was published by the publishing house Espiral Maior. It is a book that talks about the complexities of living in this world and the dynamics that are generated because and in spite of it. claus e o alacrán raises the questions: who do we become and how do we contend with violence and pain? And how do we draw strength from vulnerability?
 
claus e o alacrán (claus and the scorpion) is a political book, written in a non-hegemonic language, Galician, deeply influenced by queer theories. The book is read from the guts as well as from the heart and intellect. It also maintains the narrative tension with profoundly poetic writing. It is a book that needs several readings and rest, for it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth but a powerful message: even the most vulnerable being can be powerful and violent.
 
These poems are real. They speak of an aftermath of something horrible, and that aftermath is actually ongoing horror, it is the everyday struggle that the speaker goes through—the struggle that the readers go through. Dopazo Ruibal’s poems portray a rawness and vulnerability that mirror our own, and that is what makes them hard, that is what resonates with the readers’ experience. Yet another layer to this poetry collection is that there are no clear boundaries between what transpires within and outside the self. Amidst all the violence and destruction is the added difficulty the speaker has of forging their identity.
 
Amidst all these questions and pain and violence and loss, what gives us hope is Dopazo Ruibal’s poetry itself. It returns our humanity back to the world and to us.

Lara Dopazo Ruibal was born in Marín (Galicia, Spain). She has a B.A. in journalism and two M.A.s: one in international cooperation and one in theoretical and practical philosophy. Dopazo Ruibal has published four poetry collections and she is the co-editor and co-author of the experimental essay volume A través das marxes: Entrelazando feminismos, ruralidades e comúns. Her poetry collection ovella was awarded the Francisco Añón Prize in 2015, and with claus e o alacrán she received the Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize in 2017. Dopazo Ruibal was recently a resident artist at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome for the academic year 2018/2019.

Laura Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, (co•im•press, 2018), which won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She is the co-translator from the Portuñol of Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books, 2020). Her translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician have appeared in a variety of journals, including Timber, Exchanges, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, The Massachusetts Review, Cordella Magazine, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and The Puritan. Cesarco Eglin is the author of five poetry collections, including Calling Water by Its Name (trans. Scott Spanbauer; Mouthfeel Press, 2016), Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune; Lunamopolis, 2015), Reborn in Ink (trans. Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval; The Word Works, 2019) and the forthcoming chapbook Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.