ezra pound

and the days are not full enough

and the nights are not full enough

and life slips by like a field mouse

not shaking the grass.

I do not choose to dream; there cometh on me
Some strange old lust for deeds.
As to the nerveless hand of some old warrior
The sword-hilt or the war-worn wonted helmet
Brings momentary life and long-fled cunning,
So to my soul grown old -
Grown old with many a jousting, many a foray,
Grown old with namy a hither-coming and hence-going -
Till now they send him dreams and no more deed;
So doth he flame again with might for action,
Forgetful of the council of elders,
Forgetful that who rules doth no more battle,
Forgetful that such might no more cleaves to him
So doth he flame again toward valiant doing.

'

gale-force hearts

I'll tell you how the sun rose

a ribbon at a time.

clambering

Meditacion en el Umbral

By Rosario Castellanos

No, no es la solucion
tirarse bajo un tren como la Ana de Tolstoy
ni apurar el arsenico de Madame Bovary
ni aguardar en los paramos de Avila la visita
del angel con venablo
antes de liarse el manto a la cabeza
y comenzar a actuar.

Muro de Lamentaciones

By Rosario Castellanos

Parte VII

Te amo hasta los limites extremos;

la yame palpitante de los dedos,

la punta vibratoria del cabello.

Creo en Ti las parpados cerrados.

Creo en Tu fuego siempre renovado.

Mi corazon se ensancha por contener Tus ámbitos.

Ok now this is my rough attempt at a translation of the poem above. It's tragic, I'm sure.

I improvised a bit (particularly on the last line), so it isn't a word for word effort at translation, but I'd like to know if I'm on the right track. If any native or fluent Spanish speakers would like to help me out and correct me where I'm wrong, I'd really appreciate it- and please share your thoughts and impressions, too.

Wailing Wall

Part VII

I love you to the point where I cannot love you more;

Trembling yolk on fingers,

the vibratory tips of hair.

I believe in You closed eyelids.

I believe in Your ever-renewed fire.

My heart expands to contain the scope of your being.

Escritorias de Roberto Bolaño

SUCIO, MAL VESTIDO

En el camino de los perros mi alma encontró

a mi corazón. Destrozado, pero vivo,

sucio, mal vestido y lleno de amor.
En el camino de los perros, allí donde no quiere ir nadie.

Un camino que sólo recorren los poetas

cuando ya no les queda nada por hacer.

¡Pero yo tenía tantas cosas que hacer todavía!

Y sin embargo allí estaba: haciéndome matar

por las hormigas rojas y también

por las hormigas negras, recorriendo las aldeas

vacías: el espanto que se elevaba

hasta tocar las estrellas.

Un chileno educado en México lo puede soportar todo,

pensaba, pero no era verdad.

Por las noches mi corazón lloraba. El río del ser, decían

unos labios afiebrados que luego descubrí eran los míos,

el río del ser, el río del ser, el éxtasis

que se pliega en la ribera de estas aldeas abandonadas.

Sumulistas y teólogos, adivinadores

y salteadores de caminos emergieron

como realidades acuáticas en medio de una realidad metálica.
Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones.

Sólo el amor y la memoria.

No estos caminos ni estas llanuras.

No estos laberintos.

Hasta que por fin mi alma encontró a mi corazón.

Estaba enfermo, es cierto, pero estaba vivo.

DIRTY, POORLY DRESSED

[Sucio, Mal Vestido English translation by Laura Healy]

On the dogs’ path, my soul came upon

my heart. Shattered, but alive,

dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love.

On the dogs’ path, there where no one wants to go.

A path that only poets travel when they have nothing left to do.

But I still had so many things to do!

And nevertheless, there I was: sentencing myself to death

by red ants and also

by black ants, traveling through the empty villages:

fear that grew

until it touched the stars.

A Chilean educated in Mexico can withstand everything,

I thought, but it wasn’t true.

At night, my heart cried. The river of being, chanted

some feverish lips I later discovered to be my own,

the river of being, the river of being, the ecstasy

that folds itself into the bank of these abandoned villages.

Mathematicians and theologians, diviners

and bandits emerged

like aquatic realities in the midst of a metallic reality.

Only fever and poetry provoke visions.

Only love and memory.

Not these paths or these plains.

Not these labyrinths.

Until at last my soul came upon my heart.

It was sick, it’s true, but it was alive.

"A forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."

A piece of the afterword from the work 2666

Nobokov had synesthesia

In a world of lines and banality,

his letters were colored.

They were the colors themselves.

"In The Defense, Nabokov mentioned briefly how the main character's father, a writer, found he was unable to complete a novel that he planned to write, becoming lost in the fabricated storyline by 'starting with colors.'"

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

Lolita

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Speak, Memory

To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

Nobokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings

poems that take a thousand years to die,

scrumptious were our hearts.

World AIDS Day

1995

Rio de Janiero

; red

Lish