#207: A Translation and a Poem by John Oliver Simon

~This poem was previously published in Cider Press Review (2010).

LUNA  NUEVA

La joven

en la mesa se pregunta

Si la luz

de la vela es suficiente:

La sombra

de su vaso le responde

Con un sí

que se parece al viento.

—Alberto Blanco

(Mexico, 1951)

NEW MOON

The girl

at the table asks herself

If the light

of the candle is enough:

The shadow

of her glass replies

With a yes

that resembles the wind.

—Translated by John Oliver Simon

*****

~This poem was previously published in Poetry Flash (1993).

Isla Negra

Since there’s no way of calling up the dead

I should write you a letter on your gray fence

on the driftwood whale’s ribs stuck in the sand

between your house and the old ocean

that laughed to bust its gut to find

itself discovered by discoverers,

stout Cortez, innocent Polynesians, all

the ancient children in my classroom, and you

not first nor last among them, don Pablo

el Poeta with a capital P, accumulator

of sea-shell spirals, of escaleras secreted

by caracoles thinking of self-armored symmetry,

of wings of jaguar eyes navigating the rain forest,

Captain of sails whispered into bottles,

haunting rummage sales and shipwrecks

on every spit and cove of coast

for bare-breasted oaken sopranos that once

cleaved the salt air on a ship’s prow,

unpacking gargoyles and virgins,

well-hung ebony icons and the fiery horse

from childhood still exhaling steam

in the farthest corner of the house

forever unfinished as any Inca fortress

with no right angles out of living rock,

rocking as every wave holds its round breath

and kettledrums on granite flecked with shale

past the bar inscribed with the names of the dead

where only you could mix sinister potions

and the hassock stained green with your scribbling

and the quilts of seven continents

that drained toward sleep in the only arms

of the woman before that and after that

and the scorpion crawling down into the waves

and the walls of Communism washing out to sea

and what for, señor Poeta, why all this pyramid

of flotsam, museum or mound or house or book

of splendidly attributed trash, if it only

could be read aloud after your voice

was choked with sand, could only be seen

entirely after the jackboots hammered

on the mouths of all your doors,

could only be ignored for all your excess

of sunlight and syntax and splendor

after they carried the waxen figurine

that was your body into a hollow frozen

concrete niche with no more monument

than the name not even yours from birth

and the few remembered flames of flowers?

Here and now, where the final stones of your poems

ares smashed forever under the laughing ocean,

I let go of the hands of my own dead,

mother and brother and father and father,

I let them swim away like thoughts.

Accept them, dear Pablo, on your black island.

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEMS

               New Moon / Luna Nueva and Isla Negra stem from my  many-decades involvement with the poetry and cultures of Latin America. I met Alberto Blanco in 1984, when he read in a grand Homenaje on the occasion of the 70^th birthday of Octavio Paz. He charmed me by dedicating his reading “to the poets up here” (on the stage) “and the poets down there” (in the audience).  Luna Nueva is from Alberto’s first book, Giros de Faros (1979), which I translate as Circling Beacons. The book as a whole is a mandala of symmetrical pieces.  In Spanish, this little poem is structured as diptyches of  three and seven syllables.  I didn’t attempt to reproduce the syllabary literally in English, opting instead for the naked clarity of direct translation.  Alberto’s work has been widely translated into English by myself and others, with a volume from City Lights (Dawn of the Senses, 1994) but we are still looking for a publisher for  Circling Beacons.

               Isla Negra was written on my first visit to Chile in 1992. I made the pilgrimage to all three of the houses of Pablo Neruda: La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, and the unforgettable Isla Negra directly on the coast.  Everywhere I was struck by the Poet’s obsessive collectionism, detailed in this poem. I was surprised to find that Neruda was rejected by the young Chilean poets in favor of the genial but comparatively negligible Nicanor Parra. Much as, I reflected, we prefer the colloquial hominess of William Carlos Williams to the larger achievement of Eliot. This poem won second prize in a contest  that Poetry Flash ran for poems about Neruda. First place was Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

*****

ABOUT JOHN OLIVER SIMON

John Oliver Simon is one of the legendary poets of the Berkeley Sixties who has grown by steady dedication to his calling. Published from Abraxas to Zyzzyva, he is a distinguished translator of contemporary Latin American poetry, and received an NEA fellowship for his work with the great Chilean surrealist Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). He is President of California Poets In The Schools, where he has worked since 1971, and was the River of Words 2013 Teacher of the Year. He is fluent in Spanish and enjoys studying the Chinese written characters. His ninth full collection of poems is GRANDPA'S SYLLABLES (White Violet Press, 2015). For his lifetime of service to poetry, the Mayor of Berkeley, California proclaimed January 20, 2015, as John Oliver Simon Day. On May 14, 2016, the Berkeley Poetry Festival presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.