Autumn
Upon the sudden calm
of the water
the wind plays
ancient arpeggios
Here is music
forbidden to the human voice
Spacious laments
that make the foliage quiver
Overtones
of creaking branches
and the rustle of dry leaves
Crescendo incessantly roving
the Pampa's limitless plain
Old
Bill Explains a Poem
The poet says that when he went back to visit the lake
he'd known as a child --he recalled the image
of the swans
--still elegantly swimming there--
from a new perspective
he
guessed their number
---at nine and fifty/ a mathematical operation
that did not pretend to be an exact count --of the quantity of birds
who --in the clear green water --were shaking
their
long
necks --and
flashing --the color --of their extended wings
--toward
the heavy sky...
his sole concern
he says -- was the music of the
cipher-------------"the rest just
seemed irrelevant"
W.B.Y. in
memoriam
The object in its natural state
“no ideas but in things"
William Carlos Williams
The old rails - burnished by the friction of the
wheels
of the speeding underground trains ----gleam in the
dim light
that illumines - the long tunnel
and within that straight glimmer - of metal
receding toward
the brightly lit next station -----------------
dwells the poem
to Jorge Rivelli
Jo Anne Engelbert (Kentucky,
1933) is Professor Emerita of Latin American Literature at
Montclair State University where she established the Spanish Program in
Translation and Interpretation. She has translated short stories, poems
and essays by forty Latin American writers, including Isabel Allende,
Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Ariel Dorfman Her work Return of
the River by Honduran poet Roberto Sosa won the National
Translation Award in 2003 from the American Literary Translators
Association. In addition to articles on translation pedagogy, she has published
Macedonio Fernández and the Latin American New Novel (New York
University Press, 1978) and Macedonio: Selected Writings in
Translation (Latitude Press, Texas, 1984). She has taught
literature and translation at universities in Puerto Rico and
Nicaragua. Since retirement she lives in St. Augustine, Florida and has
taught poetic translation at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
Esteban Moore (Buenos Aires, 1952)
Poet, essayist and translator. His eight books of poetry are included in
the collection Poems (1982 - 2007) (Córdoba, 2015). His essays
are collected in the volume Versiones y apropiaciones (Córdoba,
2012). His poetic translations from the English include the poetry
of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, La poesía como un arte insurgente (Córdoba,
2018). In 1990 he was invited to The Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, where he
initiated a translation project, and to Vienna, where he taught poetry and
translation at the Schüle fur Dichtung in Wien. In 2005 and
2010 he gave seminars at the Escuela de Poesía de Medellín on the poetics
of the Beats. In 2012 the University of Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela, awarded
him the Alejo Zuloaga Order in poetry. He serves on the boards of the magazines Prometeo,
published by the
Medellín International Poetry Festival and
Poesía, University of Carabobo, Venezuela.
He has won support grants and the
Poetry Prize from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, a public cultural
institution run by the Argentine government.
