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| Esteban Moore (foto Horacio Spinetto) |
1
“Strahlenwind deiner sprache”
Paul Celan
the wind from the crystalline desert
soft as a terse sky –will reveal
infinite secret geometries of the universe/ the
smallest detail/ the dominion
of a greater light
2
"not things but minds”
John Cage
Patagonia’s distant glaciers impel/ the
whole of their accumulated mass/ intone
beneath their looming magnitude/ a
water melody
3
"confondant la nuit et le jour”
Jukes Supervielle
the nature of cities/ that splay
their circular fans – on lonely plains/ will
never match/ the intimate vibration
that radiates from fire – this calcinated ash
4
“Piedra como tú”
León Felipe
this muddy metal stone before your eyes/
size of an Alto Valle plum/ that shares
these stretching sands with rock and brush/
does not recall its birth – but murmur “meteor,”
and it will burst from the depth of your voice/
in dazzling constellations
5
“Aquí en el silencio,oigo”
Eugenio Guasta
the evening breeze —skims across plowed fields,
shakes the eucalyptus leaves –rustles the dense foliage
of the cane fields/ hums past — the huge wheels
of a sleeping tractor
6
“The pebble / is a perfect creature”
Zbignew Herbert
that tumbled stone -rolled slowly in the water’s endless
flow -could expose in the palm of a hand/ the mute splendor
of its form----- at the touch of your cautious fingertip -
a unique structure
7
“al sonido de su nombre”
Rodolfo Alonso
this object’s arbitrary name that is keeping you awake
bottle, screw, or stone/ if shouted from a rooftop
would descend the invisible trajectory / and deliver
to your ear / the hollow echo of a crash
quality of bodies, weight, size, etc.
8
“in the main of light”
William Shakespeare
in a scene composed by light/ –long shadows limn
the enormous roundness of the rocks / - in the air
to the buzz of insects in flight/ the exhaust of a motor
denounces with a choking rasp of furious rrrs floating
in a sour cloud of burnt fuel/ -the
rhythm of a chainsaw/ felling trees
9
“like a thunderbolt he falls”9
the wave of warm air/ floating above the valley
bears the falcon on a magnificent open-wing
glide/ from which his wide eye reckons the gap
between claw and prey/ dead-eye control of
instinct’s lightning bolts
10
“all is emptiness”
the curved line of fire/ tail of this comet
which -with scraps of explosive light, illumines the dark
concave plane of the firmament/ describes the fiery
chain of its path / instant footprint -which,
burnt out, leaves no orbital reference
(Translated from Spanish by Jo Anne Engelbert)
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.