Rhapsody in the Rain

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20th century Argentine poets, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Olga Orozco, poetry in translation

In December, 2014, I posted a two-part series of translations of the Argentine poet, Olga Orozco. Leafing through a binder, I discovered two of my translations not yet posted. Here is one of them.

~~~

Rhapsody in the Rain
by Olga Orozco,
translated from the Spanish

Now
from your now you will be seeing
under this same rain the rains of the deluge
and those who washed their shamed roses of Chaldea
or the ones wrung out from the druid altar to the gallows
and who went to whisper over a hostile tomb in thorny Patagonia,
and also the blues, the prodigious storytellers,
the ones who promised you a miracle when you were still visible.
Such an inventory of rain in the embalmed archives of History!
More, what do rains matter?
It would be the same if you saw dynasties of sunsets, medals, or bonfires.
I only want to say that you are a witness of all places,
a guest of time before the repertoire of memory and of oracle,
and that each place is a meeting place like the end of a tree-lined avenue.
But these steps of yours, vacillating, under the frequent feet of rain
move me even more than your lamentations in the endless corridor
or your old message for today, found between books.
You would gamble these broken words for your name trembling in glass,
all the salt of the earth would place a bet
on your coming to fight for me against the legionnaires of shadows,
or your trying to find the blue bottlefly that buzzes with death,
or your paying an exorbitant price to embrace narcissus and poppies
—the vibration most intimate of any season—
always bordering the precipices to the ends of the earth,
always at the point of falling into the bonfire,
without remission and without breath.
And nevertheless you have seen the miserable reverse of every trauma,
you know like no one else the intrigue of error that was walled up with my pride,
my dark pettiness.
You would like to keep secret the inoccultable imperfection with the shine of a slash,
turn my channeled footsteps toward applause and certainty,
correct the reach of my eyes,
the temper of my species.
Do I not hear you spin and spin between the gusts of water cleansing every fault?
And do you not intend perhaps to reveal to me with your melody the skies
you already know?
You will achieve again the yielding of this night to dawn
insisting on remaining, like before, on wringing yourself over there beyond the walls,
there, where we share only ephemeral gains and infinite loss,
changes in the margins that obscure vision,
even while the rain falls.

© Elaine Stirling, copyright translation, 2014
Image: Photographer unknown

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Cartomancy: The Poetry of Olga Orozco, Part II

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#longreads, Argentine poets, Elaine Stirling, essays on poetry, metaphysical poetry, Olga Orozco, poetry translated from Spanish to English

Olga Orozco, Argentine poet (1920-1999)

I once told a friend whose work I translated that the experience felt like crawling through his veins—slowly, on my elbows, with very little wiggle room. Reaching the end of one long poem, in particular, I felt a kind of muscular expulsion that landed me, freshly oxygenated and stunned into some bright new place. I could still feel his poem on the surface of my skin. It felt the way you would expect, recently flung from an aorta or a birth canal.

Prior to that poem, I had told my friend that I didn’t want to translate anymore. I’d done three or four, and the experience was just too weird, too…can-opening. He kindly agreed to my decision, asking only that I take a look at two more. Reading them, I could decide whether or not to continue. If I said no, there would be no hard feelings. So I translated the long one and the rest, as they ought to say, is mystery.

In translating Olga Orozco, I felt something similar, only the passages weren’t veins but caverns. They were immense, echoing and subterranean with shadows that milled about like guests at a muffled cocktail party. I could stand in Olga’s poems, but I couldn’t rush. I knew there was an end, but I wasn’t sure of getting out. Every time I finished a translation, I’d think, holy crap, that’s enough, then creep back in to try again.

If it weren’t for Melanie Nicholson, who wrote the elegantly researched Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry, I would never have found or ventured toward Olga Orozco. Descended from Basque, Irish, and Sicilian immigrants, Olga spent her entire life in Argentina. She frequented a Buenos Aires gathering of writers who called themselves “the Generation of 40”, referring to the decade. Most of the members were men, their names unfamiliar to me. In the few photos I’ve seen, Olga looks happy enough with her fellow poets, though one also gets the sense that she observed them deep, profoundly so, beneath their skin without their realizing. And that’s only one explanation for the poem, “Cartomancy”, that I’ll be sharing in this post. (Cartomancy, a word I had to look up, means fortune telling by way of cards.)

Olga Orozco was no carnival psychic. She was a lifelong student of gnosticism, Swedenborgianism, and the hermetic philosophies. She accredits Nerval, Rimbaud, and Beaudelaire as her greatest poetic influences. Olga and “The Generation of 40” were among a dying breed who viewed poetry as the ultimate “dangerous game”. They tapped into its roots as a prophetic and creative function, poetry as sacred, the Logos that makes worlds. Not the kind of stance that endears you to dictators, bishops, or tea parlour ladies.

The second, and final, translated poem is called “When Happiness Dies”. Despite this title and the overall tone of Olga Orozco’s work, I remain convinced that she was, by nature, optimistic. To read her poems the first few times is spooky; it is also kaleidoscopic. Venture in again, and the shards have shifted. Light beams differently. To say that she was sometimes speaking directly to her beloved Argentina may be a stretch, but my blood cells don’t disagree. Olga Orozco, poetess unlaureate, creatrix of new worlds where we all thrive. And, now, her poems:

Cartomancy

Hear the barking dogs investigate the origin
of shadows,
hear them tearing at the fabric of presage.
Listen. Something is advancing
and the woods crunch beneath your feet as if
you were fleeing without end and arriving without end.
You sealed the door with your name inscribed on
the ashes of yesterday and tomorrow.
But someone has arrived.
And other faces blow on you, the face in the mirrors
where you are nothing more than a shredded candle,
a moon invaded beneath the waters by triumphs
and combat,
by bracken.

Here is what you are, what you were, what is coming,
what may come.
Seven responses you have for seven questions.
Your chart bears witness that is the sign of the World.
At your right the Angel,
at your left the Demon.
Who calls? But who calls from your
birth until your death
with a broken key, with a ring
that was buried years ago?
Who glides above your own steps
like a flock of birds?
Stars illuminate the sky of enigma.
The more you want to see cannot be seen
face to face
because your light is of another realm.
And it’s still not your time. And there will be time.

What matters more is to decipher the name of who enters.
His chart is that of Madness, with his patient net
for hunting butterflies.

He is the eternal guest.
He is the hallucinated Emperor of the world that inhabits you.
Do not ask who he is. You know him
because you have searched for him under every stone
and in all the abysses
and together you’ve kept vigil over pure advent of the miracle:
a poem in which everything was all plus you
—something more than that whole—
But nothing has arrived.
Nothing more than these same sterile
words.
And it may be growing late.

Let’s see who sits.
She who is caught up in twine and caws
spins unspinning her sheet
has the black butterfly for a heart.
But your life is long and her chord will snap
very far away.
I read it in the sands of the Moon where
the journey is written,
where the house is drawn in which you sink
like a pale striation
in the night spun with great webs
by your weaver Death.
Be more cautious of water, love, and fire.

Beware of the love that stays.
Today, tomorrow, and after tomorrow.
Beware because he shines with a shine
of tears and swords.
His glory is of the Sun, much as his furies
and his pride.
But you will never know peace,
Because your Strength is the strength of torments
and Temperance cries with her face against the wall.
You will not sleep beside happiness,
because in all your steps there is an edge of mourning
that presages crime or goodbye,
and the Hanged Man announces to me the horrific night
that was destined for you.
Do you want to know who loves you?
He who departs at meeting me comes from your
own heart.
Masks of clay shine on your face, and beneath your skin
runs the pallor of all loneliness.
A courtship of lives and deaths came to live
in only one life.
He came to learn the horses, the trees, the stones,
and remained crying over every shame.
You lifted the wall that covers him, but without
your meaning to, the Tower closes him in:
a silken prison where love rattles
keys of the unbearable jailer.
Meanwhile the Chariot awaits the signal to leave:
the apparition of the day dressed as the Hermit.
But it’s not time yet to convert blood
into a memorial stone.
You are still lying in the constellation
of Lovers,
that river of fire that’s devouring the belt
of time that devours you,
and I daresay that both of you belong
to a race of shipwrecks that sank without salvation
and without consolation.

Cover yourself now with the breastplate of power or forgiveness,
as though you were unafraid,
because I’m going to show you who hates you.
Do you listen now to your heart beating like a shadowy wing?
Are you not watching with me for the arrival, bearing a dagger
of frost at your side?

She, the Empress with your broken dwellings,
she who melts your waxen image for sacrifices,
she who buries the dove in darkness to obscure the air in your house,
she who hobbles your steps with branches of a dead tree,
with waning fingernails, with words.
She wasn’t always the same, but whoever she may be
is the same,
anyway her power is nothing other than your other being.
Such is her sorcery.
And although the Croupier rolls the dice over
the table of your destiny,
and your enemy knots your name three times on the
adverse hemp,
there are at least five who know that the game
is in vain,
that her triumph is not triumph
but only a scepter of misfortune conferred upon
the uninhabited King,
an ossuary of dreams where the phantasm of love that doesn’t die wanders.

You’re going to stay in the dark, you’re going to stay alone.
You’re going to stay outside of your chest
to smite who kills you.

Do not invoke Justice. In his desert throne
the serpent was granted asylum.
Don’t try to find your talisman of fish bones,
because there is much night and much of your executioners.
His purple has muddied your thresholds
since dawn
and has marked three unlucky signs on your door
with swords, with gold and with clubs.
Within the circle of swords cruelty enclosed you.
With two disks of gold the deception of
scaly eyelids annihilated you.
Violence drew with his staff of clubs
a blue lightning bolt on your throat.
And above all tended for you the carpet of embers.
Behold the Kings have arrived.
They come to fulfil the prophecy.
They come to inhabit the three shadows of death
that will escort your death
until you stop spinning the Wheel of Fortune.

While Happiness Dies

I have seen happiness lose its way
crying out through a shadowy and lonely woods
where its last day was passed, silent,
forgetting mankind like the spent leaves
that a slow season clings to.

Never again, disdainful between afternoons,
its golden mask,
luminous hands conducting dreams
to a thirsty life,
the fugitive cloak,
its deceiving reflection in the ivy that
memories guard like a lost king.

Oh, the sorrowful repose of earth!
Someone is still waiting with the indecisive river
that blood holds:
he who in his obscurity strikes vainly at walls
pursuing a shadow taller than its nights,
and the terse ash barely looks at dawn and some
flower withers on his chest;
and over there the others
those who search for that corner of air prepared to form
like the anterior body that it inhabited
in remote ages.

They want to seize a path in the dust,
to detain in light their poor paradises made of slow,
laborious talents,
but that puff suffices,
it barely shudders the oscillating branches,
to barter peace for death,
for a sluggish habit of desires.

Because man lives undefended in his happiness
and only then, while his vain melody dies
in the distance
do our faces recover our invincible aura.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Translation Copyright, 2014

“Cartomancia” and “Mientras muere la dicha” can be read in the original Spanish here.

Behind That Door: The Poetry of Olga Orozco

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Argentine poets, Augusto Monterroso, Elaine Stirling, essays on poets and poetry, metaphysical poetry, Olga Orozco, poetry translation, Spanish to English

Olga Orozco, Argentine poet, (1920-1999)

In his very funny essay, “Crying on the Banks of the Río Mapocho”, Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso says that the destiny of all writers in Latin American countries falls into one of three camps: exile, imprisonment, or burial. He wrote those words in 1983 when civil, guerrilla, and dirty wars were still very much a part of Latino current events. His fate, in 1954, happened to be exile to Santiago, Chile, where he found himself penniless and obliged to find employment wherever he could get it. The work that drove him to weep by the banks of the Mapocho, was the translation of Ellery Queen’s short mystery fiction into Spanish. Monterroso was a literary satirist who took his time with language and story. He found Queen’s pulp fiction style forced and inauthentic. The more he sought depth, the more he didn’t find any.

Way, way over on the opposite pole are writers whose depth is so unfathomable, that to believe one can tread, bobbing happily on the surface, is the first thought bubble to burst. I happened to come across Monterroso and Olga Orozco within hours of each other. The former may have been my life jacket for the latter. For several weeks, the Argentine poetess to whom I allude in my Oceantics post, “La Mentora”, swept me downstream through currents and rapids beyond my experience. I’ve been published a few times in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Fantasy & Science Fiction, first cousins to Ellery Queen. They are not highbrow fiction, to be sure; they are meant to be fun. Where, then, to place Orozco? How is it that she, born in Argentina in 1920, enjoyed a full lifespan of 79 years in her native country and was never exiled, imprisoned, or executed? Not because she wrote frippery, I can assure you!

Olga Orozco lived through the post-WWII arrival of Fascist and Nazi refugees to Argentina. She endured with fellow poets the Juan and Eva Perón years wherein intellectuals like Jorge Luis Borges were given menial jobs to keep them barely alive and humble. She lived through the Dirty War of the 1970s and 80s, long enough to assist in the first book-length English translation of her work with the American professor Mary Crow, published posthumously in 2003. The only other English reference I have found to Orozco is in a book published in 2002 by the University of Florida Press, called Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry. Maybe that explains it! (Another thought bubble bursts…)

Olga Orozco was neither evil nor mad, and her involvement in the occult had little to do with evil eye talismans or voodoo dolls. To your average military junta censor, however, she may have come across as a harmless crazy lady. In a country where ordinary citizens were “disappeared” by the tens of thousands, it’s a pretty good cover.

In the end, however, speculation is unimportant. What matters is Olga Orozco’s work. I have translated four of her poems and would like to share them with you in two consecutive posts. Each offers a white knuckle ride in its own right. The first two poems, “Behind that Door / Detrás de Aquella Puerta” and “Points of Reference / Puntos de Referencia” can be read in their original Spanish here.

Behind That Door

Somewhere on the great inconclusive wall is a door
that one you didn’t open
and one that casts its shadow of implacable guardian on the
reverse of your whole destiny.
It’s only a door closed off in the name of chance,
but it has the colour of inclemency
and resembles a gravestone where every step
of the impossible is inscribed.
Perhaps it now creaks with an incomparable melody
against the ear of your yesterday,
perhaps it gleams like a golden idol polished
by the ashes of goodbye,
perhaps every night it’s at the point of opening on the
final wall of the same dream
and measures its power against your ligatures like a miserable
Ulysses.
It’s only a deception,
a fabrication of wind between the interstices of a
history laid to waste,
fallacious refractions that surge from obscurity when
nostalgia brushes past.
That door doesn’t open toward any return;
it doesn’t guard some rigid mould beneath the pallid ray
of absence.
You don’t return later like someone at the end of an
erroneous journey
—every stage a mistaken mirror that removes you
from the world—
discover the place where you lost the key and traded
a confused name for a slogan.
Could it be that every step you took didn’t change, as in
chess,
the secret relation of the pieces that traced the map
of the entire match?
Don’t come any closer then with your offering of
devastated lands,
with your coffer of embers converted to stones
of expiation;
do not transform your other precarious paradises into
moors and exiles,
because also, also, the wall and yearning will one day
come to be.
That door is a sentence of lead; it is not a question.
If you keep going,
you will find behind it, one after another, the doors
that you chose.

Points of Reference

I have accumulated days and nights with love, with patience
ah, with anger too, a resplendence of tigers in the dark
despair;
I have turned them to stone around the site I inhabit,
which is nothing more than pale underbrush in the middle of
the rarefied vastness,
a paltry substance exposed to pillages and the fury
of time gone wild.
I have put together vestiges, testimonials that accredit who I am,
irrefutable credentials like a game of mirrors on a wheel
of brightness,
certainties like ciphers sculpted in smoke.
I can affirm that there’s nothing under heaven that doesn’t
live on through my eyes
and that a negligible insect holds a place of honour in my
collection.
I am nothing less than a mole; something more than grass.
However I do not find my true form even
in full light.
The more that I recount, the more it pores over and chases me by fire
and under the skin.
There’s always someone in me who says that I am not me
when I appear,
someone who slips through, step by step, the more I advance
until I am blind, grabbed hold of by only a name,
by ignorance.
Because there are ungraspable prolongations that arrive over there,
unattainable zones where perhaps the footsteps of God
are imprinted,
transparent subsoils where sometimes the gardens of
another world are buried
and upon returning a perfume spreads out that resembles dawn.
And those errant blocks, continents in flight like
white whales,
that brush the boundaries propagating terror, never to return?
And what boundaries brush, if I have forced sight and insomnia
to the limit?
And where I venture, not walking, am I lost in the abysses?
Have I not thrown questions like stones and loves like
rubble
that are still falling, that have yet to touch the ground?
Immense my unknown animal, my unfathomable skeleton,
my nebulous sphinx.
And no emissary, no echo, other than this
unfinished body.
All a confabulation of the invisible to indicate barely
that I am not of this world,
but only an adverse witness against proclaimed reality,
a mark of exile adhered to the great narrow minds where
the soul begins,
perhaps with a hymn, maybe with a sob.
But tell me, Lord,
does my face depict you?

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Translation Copyright, 2014

“Resignation”, a poem by Manuel Acuña

Tags

19th century, an interpretation of souls, Elaine Stirling, love, Manuel Acuna, Mexican poets, optimism, poetry, rebirth, temporality, themes of death, translation from Spanish

Today, after a series of strange events, I pulled from my shelves a volume of poetry by Manuel Acuña, (1849-1873) a Mexican poet who died at the age of twenty-four by his own hand. I hadn’t opened the book since 1998 when I’d tried, unsuccessfully, to translate some of his beautiful work. But I had penciled a few lines inside the front cover:

Del libro de la vida / la que escribimos hoy es la última hoja.
From the book of life / what we write today is the last page.

Since writing is how I spend my days, the lines from “Resignación” felt especially poignant. I thought I’d try my hand at translating the rest of the poem, which Acuña wrote in 1872, a year before his death. I hope you will enjoy the optimism and energy of his words as much as I did. Any mistakes in translation are definitely mine! You will find the original Spanish after the translation.

Resignation

Without tears, without complaints,
without farewells, without a sob!
We carried on until the last…fortune
brought us here with the same objective,
we both came to bury the soul
beneath the tomb of scepticism.

Without tears…tears have no power
to bring a cadaver back to life;
our flowers fall and they turn
but at least in the turning, they leave
us with dry sight and a firm conscience.

Now you see it! for your soul and mine
spaces and the world are deserts…
we have concluded both,
covered with sadness and affliction,
we’re not at the end, we’re just two corpses
in search of the shroud of forgetting.

Children and dreamers when we
barely left the cradle,
pain, still alien to our lives
slipping along sweet and serene
like a swan’s wing in a lagoon;
when the dawn of the first caress
hasn’t yet peeked beneath the veil
that the virginal ignorance of the child
extends between his eyelids and the sky
your soul like mine,
in its clock advancing the hour
and in their darknesses lighting the day,
they saw a panorama that opened
beneath a kiss and at that dawn’s light;
and feeling, upon seeing that countryside
the wings of a supreme force,
we opened them early, and early
they brought us to the end of the voyage.

We gave to earth
the tints of love, and of the rose;
to our garden nests and songs
to our heaven birds and stars;
we used up the flowers on the road
to fashion from them
a crown for the angel of destiny…
and today in the midst of sad discord
of such an agonized or dead flower
one lifts only the pale and deserted
bloom that is poisoned by memory.

From the book of life
what we write today is the last page…
Let’s close it at once
and in the sepulchre of lost faith
we will also bury our anguish.

And since heaven now concedes that
these evils are our last
so the soul can prepare to rest,
although the final tear cost us
we saw the task through to the end.
And afterward, when the angel of forgetting
has delivered these ashes
that guard the painful memory
of so many illusions smashed to bits
and of so much vanished pleasure,
we’ll leave these spaces and return
to the tranquil life of earth,
now that the night of early pain
advances toward and encloses us
in the sweet horizons of tomorrow.

Let’s leave these spaces or if you
want to, we can try out our breath,
a new journey to that blessed region
whose only memory resuscitates
the cadaver of the soul, upon feeling.
Let’s throw ourselves off this world then,
where everything is shadow and void,
we’ll make a moon from memory
if the sun of our love has grown cold;
we’ll fly if you like,
to the depths of those magic regions
and pretending hopes and illusions
we’ll smash the tomb and rising
on our bold and powerful flight,
we will form a heaven between shadows
and we will be the owners of that heaven.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, translation, 2013

Resignación

¡Sin lágrimas, sin quejas,
sin decirnos adiós, sin un sollozo!
cumplamos hasta lo último… la suerte
nos trajo aquí con el objeto mismo,
los dos venimos a enterrar el alma
bajo la losa del escepticismo.

Sin lágrimas… las lágrimas no pueden
devolver a un cadáver la existencia;
que caigan nuestras flores y que rueden,
pero al rodar, siquiera que nos queden
seca la vista y firme la conciencia.

¡Ya lo ves! para tu alma y para mi alma
los espacios y el mundo están desiertos…
los dos hemos concluido,
y de tristeza y aflicción cubiertos,
ya no somos al fin sino dos muertos
que buscan la mortaja del olvido.

Niños y soñadores cuando apenas
de dejar acabábamos la cuna,
y nuestras vidas al dolor ajenas
se deslizaban dulces y serenas
como el ala de un cisne en la laguna
cuando la aurora del primer cariño
aún no asomaba a recoger el velo
que la ignorancia virginal del niño
extiende entre sus párpados y el cielo,
tu alma como la mía,
en su reloj adelantando la hora
y en sus tinieblas encendiendo el día,
vieron un panorama que se abría
bajo el beso y la luz de aquella aurora;
y sintiendo al mirar ese paisaje
las alas de un esfuerzo soberano,
temprano las abrimos, y temprano
nos trajeron al término del viaje.

Le dimos a la tierra
los tintes del amor y de la rosa;
a nuestro huerto nidos y cantares,
a nuestro cielo pájaros y estrellas;
agotamos las flores del camino
para formar con ellas
una corona al ángel del destino…
y hoy en medio del triste desacuerdo
de tanta flor agonizante o muerta,
ya sólo se alza pálida y desierta
la flor envenenada del recuerdo.

Del libro de la vida
la que escribimos hoy es la última hoja…
Cerrémoslo en seguida,
y en el sepulcro de la fe perdida
enterremos también nuestra congoja.
Y ya que el cielo nos concede que este
de nuestros males el postrero sea,
para que el alma a descansar se apreste,
aunque la última lágrima nos cueste,
cumplamos hasta el fin con la tarea.

Y después cuando al ángel del olvido
hayamos entregado estas cenizas
que guardan el recuerdo adolorido
de tantas ilusiones hechas trizas
y de tanto placer desvanecido,
dejemos los espacios y volvamos
a la tranquila vida de la tierra,
ya que la noche del dolor temprana
se avanza hasta nosotros y nos cierra
los dulces horizontes del mañana.

Dejemos los espacios, o si quieres
que hagamos, ensayando nuestro aliento,
un nuevo viaje a esa región bendita
cuyo sólo recuerdo resucita
al cadáver del alma al sentimiento,
lancémonos entonces a ese mundo
en donde todo es sombras y vacío,
hagamos una luna del recuerdo
si el sol de nuestro amor está ya frío;
volemos, si tu quieres,
al fondo de esas mágicas regiones,
y fingiendo esperanzas e ilusiones,
rompamos el sepulcro, y levantando
nuestro atrevido y poderoso vuelo,
formaremos un cielo entre las sombras,
y seremos los duendes de ese cielo.

Manuel Acuña, 1872