All posts tagged: Spain

From Sieve: A Preliminary Draft and a Ruin

By HILDEGARD HANSEN 

picture of a rusting door


Catalonia

The sea has moved inland.  Below the rectory on the hill, the fields and villages under the fog.  In the first blue of the morning.  The bell tower of the church in Lladó surfaces through it.  It is a few minutes away by car.  In Lladó the fog hangs in the streets, close to the ground.  Each building in isolation within it.  The old church, the locked doors: wood doors open onto metal doors that are molting their skin.  The keyhole the size of an eye.

From Sieve: A Preliminary Draft and a Ruin
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Translation: Poems by Juan de Dios García

Poems by JUAN DE DIOS GARCÍA

Translated from the Spanish by CORY STOCKWELL

Poems appear below in both English and Spanish.

 

Translator’s Note

Moments are the most intimate of entities. If I had to distill Juan de Dios García’s already vast body of work into a single line, a single thought, it would be this one. The relevance will be clear for the two poems published by The Common, site-specific prose poems taken from a longer series all having to do with places in García’s native Cartagena, Spain. It is a commonplace that poems capture moments, but how to achieve this at a time when places come more and more to resemble one another, and moments, as a result, seemingly lose their attachments to specific sites? For García, the answer does not lie in the obvious gesture, which would be to try to arrest the site in time—to describe it in detail, to focus on its qualities and characteristics, to insist on its uniqueness. On the contrary: what defines a site, for García, is a sort of double insistence, an insistence on two claims that seem—but only seem—to contradict one another: anything could happen at this site; this could only happen at this site. When writing of a poetry reading at the Mister Witt Café in the poem of this name, García is undoubtedly recalling a specific evening, a specific reading, a specific poet who has entered into an almost rapturous state. And yet everything is entirely different for me when, the next day, in the wake of this poet who is at once elusive and resolutely public, I have my morning coffee at this very café, not inside (in the décor that would seem to evoke a certain Chinese pavilion in Lisbon) but on the terrace, or rather—since there is no terrace to speak of, only sleek tiles that blend into the tiles that make up the street of this coastal city in which all distinctions between inside and outside become untenable—at a table placed almost haphazardly near the door. The same goes for the Parque de la Rosa, through which I stroll later that day, under an unfortunate wide-brimmed hat: there is no strange woman who sees me cry, who strokes my skin and sees in me things that I cannot see myself; there is, however, a small black dog who hurtles toward me unthreateningly, playfully, veering off at the last minute toward a young couple whose scent he has picked up. It almost goes without saying that to translate these poems—to pass through the haunts of this poet—is in no way to betray them, but simply to add another layer to what they have already expressed, another moment to the moment they give forth; it is to locate a meaning that can only belong to these places and can only be completely different from all the meanings that came before. Moments, for Juan de Dios García, are the most extimate of entities.

— Cory Stockwell

Translation: Poems by Juan de Dios García
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Mosaic School

By JOHN POCH

 

The youngest deconstructionists among us
are proud at first to spend their days breaking up
great slabs of fired tile every shade of wine
while the masters climb the scaffolds
with their gold pride, their gilt, reaching for
a sandal buckle or the heights of a halo.

Mosaic School
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Translation: Poetry by Esther Ramón

Poems by ESTHER RAMÓN

Translated from the Spanish by EMMA FERGUSON

Poems appear in both Spanish and English.

 

Translator’s Note

Esther Ramón, born in 1970, lives in Madrid and taught one of my very first writing workshops at various café tables in Lavapiés more than a decade ago, where she skillfully introduced me and fellow students to what it could mean to truly collaborate, to be interdisciplinary, to do more than look at a painting while writing a poem and instead to enter into the methods and mindsets of different mediums, seeing the world not only in a different language (in my case) but with a more creative intention. She continues to be a collaborator with other artists and it feels meaningful to translate her work, in a sense collaborate too, and become involved in her poetic world so many years later.

Translation: Poetry by Esther Ramón
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Igerilaria

By JULIAN ZABALBEASCOA

For Lorenzo Esteban Benavente and my father

 

LAKE SUPERIOR, 1974

A slight wind picks up and moves over the lake, clinking rocks together in the wash. Salvador squints into the darkness. The way his fellow construction workers talked about America’s proximity, he’d half expected to sight the faintest outline of one of its cities’ skylines as a shimmer set deep against the horizon. Instead, there’s only the night and, stretching to meet it, the mumbling water.

Igerilaria
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Plenty

By KATHERINE L. HESTER

Exterior of a fruit and egg store in Madrid 

Madrid, Spain

 

I chose my frutería not by its quality—how could I know that before I’d sampled its three types of peaches (red, yellow, squashed into donut-shapes), its abundance of tomatoes, its fuzzy orange nisperos?—but because of its old-fashioned tiled façade. 

Plenty
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Exile

By CLARA OBLIGADO
Translated by RACHEL BALLENGER

 

On December 5, 1976, I arrived in Madrid from Argentina. I flew Iberia airlines, caught the plane in Montevideo because I was afraid of the disappearances happening at the border. I left wearing summer clothes, as if I were a tourist heading for the beaches of Uruguay, then, two or three days later, landed in Madrid, where it was winter. My father and sister saw me off. It took me six years—the years of the dictatorship—to return.

Exile
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A Lifetime

Story by LARA MORENO

Translated from the Spanish by KATE WHITTEMORE

 

Translator’s Note:

This past fall, I asked Lara Moreno if she would be willing to send me some stories. I had read her novel Piel de lobo (Wolf Skin) (Lumen, 2016) over the summer and was struck by the honesty and intimacy in her portrayal of the interior life of her protagonist, Sofía, a woman in her thirties, mother to a young child, and wanted to try my hand at translating her particular voice. Lara was gracious enough to send me several Word documents, including the story “Toda una vida,” winner of the 2013 Cosecha Eñe prize organized by the prestigious Spanish literary magazine Eñe: Qué Leer, and I’ve been honored and delighted to work with her since.

A Lifetime
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El Putxet

By FLAVIA MARTINEZ

Barcelona Montjuic

I woke up early to finish some reading, but have been in bed for hours scrolling through Facebook, with little fingers and tired eyes fixed to the screen, and now it’s 1 pm. Though the streets of Barcelona are sunny most days, only secondhand light teases in from the center courtyard of the apartment building, and sometimes in here I forget what sun is. It’s the only bedroom that faces inward, the one my host mother lived in as a girl. This was her childhood home.

El Putxet
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