Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (39 page)

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Th

e deeply hidden spider of Palermo.

As a devout coward, Rosas knows

Th

at of all men there isn’t anyone

More vulnerable and fragile than the brave man.

Juan Facundo Quiroga is audacious

To the point of lunacy. Th

is fact may be

Worth the consideration of one who hates him.

Who has resolved to kill him. Vacillates,

But at last fi nds the weapon he was seeking:

What else but the dark hunger and thirst for danger?

Quiroga leaves for the north. Th

is same Rosas

Tips him off , almost at the foot of the carriage,

Th

at rumor has it that that bastard López

Premeditates his murder. He suggests

Th

at he not undertake so bold a journey

Without escort. He himself off ers one.

Facundo has been smiling. He does not

Need help. He can rely on himself. Th

e creaking

Carriage leaves the settlements behind.

Miles of heavy rain mire it down,

Mud and swirling mist and the rising water.

At last they make out Córdoba. Th

e Córdobans,

Having already given them up for dead,

Look at them as if they were their ghosts.

Last night all Córdoba watched as Santos Pérez

Handed out the swords. Th

e hunting party

Consists of thirty riders from the sierra.

Never before, Sarmiento will write,

Has a crime been set afoot so brazenly.

Juan Facundo Quiroga seems untroubled.

He moves on. In Santiago del Estero

He gives himself to the sweet risk of cards;

Between sundown and dawn he wins or loses

Hundreds and hundreds of gold doubloons. By dawn

370
S pa n i s h

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Danger signals have multiplied. Abruptly

He decides to turn back and gives the order.

Over those mountains, through that open country

Th

ey retrace their steps along the dangerous roads.

In a nondescript place called Ojo de Agua

Th

e posthouse keeper tells him that the party

Dispatched to murder him has passed that way

And lies in wait for them in a place he names.

No one is to be spared. Th

ose are the orders.

Or so he has been told by Santos Pérez,

Th

eir captain. But Facundo doesn’t frighten—

Th

e man who has the nerve to kill Quiroga

Hasn’t been born yet, is his cool rejoinder.

Th

e other men are ashen and say nothing.

Night falls, and only one of them is sleeping,

Th

e fated one, the strong one, who has faith

In his dark gods. Gradually it grows light.

Th

ey will not live to see another morning.

What is the point, one wonders, in concluding

A story told once and for all? Th

e carriage

Sets off down the road to Barranca Yaco.

Th

e White Hind

From what back-country ballad of England’s verdant land,

From what Persian miniature, from what mysterious realm

Of all the nights and mornings that our yesterday hides in its hand

Comes the snow-white hind that appeared to me this morning in my dream?

It would have been only an instant. I saw her cross the meadow

And disappear into the gold of a spectral close of day,

Airy creature made out of a little gleam of memory

And a little of forgetfulness, white hind that casts no shadow.

Th

e deities and spirits by whom this curious world is ruled

Permitted me to dream you but not to have you for my own;

Jorg e Lu i s B org e s
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Perhaps in some meander that the endless future may hold

I shall fi nd you again, oh white hind that for one instant shone.

I myself am a fl eeting dream that lasts but a day or two,

But little more than the dream of a moment of whiteness and of dew.

Elegy for the Impossible Memory

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of a dirt street with low adobe walls

And a tall horseman looming against the dawn

(His poncho long and frayed)

On one of those days on the plains

Th

at has no date.

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of my mother looking out at the morning

On the ranch at Santa Irene,

Not knowing that her name would be Borges.

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of having fought at Cepeda

And seen Estanislao del Campo

Riding out to meet the fi rst bullet

With brave and reckless joy.

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of a great wooden door to a hidden villa

Th

at my father pushed open each night

Before getting lost in sleep

And pushed open for the last time

On the 14th of February, 1938.

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of Hengist’s long ships

Weighing anchor off the sands of Denmark

To conquer an island

Not yet called England.

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S pa n i s h

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What wouldn’t I give for the memory

(I had it once and have lost it)

Of a golden canvas of Turner’s,

Immense as music.

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of having heard Socrates

As, on the evening of hemlock,

He serenely examined the problem

Of immortality,

Balancing myth and logic

While blue death crept upward

From his feet, already numb.

What wouldn’t I give for the memory

Of your having said that you loved me

And of not having slept until dawn,

Heartbroken and happy.

Relics

Th

e Southern Hemisphere. Under its algebra

of constellations unknown to Ulysses,

a man is seeking and will go on seeking

the faint relics of that epiphany

vouchsafed to him, so many years ago,

on the other side of a numbered door

in a hotel, beside the timeless Th

ames,

that fl ows along as that other river fl ows,

the ethereal element of time. Th

e fl esh

forgets its sorrows and its happinesses.

Th

e man waits and dreams. Slowly, vaguely,

he rescues a few trivial circumstances.

A woman’s name, a whiteness, a body

by now without a face; the hazy half-light

Jorg e Lu i s B org e s
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of an evening of no date; the drizzling rain;

a few wax fl owers on a marble slab;

and the low walls, the color a pale rose.

Elegy

Buenos Aires, 14 January 1984

Now it is yours, Abramowicz, the singular taste of death, withheld

from no one, which will be off ered to me in this house or across the ocean,

on the banks of your Rhône, fl owing fatally as if it were Time itself, that

other and more ancient Rhône. Yours too the certainty that Time leaves its

yesterdays behind and that nothing is irreparable or the opposing certainty

that the days can erase nothing and that there is no act, no dream, that

does not cast an infi nite shadow. Geneva considered you a jurist, a man

of lawsuits and verdicts, but in every word, in every silence, you were a

poet. Perhaps this very moment you are leafi ng through the various books

which you did not write but imagined and gave up on, and which for us

justify you and in a way exist. During the fi rst war, while men were killing

one another, we two dreamed two dreams that were named Laforgue and

Baudelaire. We discovered things that all young men discover: ignorant love,

irony, a longing to be Raskolnikov or Prince Hamlet, words and sunsets.

Generations of Israel were in you when you said to me one time, smiling,
Je
suis très fatigué. J’ai quatre mille ans
. Th

is took place on the Earth; useless to

guess how old you must be in Heaven.

I don’t know if you are still someone, I don’t know if you can hear me.

To One No Longer Young

Now you can see the tragic mise en scène

With everything in its accustomed place—

Ashes and sword for Dido the sad queen,

Th

e coin for poor blind Belisarius.

Why do you keep on looking for the war

In the old bronze hexameters darkly lit

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When here they are, the seven feet of dirt,

Th

e sudden hemorrhage, the open pit?

Here the plummetless mirror that will dream

And then forget the face of your extreme

And fi nal days, is keeping you in sight.

Now the end draws near. It is the house

Where the slow hours of your brief evening pass,

Th

e street that fi lls your eyes, day in, day out.

Robert Mezey, 1991

Jorg e Lu i s B org e s
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Eugenio Flor it
(1903–99)

Conversation with My Father

Clearly you already know it

you already know it all

know it all clearly.

Because of this you know too

how I wish to tell it,

for while I speak I am recalling

as I sit here beside you:

I am writing

and you silent beside me.

. . . Well, since you left

many things have happened . . .

Men have died and been born,

grown ill and recovered,

felt well, taken their

sup of soup, piece of fi sh,

got up, gone into the sun

like cats to the window.

Others do not get up

but remain stretched out

and die.

Die like you,

and others, men and women,

and all that you love

and all those who follow you.

Although many still live.

Th

ey keep living, despite weeping and mourning.

And one day they want to go

for a walk, to go to the movies,

to play the piano much as you do.

Not that in this way I bury you deeper;

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but that, more living, they remember you more.

Because they live with you, with what you enjoyed

in your books. (Th

ough I still

have in its grey covers,
Peñas arriba
,

which you left open

that day . . . )

And we all continue living

and you see, remembering you daily.

And we say: he liked this dessert,

and used to walk here, always in a hurry,

and once shaved off his moustache

and at once let it grow again.

More than once I thought

how much you enjoyed

walking in these parts, to go to the museum

and there tell me about
Las Meninas

and then gazing side by side at
La Duquesa de Alba
,

that Doña Cayetana de Silva

that your brother Pepe once brought

from the other side.

Yes, it would be fi ne

to wander again through so many rooms—except

the little French things of the 18th century, so silly,

and the English women with their buttery fl esh.

And then go into the park

and sit down to talk at our ease

observing how at sunset the air

moves rippling the lighted waters of the pool.

You already know how the war came about

and how in it people died;

and how the war ended

and how the people’s mania followed it

E ug e n io F l or i t
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bent on destruction, killing

as if all the maceration of fl esh were not enough.

And we learn nothing.

And it is sad to think that all this agony

could simply disappear

if man could learn to wipe the grin from his face,

and to say one good word, truly,

and wish, in fact, to make life noble.

But he does not want it, as you see.

What he wants is to follow

this overwhelming dance of death

which is not your death nor mine

—that is to say, death as it may happen

about the house, one that is met in slippers

or at most in the open country

or in clear water,

without the other, heaped up mountainous

in stinking fi elds and foul waters,

death which drops from the air

and comes from hiding

to crush bodies as if they were nuts

reap them as if they were heads of wheat.

Th