from The Past is a Lonesome Town
WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU ATTEND FOR SIXTH GRADE?
in sixth grade there was an epidemic of HEPETITIS A
so bad they scrubbed the trays
those of the brigade
I was one of the few not infected
the SICK
returned to school
on restriction, but
they ran and rode bikes
through the empty streets
screwing up their LIVERS
ms. dinorah announced
IN THIS TOWN
IN A FEW YEARS
YOU’RE GOING TO SEE
THE RESULTS
OF THIS INFECTED BLOOD
I thought all my friends would die
by fifteen
and they did die in some way
I may be one of them
WHAT WAS THE LAST NAME OF YOUR THIRD GRADE TEACHER?
at noon they were bringing lunch
some old aluminum CANS
left in the main hall; we pulled them in
with a rebar bent into a CROWBAR
the nurses visited us for TWO REASONS
to vaccinate or put in our mouths
a harsh liquid
infamous as THE LITTLE SIP
one afternoon the lunch truck
apparently was going to explode
they sent us away from school
neither THE LITTLE SIP nor THE VACCINES could save us
crowded together against the wall we pioneers were crying
but nothing exploded; instead
we discovered that at THIS HOUR the sun was softening the asphalt
spilled without gravel
we left CRATERS
in our eagerness to get globules of oil
THE STAINS stayed on our fingers for a week; we had survived
WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE PLACE YOUR WEDDING RECEPTION WAS HELD?
the lights of the college dorm room
went out at one
in the lower BUNK of aluminum pipes
the blond and I banged carefully
without shaking the one above
who was, besides,
a Jehovah’s Witness
and had once seen objects
MOVE as if by themselves
YOU CAN CALL ME
NYMPHOMANIAC, YOU CAN CALL ME
WHAT YOU LIKE
she claimed those first months
BUT YOU HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF ME
what it meant
in the language of the blond
we had to screw
every night
the bunk across the room
could see our SHADOWS
a year later on a merciless night
we separated
like objects that drift apart
according to the scriptures
WHO WAS YOUR CHILDHOOD HERO?
during a BLACKOUT
the family fell in a sinkhole
earth swallowed them
forms on the sidewalk saluted them as they passed
we wondered later
who it could have been
a neighbor shouted in the distance
I’M GOING TO SHOVE MY LEGS
IN THE OVEN
TO HAVE SOMETHING TO COOK WITH
FIRE BEETLE: phosphorescent points
flying in parallel curves
AIRPLANE: red lights overhead
blinking in a straight line
ON WHICH WRIST DO YOU WEAR YOUR WATCH?
they tried to steal it from me
two NIGHTS
the first I woke from a dream
pulling so strong
on THAT ARM that when fleeing
the sleepwalker dragged my bed with him
the second, also asleep
another hand leaped through the little window of the bus
his fingers dipping under THE WRISTBAND
I towed him a few meters
I was not the one with the untouchable properties
the watch was heir to something that granted
the left hand an instinct for conservation
stronger than its resistance to water
it has already stopped telling time
at the bottom of THIS SUITCASE
WHAT WAS YOUR HAIR COLOR AS A CHILD?
at midnight
they put A BULLET in the leg
of the old woman who demanded to participate
in the celebration of the Revolution
it was not a bullet
shot from a pistol
around the bonfire lit by rays of matches
the missile lodged
heads were set on fire
we had to run
I never knew where the ORDNANCE was coming from
I had escaped this bullet
at seven on the slope
of the backyard of a house; in the ritual
they said when BURNING it left
a silhouette of a turtle
we hit our heads as in Russian roulette
until one of us decided to start the RACE
we poured into the street, running away
without knowing from what
and this, I remember, was
weeks before the host would show us
that by means of an EXTREME CRUNCH
it was possible to blow yourself
Translator’s Note:
The poems from The Past is a Lonesome Town (El pasado es un pueblo solitario; Bokeh, 2015) are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by coming of age in a small-town Cuban childhood during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime, and on the other, a testament of exile, memory traces in the wake of forsaking a complicated homeland. The “prompts,” in English, are security questions—required of immigrants hoping to establish accounts and services—which the newly-arrived Morales only half-understood and, given Morales’ characteristic irony, questions which have trenchant implications for the poet’s new “American” identity. Morales, who graduated with an architecture degree in Cuba, moved in 2009 to the Dominican Republic for two years and then emigrated to study at New York University, where he received an MFA and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature.
A special challenge in “carrying over” into English Morales’ often oblique, associative leaps is rendering the intelligently bewildered and flustered tone of the motivated immigrant faced with obstacles to his future and yet filled with indelible memories of the past—literally living “between,” just as a translator experiences the contrary pulls of two language traditions and, like the speakers in Morales’ poems, labors between those forces. Frost famously declared poetry is what’s lost in translation, but my experience is that poetry is also what is found there, a linguistic tightrope act that demands the same concentration and balance; practicing, we often fall off. One reason is that, in my view—by no means shared by all readers and writers—a translator is not just the transmitter of a poem into what is somewhat clumsily called the “target” language, but also the creator of an original text. Or to put it another way, as Tolstoy translator Richard Pevear says, “translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, but a dialogue between two languages.” Octavio Paz goes further at the start of his essay on translation: When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate. By extension, then, literature—the most creative use of language–is always a process of translation, turning the content of the imagination into literary art, even when poets and readers speak the same tongue. Many translators have noted that their struggles to re-create a writer’s words in those of a different language in fact continue the original struggle of the writer to render nonverbal realities into words. But not all translators are lucky enough to work with the author, and certainly none can have learned as much and worked as pleasurably as I have with Osdany Morales. More than a dozen other of my translations of his work from El Pasado es un Pueblo Solitario have already appeared in the journals Interim, The Bangalore Review, Asymptote, and forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly. As for other questions that arise from literary translation—a vast subject—I like to think I’m not being defensive when I quote Gregory Rabassa, asked by an interviewer if he knew enough Spanish to translate Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. “The real question,” Rabassa corrected the interviewer, “is whether I know enough English.”
Osdany Morales was born in Nueva Paz, Cuba, in 1981. He is the author of two collections of short stories, Minuciosas puertas estrechas (Narrow Little Doors; Ediciones UNIÓN, 2007), and Antes de los aviones (Before the Flights; Suburbano Ediciones, 2013); two novels, Papyrus (The Last Librarian; Dalkey Archive, 2012) and Zozobra (Landfall; Bokeh, 2018); a poetry collection, El pasado es un pueblo solitario (The Past is a Lonesome Town; Bokeh, 2015); and a book of essays on Cuban literature, Lengua Materna (Mother Tongue; Bokeh, 2023). Morales has received the 2006 David Award, a 2008 Casa de Teatro prize, and the 2012 Alejo Carpentier Award.
Harry Bauld’s poetry collections are The Uncorrected Eye and How to Paint a Dead Man. He was included by Matthew Dickman in Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press). His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and U.K. and won the New Millenium Writings award and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize. He divides his time between New York and the Spanish Basque Country.
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