from What the lightning brings
THE PAST HAS LEFT YOU BEHIND, YOU HAVE CONSECRATED YOURSELF
to that past that fed you up
but you live holstered on the stone, the stone is
your horizon
on top of your shoulders, where the pain abdicates, and the
tears dig their grave,
on that fragile wood, they overcrowd themselves
the days without time
you look at time running in the distance, towards the void
of its useless destruction.
EL PASADO TE HA DEJADO ATRÁS, TE HAS CONSAGRADO
a ese pasado que te colma
pero vives enfundada en la piedra, la piedra es
tu horizonte
sobre tus hombros, donde el dolor abdica, y las
lagrimas cavan su tumba,
sobre esa madera frágil, se hacinan
los días sin tiempo
miras el tiempo correr a lo lejos, hacia el vacío
de su inútil destrucción.
THERE, THAT THREAD OF SMOKE TILLING MY EAR
that clamor of my head flanked by the wind
or the life that resists its fatality
in the middle of a pure day
there’s fragile snow and absolute
searching its secret
a past that seems irreparable
a trail that deviates from the corn
where the herb numbs.
now we will not have but deserted sheds
dust settling within the shutters
silent debris over our nape.
AY, ESE HILO DE HUMO LABRANDO MI OÍDO
ese clamor de mi cabeza flanqueado por el viento
o la vida que se resiste a la fatalidad
en mitad de un día puro
hay allí nieve frágil y absoluta
buscando su secreto
un pasado que parece irreparable
un sendero que se desvía del maíz
donde la hierba se adormece.
ya no tendremos sino galpones desiertos
polvo aposentado en los postigos escombros silenciosos sobre nuestra nuca.
WHERE THE NIGHT RISES TO DELVE INTO THE CLARITY
there too you lack the shadow
I warm my ear of the wind
here
in front of the ash of the stone
I fill my hands with that furious cold
I make its roots darker
in the dense light
DONDE LA NOCHE SE ALZA PARA AHONDAR LA CLARIDAD
allí también te falta la sombra
me acojo el oído del viento
aquí
frente a la ceniza de la piedra
lleno mis manos con ese frío furor
hago más oscuras sus raíces
en la luz espesa
I LOOK AT THE HORIZON UNDERNEATH THE RADIANCE OF THE
battle
and in my anxiety I wait for the finale
of the strife.
such is my luck, the one that debates against dilated powers
in the middle of enormous stones without smoke
in the pure abandonment, in the absence of all
humidity, as if I could hear the scream of my bones.
if someone were to ask me how to awaken hope
how to discover the herb without giving a single step back
how to silence so much memory and not redden before the
magnificence of the constellations, I would respond
that we still don’t feel the pain of that lost kingdom.
MIRO EL HORIZONTE BAJO EL RESPLANDOR DE LA
batalla
y en mi ansiedad espero el fin
de la contienda.
esta es mi suerte, la que se debate contra poderes dilatados
en medio de enormes piedras sin humo
en el desamparo puro, en la ausencia de toda
humedad, como si escuchara el grito de mis huesos.
si alguien me pregunta cómo despertar a la esperanza
cómo hallar la hierba sin dar un paso atrás
cómo silenciar tanto recuerdo y no enrojecer ante la
magnificencia de las constelaciones, yo respondería
que aún no sentimos el dolor de ese reino perdido.
I ONLY ENCOUNTER IN MY ROUTE THIS ENLARGED AIR.
I walk towards it with the docility of the mast that, by chance, talks to me
of the savage pains returned for the winter
eternal guest of some morning, the alive blood, the stone that falls from heaven.
All the air fades or talks while it walks or sprouts out
of the crust of a tree before it addresses us.
The sun gives us its back, takes care of our richness, it returns us
the metal and the wood to fortify our memory.
We have had dust and ash
some surge, some farewells and the promise of other landscapes
givers of shadow and light from some stone.
SÓLO ENCUENTRO EN MI RUTA ESTE AIRE AGRANDADO.
Camino hacia él con la docilidad del mástil que, acaso, me hable
De los dolores salvajes devueltos por el invierno
huésped eterno de alguna mañana, la sangre viva, la piedra que baja del cielo.
Todo el aire se desvanece o habla mientras camina o brota
de la corteza de un árbol antes de abordanos.
El sol nos da la espalda, cuida nuestra riqueza, nos devuelve
el metal y la madera para fortalecer nuestra memoria.
Hemos tenido polvo y ceniza
algún oleaje, algunas despedidas y la promesa de otros paisajes
dadores de sombra y luz desde alguna piedra.
NOW I DO NOT HAVE THAT PAIN THE STRENGTH OF THE ABYSS
the pain of the stone that lifts up to your chest
what I do have is the umbral where the wind nourishes itself
with its páramo face
this lament that comes from the center of the earth.
YA NO TENGO ESE DOLOR LA FUERZA DEL ABISMO
el dolor de la piedra levantada hasta tu pecho
tengo sí el umbral donde se nutre el viento
con su rostro de páramo
este lamento que viene del centro de la tierra.
Translator’s Note:
The apparition that is leftover from lightning cradles these poems. A welcoming by chance to a search fueled by obsession, often blissfully painful. The illumination and engulfing nightfall from such a strike, done to or by the one that wields the pen, or both, spreads over a battlefield within the mind. Its origins: a cause and symptom of existence within darkness. Language, which strips noise and creates sound from wind, poses itself above the hardness of the stones, nuzzles itself into the emptiness that it encounters with an echo of persistence. That obsession reins in shadows as part of their arsenal. Esdras Parra always attuned her ear to welcome such a strike, to possibly hear her finale, what would be left afterward, or what was left to get there. Within that illumination, the flash emerges from and into her with a violent raze of her body and senses. Her manuscripts were written in a tight, loose script, almost unintelligible, mimicking her knowledge of her inevitable but intangible goodbye.
Lo que trae el relampago (What the Lightning Brings) is made up of two books that nourish themselves on each other: Cada noche su camino (Each Night its Own Path) and El extremado amor (The Extreme Love). They diffuse as each follows the sensorial progression of the light/shadow of the other. The books have a symbiotic relationship, insisting on their reflection; one represents the finale of a life, and the other the beginning of that echo. These works, written in the final years of her life, reflect deep ontological and existential contemplations, grappling with themes of death, love, and the self: “Why does the shadow not have as well its own echo”. These hyper-humanistic themes of solitude, existential search, and reflection demand a profound call for meaning within the imagery of a naturally abstract landscape. These poems give us a somber, imaginative third space during her auto-grieving. Through a navigation on this battlefield, the elemental pastoral wields the senses as her weapon. Parra invites us into her somber escape, constructing an introspective utopia to face and claim victory in armor and glory against her existence within transnecropolitics and extending her life into perennial preservation.
Despite Parra’s poems braiding universal themes and an affective state of wonder, she still very much exists and masters her cultural practice. Subjectivities of language and cultural presence are necessary in poetic creations. In THE PAST HAS LEFT YOU BEHIND, YOU HAVE CONSECRATED YOURSELF, Parra utters “a ese pasado que te colma”, using the word “colma” has specific cultural signifiers aside from the direct use of the word’s definition which means “filled up” or “heap”. And while in colloquial use it contains remnants of its formal definition, in slang it is used to describe the inconceivable or unthinkable. The closest translated rendition I believe would be “fed up”. It is a phrase that is used to describe something that is unfair due to how “filled up” you are.
Translating Parra’s poems is an intimate task through her entrapment, through wounds. Like stitches made of grass, she embraces the precarity of life by its teeth. Her landscapes form a whirlpool of time travel, and teleportation for a diaspora, of being a child in the wonders of the Andes mountains. She was born and spent her childhood in Mérida, where the Andes are at their oldest. Though at its lowest height in comparison to the rest of the mountain range, one can hear the calls of such ancient formations in the fog curtain. Being a child on such a mountain you are connected to some of the oldest lands at their last breaths. In this collection, Parra exhumes this relationship in conversation with her body at its last exhalations as a child does to a mountain. In NOW I DO NOT HAVE THAT PAIN THE STRENGTH OF THE ABYSS, she speaks about the “páramo”, which is a variety of alpine tundra ecosystems located in the Andes Mountain Range. The ecologist Zdravko Baruch broadly describes the páramo as “all high, tropical, montane vegetation above the continuous timberline”. Within the mountains, you see rounds of soft peaks and valleys lush in full green. Although one can’t see how high one is, you feel it. The cold is thin due to such heights, soft but enters your ears and whispers in shivers. Páramo can be translated to “moorland”. As a child myself of such lands, I believe it integral to honor the zone not just as a type of land but as one that deserves its own distinct title. This type of Venezuelan ecological subjectivity is instrumental in Parra’s pastoral elements, therefore I decided to keep the sonics of the original word intact.
Parra baptizes us into her hyper-naturalistic landscape and uses elemental and a sensorial arsenal to transverberate her introspective existentialism and the radical negativity that drives the gravitational force for her perennial futurity against her approaching terminality. She is the owner of a singular voice. Parra offers texts that insist on surviving. Plotted along an orbit of transubstantiation and nature, she wields a battlefield along an ontological trip constructed in fragmented, iridescent points and luminescent sharp edges. She utilizes this cyclical conversion through such a transitory stage of the edges of life to drive original questions within Venezuelan poetry.
Esdras Parra was a trans poet, writer, essayist, translator, and illustrator born on July 13, 1929 in Santa Cruz de Mora, Mérida, Venezuela, and passed away on November 18, 2004 in Caracas. She studied philosophy in Caracas at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and in Rome. Her professional career included being the literary director of Monte Ávila Editores, coordinating the literary paper of the El Nacional newspaper, and serving as the editor-in-chief of Revista Imagen. Parra’s literary journey began with three notable narrative books: El insurgente (1967), Por el norte el mar de las Antillas (1968), and Juego limpio (1968). However, she eventually focused exclusively on poetry and drawing. Her poetry works include Este suelo secreto (1995), which won the Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas, Antigüedad del frío (2000), and Aún no (2004), which was published shortly before her death. Lastly, these are poems from Parra’s posthumously published collection, Lo que trae el relampago (What The Lightning Brings, 2021), published in Caracas by Fundación La Poeteca in 2021. It gathers the two poetry collections she left unpublished: Cada noche su camino, written between 1996 and 1997, was carefully revised for a definitive final version; and El extremado amor, written between 2002 and 2003, which never had a conclusive draft as she was uprooted by illness and death.
Valeria Rodrigo is a lesbian writer and translator from Valencia, Venezuela. She is featured or forthcoming in Foglifter, Azahares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Columbia Review.
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