POSTS

HOUSE

a house
six outside doors
seventeen inside doors
twenty-three keyholes

so many doors to lock
so many doors to kick
and slam open or shut
only one of them was permitted to do that
only she
not he
and not the child

so many keyholes
so many near-identical keys
and the child didn’t know which was which
only she
and sometimes he

doors leading to wailing and gnashing of teeth
heady impotence echoing through the keyholes
cursing of feet against a rickety hollow core door
nights full of pent up sounds from doors
but no keys

so many doors
still he had to climb through the basement window
the same window every time
under the stairs where nobody could see him
after all it was a disgrace

and the child was left behind

HÚS

eitt hús
seks úthurðar
seytjan innihurðar
trýogtjúgu lyklarhol

so nógvar hurðar at læsa
so nógvar hurðar at sparka
og bresta upp og aftur
men tað slapp bara ein
hon
ikki hann
ikki barnið

so nógv lyklarhol
so nógvir næstan sama slag lyklar
men barnið kendi ikki lyklarnar
bara hon
onkuntíð hann

hurðar inn til grát og tannagrísl
ørandi máttloysi ekkóandi gjøgnum lyklarholini
syngjandi leysir hurðaklædningar fullir av forbannilsum
nætur fullar av innistongdum hurðaljóðum
men ongir lyklar

so nógvar hurðar
álíkavæl mátti hann fara út gjøgnum vindeygað í kjallaranum
sama vindeygað hvørja ferð
undir trappuni har ongin sá
tað var jú skomm

men eftir stóð barnið

WALLS

hope sits in the walls
of the house
where tears
rage
pain
hold sway

joy is an outlaw here
together with stiff smiles it stamps out the rhythm
of a mad dance in darkened room
snight and day
so that children become adults before the sun rises
and adults lose faith in themselves again

despair is best friends with fatigue
added together they make impotence
which mercilessly takes its seat in the house
so that he and she
no longer can bear to see the child
sitting in the walls waiting for them

VEGGIR

vónin situr í veggjunum í húsunum
har tárini
øðin
pínan
hava valdið

gleðin er friðleys
saman við stívnaðu smílunum trampar hon rútmuna
í ørliga dansinum í myrku rúmunum
nátt og dag
so børn gerast vaksin áðrenn sólin rísur
og vaksin aftur missa álitið á sær sjálvum

vónloysið er besti vinur hjá møðini
saman skapa tey máttloysi
sum uttan náði fær sær sess í húsunum
so hann og hon
ikki longur orka at síggja barnið
sum situr inni í veggjunum og bíðar eftir teimum

KEYS

numberless doors
that forced him
to climb out the window
when he wanted out
all the way out

implacable doors
between him
and her and joy
and then the child
that damn child

doors to pass through
and never return
back through
empty handed when the world sticks out its tongue
and spreads its legs for you
and wants to be taken right then and there
and people are starving
and getting murdered
and can’t afford keys or salt

so the child thought
looking out the window
for footprints
in long since melted snow

doors to lock
with jangling keys that came at a price
that never fit into a child’s small pockets
because doors lock both ways
every way
from the inside and outside
backwards and forwards

to come to a locked door
meant something in that house

can we go now
asked the child
if the door lets us
he answered

she didn’t reply
because the keys were so loud
and in that moment
the lord was no longer lord of the keys

once the child left
and almost couldn’t find the way back
 again

LYKLAR

óteljandi hurðar
sum noyddu hann
at fara út gjøgnum vindeygað tá hann vildi út
heilt út

hóttandi hurðar
millum hann
og hana og eydnuna
og so barnið
á hatta ólukksáliga barnið

hurðar at fara út ígjøgnum
og aldrin koma aftur
aftur
sum av torvheiðum tá verðin gálvar og gleivar
og vil verða tikin her og nú
og menniskju svølta og verða dripin
og ikki hava ráð til lyklar og salt

soleiðis hugsaði barnið
og hugdi út gjøgnum vindeygað
eftir fótafetum í kavanum
sum langt síðani var horvin

hurðar at steingja
við illsintum dýrgoldnum lyklum
ið aldrin passa niður í smáar barnalummar
tí hurðarnar steingja báðar vegir
allar vegir
inneftir og úteftir
frameftir og aftureftir

at koma á stongdar dyr
hevði ein serligan týdning í hesum húsinum
fara vit nú
spurdi barnið
um hurðin vil
svaraði hann

hon segði onki
tí lyklarnir larmaðu so illa
og beint tá
var harrin ikki harri yvir lyklunum longur

einaferð fór barnið
og mundi ikki funnið aftur
aftur

LUDO

they embrace on the kitchen floor
he
and she
her fury has passed for now
the quarrel seeps through the walls
and into the floor

the child just stands there
watching
holding their breath
is allowed a goodnight hug
wants to
doesn’t want to
play the game anymore

at any moment fatigue will come
and the game of ludo beneath the kitchen lamp
where darkness holds sway
on the red wax tablecloth

they let their thoughts keep an eye on each other
the game is more than a game
an entirely different game
a dangerous game
no longer a game of ludo
but a deadly game of reality set to explod

ea look
a tic
a breathless yawn
a father’s fragile eyes almost smiling
a childish giggle that lasted too long
or too briefly
can send it all to hell so that doors slam again

and make things break
around them
inside them

so here they sit again
he and the child
sick to their stomachs
as the night laughs

LUDO

tey klemmast á køksgólvinum
hann
og hon
øðin er uppi fyri hesa ferð
klandrið seyrar út gjøgnum veggirnar
niður í gólvið

barnið stendur bara har
hyggur
heldur ondini
sleppur álíkavæl upp í klemmið í nátt
vil
vil ikki
spæla spælið longur

um eina løtu kemur møðin
og ludospælið undir lampuni
har náttin ræður
á reyða voksdúkinum

tey lata tankarnar ansa eftir hvørjum øðrum
spælið er ikki bara spæl
eitt heilt annað spæl
vandamikið spæl
ikki ludospæl
deyðiligt veruleikaspæl sum hvørja løtu kann bresta

ARE COPPER PIPES IN HEAVEN

do they use copper pipes anymore
or are they banned because she used them
to terrorize him

anyone can learn to use copper pipes to terrorize someone

beg god for a two-story house
a man who locks himself in the basement
looking for fugitive rest in a narrow bedroom
that’s right beneath the kitchen

don’t forget the copper pipes

the man doesn’t dare count the darkened hours
because the banished sun will surprise him again
and you must always be ill-tempered and insomniac

when the fight is finished and you yet again
have beat him into himself
or have attacked him with a knife
and he wounded in body and soul has gone to sleep in the basement
turn on all the taps
let the water creak its dizzying angel song through golden copper pipes
and don’t forget to flush all the toilets at the same time
so that the heavenly demon will gurgle in the cisterns
unceasingly

the kitchen is the highlight
let the tap sharpen its glass-shard spear on the steel sink
please don’t turn it up too much
let the water stream spine-snappingly sharp
so it becomes unbearable
unavoidable
just over the head of the man
who is still fumbling for a pitiless sleep

the chair’s restless metal feet are waiting too
drag them across the floor
teeth-grindingly against the linoleum
again and again
and again
all night

do it all night long
which you’re more than capable of

the stage is set
your heavenly stage
it’s all up to you now
and the endless yards of thin copper pipe
inside the walls
and beneath the floorboards of the house
to set the balance
make the water sing just the right
ominous tune
so lovely
so endlessly sad to the ears
his ears
as he lies awake staring at the ceiling
just below you and the kitchen
with his big dry eyes
unable to ask
why
as they sink into a stiffened resin flux on the wooden ceiling
and forget any thought of the child
who is lying alone in between the copper pipes
singing so it will remember

everything

ERU KOPARRØR Í HIMMIRÍKI

brúka tey koparrør longur
ella blivu tey bannað tí hon brúkti tey
at terrorisera hann við

øll kunnu læra at terrorisera við koparrørum

bið guð um eini hús í tveimum hæddum
ein mann sum læsir seg inni í kjallaranum
leitandi eftir friðleysari hvíld í einum trongum kamari
sum altíð má liggja beint undir køkinum

gloym ikki koparrørini

maðurin torir ikki at telja myrkaløgdu tímarnar
tí bannsetta sólin fer enn einaferð at taka hann á bóli
og ringa lagið má vera á tær sum aldrin fer í song

tá bardagin er av og tú enn einaferð
hevur sparkað hann inn í seg sjálvan
ella hevur lagt á hann við knívi
og hann særdur uppá likam og sál er tørnaður inn í kjallaranum
koyr so allar kranar frá
lat vatnið gnísta sín ørandi einglasang í gyltu koparrørunum

gloym heldur ikki at skola øll vesini niður í senn
so himmalski demonurin kann surkla í sisternum
uttan íhald

køkurin er hæddarpunktið
lat kranan hvessa sítt spíska glarspjót móti stálvaskinum
koyr endiliga ikki ov hart
frá lat vatnstráluna vera akkurát so mønustingandi hvassa
at hon verður mest óúthaldilig
óundansleppilig
beint yvir høvdinum á honum
sum enn trilvar eftir náðileysu hvíldini

metalbeinini á stólunum bíða ótolin
drag tey aftur og fram eftir gólvinum
tannapínugríslandi móti linoliinum
umaftur og umaftur
og umaftur
alla náttina
endiliga alla hesa friðsælu nátt
sum tú orkar so væl

Translators’ Note

Rare sunlight lit the green fields and grass roofed houses of the valley below and pooled in rectangles on the wood floor of my co-translator Sámal Soll’s kitchen floor. We riffed back and forth on idioms and phrasing and debated meanings trying to suss our way through Katrin Ottarsdóttir’s poetry collection, Are there Copper Pipes in Heaven. In it Ottarsdóttir pries back the screen of privacy to reveal the dark and dysfunctional private life of a home where a mentally unstable, drug abusing mother terrorizes her weak husband and neglects her daughter.

This book is the most confessional and auto-biographical poetry ever published in Faroe. In a country that is also a small town and no one is farther than a degree or two of acquaintance or relation, a country where poetry sells just as well as novels, this style is controversial. When I told people I was translating Are there Copper Pipes in Heaven, I got a mixed response. Quite a few people said something to the effect of, “she’s very talented but I don’t know about her writing about this.” A few said, “my parents knew her parents and they don’t see the situation the way she writes it.” It wasn’t the controversy or the shock—which comes through even to an English speaker accustomed to confessional poetry— that drew me in. It was the spare sparse language and the overarching vision of the Ottarsdóttir’s verse. I sank into it and tried to put myself there, a fly on the wall of that house.

Sámal and I got through half of the manuscript that day. We went back and forth and
tense issues, idioms, and biblical references. One thing that kept tripping us up is gender transference. In Faroese, all children are referred to with the pronoun “it” since child is a neuter word. In English, this brings to mind the book A Child Called It. Though this book is about domestic abuse, that gives the wrong sense. We opted for referring to the child as “she” but were later corrected by the author who explained that he (the father), she (the mother), and it (the child) represent a trinity. She was insistent that only the mother had the right to the pronoun “she.” It’s this give and take between the original language and the target language where the impossibility of translation becomes apparent. It’s also where translation becomes the most fun – how to solve the puzzle in the best way possible, even when the pieces won’t fit perfectly? Those sunlit hours translating poetry in the islands of fog were almost hypnotic. And that liminal space of light and language and conversation is to me what translating is all about.

When we’d finished the day’s work and had dinner, I asked Sámal to point out my way home to downtown Tórshavn. “This may sound a bit Holmesian,” he said, “but look down toward the black falls. Do you see that man in a black trenchcoat? Follow the trail he’s on.”

Matthew Landrum holds and MFA from Bennington College. His translations from Faroese have recently appeared in Asymptote Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Image Journal, and Modern Poetry in Translation. He lives in Detroit.

Sámal Soll is a Faroese writer and translator. His first short story collection titled Glasbúrið was published in 2015. He has an MA degree in English Language and Literature from Aalborg University in Denmark and has just completed a degree in Faroese Language at the Faroese University in the Faroe Islands. He is currently working on a translation of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. You can read more about his work at www.samalsoll.wordpress.com.

Katrin Ottarsdóttir is a pioneer in Faroese filmmaking and has made several feature films, documentaries, shorts etc., e.g. the award winning feature films Atlantic Rhapsody (1989), Bye Bye Blue Bird (1999), and LUDO (2014). Born 1957 in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, she studied film directing at the National Danish Film School. She debuted as a writer in 2012 with the poetry collection Are Copper Pipes In Heaven (awarded the Faroese Litterature Award 2013). In 2015 she published the poetry collection Mass For A Film, and in 2016 a collection of short stories, After Before.

She’s Written To Him Five Times In Two Years

After Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther”

Looks for nothing but his reply every time

she sifts through her mail. 

He’s been silent
as a stillborn baby, but she could swear
she feels him
dreaming.  He’ll come back. 

Like her own pulse, this certainty
drums dumbly on
inside her.   

Sometimes, she shivers awake

alone.  I was inside his body. 
He was falling; I felt him

hit the ground.  I Could Not Follow After Elvia Ardalani’s “Nadie En El Último Momento”

Tell me, Dad –

Did night, an enormous wave, come down
on you all at once?

Did my baby-face flash before your eyes
when the tide crashed
against your heart, sick
of rising?

This is what you wished for: 

A body, unmoored;
The kind of silence that assails,
glues deep sleep
onto the insides of your eyelids.

Night arrived; nothing stayed
anchored.

When you left,
you left me behind.

When The Heart Stops Ticking, The Soul Does Not Change Shape

After Elvia Ardalani’s “Muerto Eras Pesado y Dócil”

Only the body remembers
stillness – relaxing without wanting
or waiting for seasons to end.

[Underground, the body erupts
into bloom.]

Someday, you will cease
to worry about frizzy hair, missed
periods, or too little sleep.

Someday, you will abandon yourself
without resistance.

[Love, like evil, switches form.
Love, like God, is in everything.]

Translator’s Note

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther” was originally published in German in the early twentieth century.  While crafting my translation of “The Panther,” my objective was to capture the original poem’s tonal/thematic essence, and then render it in a fresh, unique way – to use a different subject (a woman, instead of a panther) and different language to depict a moment similar to the moment Rilke depicts.

Elvia Ardalani’s “Nadie En El Último Momento” and “Muerto Eras Pesado y Dócil” appear in her Spanish-language collection, Miércoles de Ceniza.  I wanted my translations to retain Ardalani’s poems’ tonal and thematic essence.  In some instances, I borrowed her language––pulled words and even direct phrases from her poems, and then reordered them/couched them between my own words.  The result: Love children that are neither wholly Elvia Ardalani nor wholly Jeanette Geraci, but resemble both of us.  There’s a mysterious magic about the fact that––even in moments when I was working with another poet’s language––I ended up unconsciously playing with rhythm and sound in a way that’s typical of my habits as a writer.  I guess this is an example of the strange, beautiful merging process that other translators have told me about!

Jeanette Geraci graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA Creative Writing program in Spring 2017. Her creative nonfiction, flash fiction, and original poetry have appeared/are forthcoming in Room Magazine, 3Elements Literary Review, Blue Fifth Review, Lunch Ticket Literary Magazine, Lingerpost, Compose Journal, and numerous other publications. Jeanette received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2016. She currently lives and works in South Florida. This is her first published translation.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian German-language poet and novelist. His poetry, creative prose, and collected letters continue to inspire readers around the world.

Elvia Ardalani is a contemporary Mexican poet who has published four collections (including her most recent, Miércoles de Ceniza) and currently teaches Creative Writing and Spanish literature at the University of Texas-Pan American.

La gita / The Outing

Un vento che m’impasta
col soffione, che mi
fonde le suole mentre
faccio la mia
cernita: quale sasso
ti ricorda, il suono
di quale sirena.

Adesso è il tempo della
miniera della terra
che mi sfiora il capo,
del parlare indurito,
della lampada spenta.

Scale dentro la roccia
grattano il fondo, dove
si sudano sassi e il cuore
gorgoglia.

Ci scendiamo in miniera,
seguendo briciole di
pirite, ci si scende
con gli occhi, coi ginocchi,
ci si scende a cercare
la traccia, la goccia
che ha segnato la pietra
col cadere, che fa la
memoria traboccare.

(ci sciogliamo
col caldo, goccia
a goccia, ci
rimpastiamo
al mare.
ci ritroviamo,
nodo nella
palpebra.)

Dentro ascolto il
legno del sostegno,
conto le micce che
aprono alla vista,
ci raduno prima
della volata,
                  ci cerco
nel buio e nel calore.

Ci cerco, a noi due:
tu nube di memoria,
io che mi sfuggo
come di mercurio,
tremito di termometro
che ingoio, vetro e tutto.

(Un treno dal buio,
un piede per binario,
un occhio accecato che
ti cerca,
            un treno
nel buio, che t’aspetta.)

…

poi

…

È il crepito
al respiro
ad annunciarti,
tutta la polvere
infilata negli
alveoli, ora
carta vetrata.

È il bagliore
di cerino dentro
all’occhio.

(la polvere che scende
dalle mine s’è
intrecciata al polmone e
ad ogni piano la
sacca è piú lisa,
piú pesa.)

…

in galleria (ancora febbre)

macchina che va a vuoto
e surriscalda,
l’affanno accelerato di chi
sente sfuggirsi,
lampadina che
sfrigola e svapora.

…

sfilarti il filo
rosso dalla scapola,
seguirti nelle
ossa della
terra
       oltre il confine
del labbro,
                noi,
rimossi dalla luce.

questo è un lavoro
di taglio e riempimento,
poco importa se sasso o

se parola.

*

A wind that kneads me
 with hot gas, that melts
my soles while
I pick: what stone
recalls you, the sound
of what siren.

Now is the time
of the mine, clay
grazing my head,
hard language,
lamp gone out.

Stairs in the rock
claw the bottom, where
skin sweats stones,
gurgles the heart.

We go down the shaft
along a trail of pyrite
crumbs, go down
with our eyes, knees, go
down to trail
the trace, drop
by dropping, making
memory overflow.

(we melt with
the heat, drop by
drop, we knead
back into the sea.
we meet again,
knots on
eyelids).

I listen inward
to the support beams,
count the fuses
that open the view, I
amass us
for the flight,
                  look for us
in the dark, in the heat.

I look for us two:
you, a cloud of memory,
me, fleeing
myself like mercury, that
tremor of a thermometer
I swallow, glass and all.

(A train from the dark,
a foot on each track,
an eye, blinded, that
looks for you,
a train
in the dark, that waits for you.)

…

then

…

It is the crackle
of breath
that announces you,
all the dust got into the
alveoli, now sandpaper.

It is the glow
of a match within
the eye.

(dust comes down
from the mines,
interlaces with lung, at
each floor the sack sags,
gets more threadbare.)

…

in the gallery (fever still)

a car running on
empty, overheating,
fast breath of the one that feels
that one flees, a light bulb
sizzles and goes out.

…

pulling the red
thread from your shoulder
blade, following you
in the earth
bones
beyond the frontier
of the lip,

us,
removed from light.

This, the labor
of cutting and filling,
what matter whether with stone

or word.

Previously published in “Da una crepa”, Einaudi, 2014, and forthcoming from The Plant of Dreaming (Chelsea Editions/Xenos Books).

Translator’s Note

The first thing about “La Gita” is that it probably should be called not “The Outing” but “The Inning,” since the journeys, or gite, it plots are inward: one, that of descending into a mine; the other, that of descending into a yours, which is also mine. Descent into the earth for a Florentine poet like Elsa Biagini has only one possible, but also inescapable, literary map, that of the Inferno, and in this very personal poem about her grandfather, a mining engineer also named Dante, the way through the claustrophobic insides of the mine is also the path of the soul against the current of time into memory, perhaps a memory that is not an unmediated, individual memory: a mine for me that itself is not mine. The soul proceeds through it feelingly.

I co-translated most of “La Gita” with the author. Some of the translation is the author’s English version lightly edited, some of it is me working from the Italian. The original was published in 2014 in Da Una Crepa, Elisa’s third collection with Einaudi, one of Italy’s most influential publishers, based in Turin. Material from the previous two Einaudi collections was translated for The Guest in the Wood, published in 2013 by Chelsea and the winner of the Best Translated Book Award for poetry.   

Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of, most recently, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, and the translator of The Fire Horse: Children’s Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms, both available from New York Review Books, here.

Elisa Biagini lives in Florence, Italy, after having taught and studied in the US for several years (Ph.D. Rutgers University). She has published seven poetry collections, most recently Da una crepa (2014). Her poems have been translated into many languages, and she has published editions of her poetry in Spain and the US (The Guest in the Wood, Chelsea editions, NY 2013 won the 2014 Best Translated Book Award). A translator from English (of Alicia Ostriker, Sharon Olds, Lucile Clifton among others), she has published an anthology of contemporary American poetry, Nuovi Poeti Americani (Einaudi, 2006) and  she has been invited to the most important international poetry festivals. She teaches Creative Writing-Poetry, Travel Writing, Literature, and Art History in Italy and abroad.  

Selections from Taller Sub Verso / Sub Verse Workshop

E

The curtain is a collage of home videos and clothes used by hustling sex workers. On the canvases the sonorous poets are moaning: s/he breaks the drums on spilled things like dance, s/he slides and rolls around in the spilled things: splashing what is delicious over the delicate, like an idiophone community of spillways conceives itself: s/he photocopies Polaroids and wrinkles them like their astronomical deterioration bellows with brilliant movement: s/he silences because s/he tenses like a cylindrical similar to nerve firing: s/he glances her tongue over the crystal edge since the note is venal: coherent is the machine that regulates the volumes of the speeches like the gang in a schizoid curation
Iniquitous, the symphonic tongue
because of the accents of its censures. We are all pornostars.
sometimes as is the adverb of renunciation
of the abuse of the disillusionment of speed.
The recording screams amateurism and evolution. Use the strangest thing you all can see to illustrate your amusements.

G

We are the dissolving of candy. An in-style limbo. Let’s split the verse with cruelty. Copyleft. Criminal micropolitics surgically operate methods of discipline. Let’s diminish masculinity without increasing the feminine. The mine embeds the tear, in italics one craves psychotropic amulets against the melancholy of sulfur. They are the curves of anthologies in aerosol, post-graffiti stickers from amusement parks. We are curves of contaminating red tape, almost autonomous, among arts.

Icicles are hung above unstable corrugated iron roads. Ventilation that motorizes the balance of fatalities impregnated by lovers negates the slight possibility of rehearsal. A semi-desiccated hedgehog speaks with its surgeon, it tells him that it sees g-spot fireworks on sad, seared retinas. The soup is divvied up inside the tunnel of hung-up audiences that sorrow the shadow. An enormous mug turns with intimate dishonesty in the cupola of an abandoned factory. My childhood runs between the bosoms of transgenic crops. The end of the fallible speeches is refined. You all are records of scenes of contagion and dependence among fragrant branches dedicated to impertinent deities.

S

Spin the letter each time you finish. The clock is the optical illusion of the monument. Look for a response in the prostates of lit candles. The perpendicular esses that gravitate bionic in their waning moons while I yell at the grasshoppers ruins of constellations, now they stick to the clouds like bursts of memories, tonight the stories will end in the disgrace of those sentenced. You will mutilate harlequins of unsolved crimes, with the remnants you will name and attack each other. In your lymph nodes there exist craters of devastating lava dreams.

That S will traverse the vowels of your howls, the velvets. It will suppress the first letter of your name, will walk it on a leash, will order it to lick the phlegm and to feed it from its own mouth. Receive the instructions to stay in the background scene. Destruction of your vanities thanks to the licking of your almonds. Voracious flying kick in the wind. Hide your yet undeciphered codes in the indiscreet reader. Fleeting matches will bellow against darkness.

That S is also the whip that will fall heavy on your destiny. The animals will fornicate in the graffiti while the silk marks the inside of your teeth. The hills are the curves of erotic bodies of a guerilla cumbia.

Translator’s Note

Giancarlo Huapaya’s book Taller Sub Verso (Sub-Verse Workshop) is constructed like an Abecedary, in which each letter is a space where processes and performances are developed, involving bio-political relations, micro-economies, neo-mythologies, sexual technologies, hybrid esthetics, and elastic concepts that are activated through mechanisms of evolution and mutation. This selection highlights three of the poems that, though not united by a theme, share the same swirling, heady, corporeal atmosphere that links the collection as a whole, at the interstices of essayistic argumentation, the fragmentation of poetry, and the dynamics of performance.

My approach to translation varies with each text that I confront. That is, I believe that translation is first and foremost an act of listening. Though “fidelity” to a deep sense or meaning is an important criterion for translation, it is certainly not the only one. I believe that each text, especially each poetic text, offers its interlocutors its own unique key with which to open it. In some poems, this will be the cadence, the rhythm, or the sonorous urgency that takes the lead. In other poems it is the playfulness among words and concepts, the exchange across space and time, or the volley between opposing conceptual courts that begs to be highlighted. In some cases, there are multiple levels of meaning, and my goal is to capture as much of this polyvalence as possible in the translated language, and in others, the goal is to preserve the original ambiguity. What makes this particular collaboration especially fruitful is the fact that the author, Giancarlo Huapaya, and I have been able to work side by side.

I was excited to work with Giancarlo because his poetry vibrates, it crackles, and it allows me to fully move across the visceral and cerebral planes, back and forth, always circling in towards a core of human experience, a painful or beautiful truth about the nature of humans as political, sexual, sanguine beings. Such collaboration has allowed me to interrogate, to understand veiled references, to bring these to the fore. Together we made choices based on sonority, significance and, at times, we sought the sensation of strangeness in a precise word usage or turn of phrase. I see the translation of contemporary work an act of transcreation in which translation is a dialogic process that allows me to breathe a different life into the poetry, capturing, too, the spirit of the times in the new language while honoring the source language and its linguistic and cultural particularities.

Ilana Dann Luna holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she graduated with an emphasis in literary translation. She is an assistant professor of Latin American Studies at Arizona State University. Her book Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (forthcoming SUNY Press) meditates on one aspect of translation: the adaptation of literary text to film. Recent translations of Mexican poet Ignacio Ruíz Pérez have appeared in the Houston Poetry Festival Anthology and Askew, and translations of Peruvian poet Paul Guillen appeared in Hostos Review/ Revista Hostiana.

Giancarlo Huapaya (Lima, Peru) is Founder and Editor of Cardboard House Press. He is author of the books Estado y Contemplación/ Canción de Canción se Gana, Polisexual and Taller Sub Verso, and the editor of the anthology Pulenta Pool: Peruvian Poets in the United States (Hostos Review, 2017). He will soon present an exhibition of the past fifteen years of Peruvian visual poetry at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Previously, he was the advisor of the editorial and music industry policies of Cultural Industries of Lima, and he was the director of the Lima Poetry Festival during its first three years.

Good Intentions

Every morning Mom wakes me up with her shouting and through her tears asks me where Dad is. Our little farce commences in that very moment––while I dress or bathe her I tell her any old thing that comes to mind. That Dad will be right back in a few minutes or maybe that he already died, many years ago.

Mom has that strange look on her face when I answer her, that way of saying yes and no at the same time. But in the end she always nods––even on the days when I’m only her nurse––and with her eyes half-closed she asks me where my bathrobe is. She always says yes because there’s no reason for her to stubbornly cling to saying no, no flimsy memory that denies that we’re at war or that her other daughter––your little girl, Mom, don’t you remember––was finally devoured by cancer.

She has long white hair, a thin pale mane that takes me a long time to untangle. And I use those empty minutes to tell her some story about the past, weaving a truth that might be any truth, because any one is just as good as another––whatever ours was, I forgot it a long time ago. She listens in silence, staring at me, her eyes round with astonishment. She asks no questions. No question is possible when nothing is certain. She doesn’t even open her mouth to complain when the comb gets snagged in her hair, because I just repeat to her that pretty little girls don’t cry when they get their hair pulled.

Sometimes I remember Mom’s dreams, the ones she had before she got sick, before she forgot all those things she would have liked to have been. And I repeat them to her in every detail. I tell her that she was a scholarship student, that she didn’t get married so young, that Dad never said all those things. I tell her that the world outside is doing much better than she thinks. But the fact is that Mom doesn’t think at all and she simply stares at the closed venetian blinds, shrugs her shoulders, and smiles. She doesn’t think of anything because it’s enough for her to know that I graduated first in my class or that I’m about to close a business deal somewhere so far away that I need a plane ticket to get there. And then there are also those lucky days when we win a million dollars in the lottery and we’ve got so much money that we could buy any old thing we like, except today is Sunday and all the shops are closed.

Mom smiles on any of those days when everything is perfect. But there are also days that begin differently. Days when I wake up with a strange taste in my mouth or I get another one of those tremendous migraine headaches. And suddenly things just don’t seem quite so easy to me. Something prevents me from inventing another story about the past that sounds just the way Mom would have liked it to be. Something that seems a lot like rancor or envy. Envy for that comfortable existence that consists in waking up fresh each day, always ready to hear anew what a success your life has been. The same beauty again and again ad infinitum. After all, my real life, that life I sometimes remember, was never easy or wonderful. It’s then when I feel that unbearable migraine that I can’t do anything about. Mom shouts from her room, crying for Dad, asking where he is all over again, and I surprise myself by telling her that she threw him out of the house years ago. Or that he died, or that he’s in the room next to hers and doesn’t want to see her. Or that I’m his mistress and it’s me whom he really loves.           

Of course I love Mom; and I sympathize with her condition. But it’s not easy to take care of her day after day with the same spirit as if nothing were going on, as if time didn’t exist and we were back inside her photographs of a forgotten childhood. What I mean is that every time my migraine surges back I know it’s going to be a hard day for us, that I’m going to say some terrible thing that I’ll regret later on, or simply that our past will be unbearable all over again. Maybe I was never really born. Maybe my mother’s whole family died in some bloody war whose name I invent. Maybe Mom never met Dad: you think you remember that you did, but it’s not true, Mom; it’s only another one of your dreams. And she stays silent in that way she does when she believes absolutely everything. Also, when I tell her but of course you love mashed potatoes, Mom, and while she makes an effort to choke them down, I feel how she trembles and struggles with herself, with her revulsion, with her traitorous tastebuds. Or I point to her sick leg and I tell her nothing’s wrong with your leg, and I make her walk up and down the hallway while she grits her teeth and tries not to show any sign of the agonizing pain. The next day she wakes up with her leg all purple from the effort. Her exhaustion is the perfect excuse to tell her that everything really is pointless, that the accident that killed Dad many years ago also left her crippled. Mom looks at me again in that strange way, because she tries to remember but her memory is nothing but the same blind wall without any windows.

Sometimes the game consists of precisely the opposite: in not doing, in not saying absolutely anything. First thing in the morning I hide from her and pay no attention when she shouts and cries. Even when she drags herself out of bed and ends up with bloody gashes on her wrists. With great effort, she totters all around the house but nobody’s there and she doesn’t recognize a thing. Her most recent memories are thirty or forty years old, so I smile when I think about how each new piece furniture forces her to confront a painful, incomprehensible oddity, like a strange artifact from a science fiction movie. Her favorite place is the bathroom. The fixtures are old, probably at least as old as those memories of hers, and the bare pipes are even made of lead. There she hugs the toilet bowl or the sink and, pressing her forehead against the marble, screams until she loses her voice. Sometimes she cries out for Dad; sometimes she remembers my name or her own mother’s name. I deliberately leave a calendar next to the mirror. A calendar that might be current or perhaps, as necessary, one from the past, or even a fake one showing some unbelievable date from the distant future. Mom reads 2374 and repeats it to herself again and again while she clutches the sink weeping, because she understands that she surely must be dead already. At some point she falls asleep, fainting from hunger or thirst: her anguish must surely be immense. Later she wakes up in some part of the house and then I appear, her savior. I help her sit up and I say to her, Mom, you fell asleep, and after you told me that you’d help me peel the potatoes this time.

Other days I lower all the blinds and switch off the electricity. I enter her room in the dark, clapping my hands all the while. Time for school, I tell her, time for school, get dressed now or you’ll be late. I try to make my voice sound different, but it doesn’t really matter, because as I’ve already said, Mom accepts everything I tell her. Who are you, she asks me, and I reply very casually that I’m Mom, why aren’t you getting up. She takes a few moments to answer, because my mom is no idiot and she must remember vaguely that her mother died when she was a very little girl. But I don’t give her time to think. I caress her white hair, her wrinkles, and her flaccid breasts, and I say to her, Darling, you’re going to be late for school, get up now I’ve already prepared your breakfast for you. She doesn’t know what to say. She vaguely murmurs something about my father, about her daughter, but I leave her no room for doubt, and I tell her here you go again with that absurd nightmare about your husband and your daughter. Finally she accepts the fact that I’m Mom and she’s seven years old. Then she kisses me. She calls me sweet names that make me laugh. She also tells me that she has a math test at school that day. I give her a kiss and then I sit up, switch on the lights, and raise the blinds. I hold a mirror up to her face.

But I love Mom. What I mean is that I want the best for her. Especially those days when my head isn’t killing me. I know that I love her because sometimes I’ve listened to her cry––maybe I told her that she has cancer or that her little girl drowned in the bathtub; the little girl in her head who must surely be me––and when I’ve heard her crying I feel like something inside me is breaking. It only happens very, very rarely, but when it does I can’t stop hugging her and I need to be sincere. I need to tell the truth for once, because I’ve repainted the past so many times that it’s now like we never had any or, on the contrary, that we had every past you could imagine. So I look her in the eyes and I tell her everything. I tell her about my migraines, about her illness, the reason why I lower the blinds and why I don’t answer the phone or the doorbell when they ring. I tell her that some days I invent a perfect past for her and on other ones I feel like I’ve got to make her memory a living hell. I also explain that I surely must seem cruel, but in the end it’s not all my fault: that in a certain way it’s the past that chooses me, that calls to me each morning. I tell her that in these years I’ve learned that the truth doesn’t exist, that the truth has to be reinvented every day––and that sometimes the truth surges up from one simple headache, or from a hopeless whirling nausea in my stomach.

Mom doesn’t say anything. She only listens in silence and smiles or half-closes her eyes. She looks at me in a completely different way than usual. For the first time she doesn’t believe me. It’s strange to realize how sometimes the truth is harder to accept than a lie. At first she doesn’t believe me, and she lolls her head because everything is absurd, but suddenly something changes in her expression. It’s a look of horror or surprise. Perhaps it’s because at last she remembers, that she suddenly sees something in my face that that startles her, something she had never seen before. For a moment she looks me in the eyes, and in her gaze I see certain memories that I promised to never name again. In an instant her expression is more terrible, more unhinged than on the days when, with tears in her eyes, she hears me explain how the Cold War finally erupted and we’re the only survivors left on Earth. And then it happens. For a moment her strength returns to her body. She pulls away from my arms, she flails at me until she manages to claw at my face or my breast; she scratches me, spits at me, and screams horrible things at me that she might never have imagined before getting sick, none of which I take seriously because I pity her condition. She bites me with her toothless mouth or she simply goes running down the hallway; she runs despite her bad leg, in spite of her big heavy shoes and the trembling in her knees; she runs to the door that’s bolted shut or clutches wildly for the telephone. The poor thing doesn’t remember that it’s been disconnected all these years.

Mom pounds on the door over and over again. She screams things that no neighbor will ever be able to hear. She slowly starts to understand that the phone is disconnected and the door is locked tight. Sooner or later she’ll forget everything that I’ve told her. She keeps banging on the door but her energy is spent, along with her hope, and when she’s finally overcome by the pain in her leg she lets herself slide down to the floor. There she cries long enough to forget what she’s doing there on the carpet. And when I see that that moment has arrived I slowly count to twenty and then I go to her side, I caress her head and sweetly ask her why are you crying, Mom, and with her voice raspy from screaming and crying she answers I don’t remember, and keeps on crying. Then I wrap her in my arms, I hug her tightly and I forgive her for all those things I don’t remember and that perhaps I invent. It’s as if I suddenly feel an infinite compassion for her bad leg and I can’t help starting to cry myself. We cry together. We cry in silence for days gone by: for all our yesterdays, and for tomorrow as well. And for a moment I fold my hands together and I wish with all my might that tomorrow will be a different kind of day. A day without migraines or bad tastes in my mouth. A day when there is one single truth that we can confront face to face. And that truth can be any lie properly told. After all, knowing that something was true never really did us much good anyway.

Translator’s Note

Juan Gómez Bárcena’s “Good Intentions” is a powerful, melancholy, darkly comical story of family entrapment in the face of aging and senility, and a daughter’s weakness against the temptation to enact revenge for past wrongs both remembered and perceived as she struggles, alternately, between being her crazy mother’s caretaker and tormentor. And while the narrator wryly confesses the mental cruelty she routinely visits upon her mother, the story is much more than its masque of black humor; akin to the bleak meditations of Beckett and Pinter, “Good Intentions” is about humans’ unenviable, Sisyphean labor to maintain clarity and make peace with the reality of corporeal decay and its attendant physical suffering while confronting the shibboleth of truth. It is an excursion into the quagmire of subjectivity famously explored by Thomas Hobbes in Chapter II of Leviathan, “Of Imagination”: “imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.”  For some readers, the story may also resound as a very dark echo of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” But where Capote’s famously poignant tale features two people––a young boy and his older, female cousin––essentially alone together, bound by mutual affection, and protecting each other’s souls from the spite of unloving relatives, Gómez’s nightmarish narrative memorably imagines the weird, disturbing solitude of mutual entrapment and the perpetual battle it engenders, something akin to what William Faulkner in his tragic tale “Barn Burning” laments as “the old fierce pull of blood,” the humbling, horrifying, sometimes fatal, truth that we are born into an inexorable, lifelong confrontation with our gene pool, forever groping between who we think we are and how our family defines us.

Translating a story like this one entails dwelling a while, willingly, inside its house of horrors. To a certain degree, familiar territory. I grew up in a very large, spooky old pre-Civil War era house. Ghosts? Unquestionably. But ever more powerful is the effect that large, old, open, lonely inner spaces have on the mind and memory because they provide an almost infinitely interchangeable set of interconnected spaces through which to move and imagine, searching and being followed at the same time. Add, to many echoing, dusty, high-ceilinged rooms, various attics and a labyrinthine basement once used as a stop on the Underground Railroad and, well, when you encounter a story like “Good Intentions” it feels like stepping through the front door after baseball practice, familiar environs, that is; but actually inhabiting that unhappy place for a while is not not always easy because this is someone else’s intimate creation and, as translator, I have to explore it rather closely and allow myself, authorize myself to write down words, phrases, emotions, scenes that are seriously disturbing; it’s a process of discovery and revelation, and of coming to terms with all that; writing something, and having to write it clearly, deliberately, precisely, and then revisiting it, something that I would probably never have thought of or written myself, can be an odd feeling; revealing all that, committing to having a relationship with that text and then putting my translator’s byline on it. All a bit surreal.                      

In terms of actually translating, after the initial reading, it’s a process of gradual and increasing familiarity, building up the translation sort of like the way forensic model makers add layers and bits and pieces to a skull in order to create a bust, and trying to recreate the face of a person whom they will never really see, working through several drafts, checking for errors, reading aloud, listening to the voice come to life, trying to feel that it’s convincing until the time comes to surrender it, and then wait to hear back after other eyes and ears have taken a crack at discovering its character.

This is the only story by Juan Gómez Bárcena that I’ve translated, and I can’t speak to his immediate influences. Nor can I pinpoint codified or canonical precedents but it certainly reminds me of, and unnerves me like quite a few other stories I’ve read from the world of Spanish-language literature. I think of the spiraling claustrophobia of Borges’ detective story “Death and Compass” with its pathological relationship between Eric Lönnrot and Red Scharlach, and Antonio Ungar’s novel Tres ataudes blancs (Three White Coffins). I think of the cruelty that saturates and defines the relationship between a father and son in Ana María Shúa’s knife-edged novel Death as a Side-effect.  Finally, I think of the coldness of Albert Camus’ Mersault (obviously from French literature, not Spanish) and the ludicrous, terrifying closed-house scenarios found in some stories by Julio Cortázar, such as “Bestiary,” where children try to survive in a house where a tiger sometimes roams free, and the fascinating but disturbing and inescapable möbius strip of “Continuity of Parks.”

Brendan Riley holds degrees in English from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University. An ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English, he has also earned certificates in Translation Studies from U.C. Berkeley, and Applied Literary Translation from the University of Illinois. Riley’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s acclaimed Hypothermia, and Juan Filloy’s 1937 modernist epic novel Caterva, as well as the travelogue Sunrise in Southeast Asia by Carmen Grau, and The Bible: Living Dialogue, a religious and spiritual roundtable by Pope Francis, Marceloa Figueroa, and Abraham Skorka. Recent translations include Carlos Fuentes’ The Great Latin American Novel, an expansive, nonfiction survey of the genre, and Antagony–Book I: Recounting by Spanish novelist Luis Goytisolo, both published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Spanish author Juan Gómez Bárcena (b. Santander, 1984) holds degrees in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and History. His 2014 novel El cielo de Lima (Translated as The Sky Over Lima, by Andrea Rosenburg) won the Ojo Crítico de Narrativa prize from Spain’s Radio Nacional. His 2012 book of short stories Los que duermen was named one of the best literary debuts of 2012 by El Mundo’s El Cultural magazine, and also received the Premio la Tormenta al Mejor Autor Revelación award. He also edited the anthology Bajo treinta, a collection of short stories by young Spanish writers.