Me parece que el traducir de una lengua a otra es como quien mira los tapices flamencos por el revés, que aunque se ven las figuras, están llenas de hilos que las oscurecen, y no se ven con la lisura y tez del haz; y el traducir de lenguas fáciles, ni arguye ingenio ni elocución, como no le arguye el que traslada ni el que copia un papel de otro papel––dijo don Quijote.
Y aún así le dije a Enrique Fierro, simpatizante de los rinocerontes––Tomemos prestada la pelota de ping-pong de nuestros amigos Lorenzo y Margarita, y aquí escribámonos y traduzcámonos el uno al otro. Pero, tejamos reversos, traducciones traidoras, como falsos amigos, des faux amis que se miran, pero no se reconocen.

Monday, March 28, 2011

The days in Miami, impossible, too intensely incondensable. Largely spent on SW 10th Street, downtown, at Romain and Shani's apartment, felid-free, unlike that of Nicholas, Pastèque and Guéridon, inescapable compatriots of Romain who accompany me always, even when arriving hours late for dinner. Romain's eggplant appetizers luckily best served cold, and chicken. Romain whose close calls with combative geese in Tours' Jardin des Prébendes d'Oé, near my old number 10 on the street of the same name, left him the talent to imitate the anatid war face exactly. And Shani, now his fiancée, whose French outshines her Spanish as well as the March 19th moon, but whose persistence with the magic magnetism of poetry, helped by Romain's carnal Spanish syntax, will surely soon give off a glow at magnitudes capable of competing with the skyscrapers' nighttime neon that filters through their seventh-floor shutters.

Largely spent on SW 95th Street, inland, before the backyard terrace where a pack of crazed cats, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer amongst them, all moon-driven or readers of Romain's poems, were in pursuit of their Juliet. Their Juliet who improvised her scene atop a fence calling out with her ambulance meow. While indoors destiny self-manifested inside tiny clay cups of cared-for coffee served by Lorenzo's imagined hand; inside the crackling between the photograph pages –grey hourglasses in red campfires– turned by the kind hand of beloved Marta; inside the creative complicity and a wave to share enthusiasm proffered by the open hand of Margarita. The same Lorenzo and the same Margarita of Ping-Pong Zuihitzu renown –the revelation, hospitably inspiring Foes Amis– who just 8 days past lowered the curtain on their project and on these very moments, leaving us alone thinking encore!

Saint Jerome speaks, the horror and the silences terrified their souls, then he descends into the catacombs where a boy, largely on W 6th Street, still puts his hands on the pages of Richard Scarry, convinced that to push is to hold, that his small hands steady that large book, those hands less powerful than he realizes and more powerful than they are. Those hands who don't know that mom keeps the story in front of him, and that when she lets go the book falls away. In that book, in those days, there were no rhinoceroses. And in these days there is not that book, and not those hands, only unions between old and new friendships without which we wouldn't think to live and to remember being who we are.

2 comments:

  1. El Fierro de la esclavitud o la esclavitud de Fierro.
    ¡Te liberaste!
    Es la primera entrada donde eres tú por todos lados y me encanta.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sí. te perteneces mucho en este texto, therefore, nos perteneces mucho más a nosotros.
    resplandeces. y no queremos cerrar los ojos.
    es bello!

    ReplyDelete