If I may be so bold I will now break ranks for a minute to translate entries only spoken and heard since some January frost, Grisha explained, has kept the rabbit's head frozen in mid-air. But what of me taking two turns? Unheard of elocuted revolution! If I can't win my fortune this way, then all must be hopeless and I a true apprentice to fraudulence. Nevertheless, the best example possible.

The masses imagine seeing retirees turning to silhouettes, lumbering and sulking away. They imagine a physique where Doppler's peak is already reached, and now, gently descending the downside, the finished begin to disappear. But for this those people need a stationary imagination fixed there in the street. They need that, or for their two feet to skulk backwards, into the sun, chin up towards the icosahedral cloud hanging just about as high. Even so, the more space that's made, breaking apart air pockets of car horns and Pizza Hut to place inside pieces of insolence and fist-pounding, the longer their shadows will grow, always closing the distance. Depending on the time of day, one or the other is constantly forced closer, a gusty game of pong, Newton's cradle rocking. It's unavoidable. It's the inheritance. Or the silence. Or the coming comeuppance when, while walking away, they will take their tumble and their senescent silhouette hand can't grasp their cane piercing the crosswalk to pull themselves up.

Yes, yes, maestro, back to work. I've already read Les Chants and À la recherche. I'll have Suite for Monday. –What do we do now? –Wait. –Yes, but while waiting? –What about hanging ourselves? No such luck. That rope, Grisha yarned, is also a sphere, so I submit that you will now have to translate me instead.

Some October frost froze the sphere in mid-air; professor and student set down their paddles to stretch their legs. Ping-pong frozen like in a photo taken atop the Turkish Mount Ida, looking down at a fallen oriental fortress in decadence under the Austin sun. In suspension with Cervantes, lazy, waiting for momentum to overthrow.

From deep within a shadowy swamp of dissertation alligators, where details roll about drowning ideas forced down well below sea level and intelligibility, the word late inside translation glowed more neon each night. And so from behind the great walls the gods lured Hector to his destruction. My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter. And the gates opened.

What terror to grow old before you're done. Like the string of sounds lashed and bound round the ear. The ones that did not make it. The ones just missing because of a gust of wind. The ones left teetering at moments upon the precipice, the rim of the word processor set to purée, the purée that forms the cast setting the mold to produce the statue.

Adieu tristesse, Bonjour tristesse. Let's walk with (r)apt hope gained from days spent with Paul Éluard and Enrique Fierro. Two tomes. With one step let's toss our weekly workings overboard, bringing luck back to our side, making a man of whales become that man of Wales, correcting again and again from some sad height, never going gentle into that good night...
yelling I think that's a record just as we both collapse.

Héctor (López Vignoli) propuso este título para la foto que publica Manning: "Dos orientales de la Decadencia bajo el sol de Austin". A Fierro no le pareció mal y así empezó a nombrarla, aunque algunos de sus amigos le dijeron que tendría que consultar a Ida. Pero a él, poltrón y perezoso como es, todavía no le ha llegado el momento de hacerlo.

Primero, porque ha tenido que ocuparse de muchas cosas ajenas a este arrítmico ping-pong: los "cuidados pequeños", que decía Darío, jamás perdonan a los que se olvidan de ellos.

Y segundo, porque ha pasado días y días con los dos tomos de La Pléiade de Paul Éluard, que supo ser uno de los poetas franceses que lo acompañaron en sus años liceales y de Preparatorios. Y del que llegó a traducir algunos poemas para una revista impresa a mimeógrafo que "dirigiera" con un grupo de alumnos de Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, su primer profesor de Literatura (Tercer Año B, 1956, Liceo Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, Montevideo). ¿Habrá leído ahora en Ëluard lo que leyera entonces, cuando sus angustias primeras habían sido hechas a un lado por un entusiasmo sin límites y la esperanza se había adueñado de su corazón? Lo dudo. Conociéndolo como lo conozco, lo dudo.

Para concluir una noticia que no le importa a nadie: después de muchos intentos fallidos, Fierro al fin escribió en un ra(p)to un texto que debía enviar y envió a Montevideo para su aprobación. Aunque todavía no acaba de convencerse del mismo y es probable que lo corrija una y otra vez hasta que lo abandone y decida no publicarlo jamás.

First, a promising photo never seen:

And now I will transcribe several words I wrote twenty-one years from now. Parasites the lot of them, their intention is to be not as tall as those of the honoree:  

THE TREES HE KEPT MOOING

For Enrique Fierro, when radiating his ninety years

1)

An orange

An orange Earth

An orange Earth blue

An orange for Enrique

             ... forgetting his dark premonitions he has stayed here beside us.

2)

Seen on good days

Seen on very good days

About the town of Austin

Around the shores of its Sidewalks

For he who has lasted

among poets: Enrique

             ... wandering his distinct way, newspaper under arm.

3)

Your cow moos trees

that you, Enrique, mooed first

that you, Enrique, still moo

             ...measuring their verses in rings and in years.

4)

And with so many words

Enrique Fierro, you should start

             ... writing those memoires we so often request.

Primero la foto prometida en mi última entrega:

Y ahora unas palabras que escribí hace siete años. Aparecidas en algunas publicaciones periódicas, no pretenden estar a la altura del homenajeado:

EL SILENCIO ES CON ÁRBOLES
A Nicanor Parra, en sus noventa años

1)

Una naranja
Una naranja azul
Una naranja azul naranja
Una naranja para Nicanor


2)

Con buenos días
Con muy buenos días
Por la bahía de Montevideo
Hacia la cordillera de la Costa
Para el primero que es el último
de los poetas: Nicanor


3)

Mi vaca en verso muge
que Nicanor es un árbol
que Nicanor es con árboles


4)

Ya que no tiene la última palabra
Nicanor Parra debe empezar


A 5 de septiembre del 2004

Two Saturdays past I had an encounter in Forest Books with a 1969 selection of Nicanor Parra's Poems and Antipoems pieced together by a team of translators from City Lights. This was San Francisco, where nowadays my friend Nicholas Bacuez sits peacefully in the brisk air whisking his tea. That night, the bookkeeper, a man of Zen, tended to his shelves and to us, his only two clients, by practicing his classical guitar. We were witnesses to the stopping and starting of an instrument feeling its way forward. Undocumented modesty. Music thinking. Solitude. Ferlinghetti forging I'm the individual from Parra's verse. And here, in his temple, this man's silence silenced the men yelling Stella outside beside the bar. Darkness fell over the streets of the Mission. Allison picked us up in the car and she drove us home.

It's been a long month often interrupted with well-wishing. So much luck to so many writers whose first books are sowing clouds with their first titles: some harsh and thundering–like nube, others welcoming, caressing our hand–like nuage. But each one still a coffin, like errata, Uribe might say. And then suddenly Fierro wrote to us again. Here, this infernal invention, lacking in titles, deviously feigns host to his still lifes, his style of lists filled with friends and acquaintances. Blossoms from a fertile memory not lost. He presents us his self-portraits painted with people wilted, wilting, and not. And we remember they exist, and he exists, and we wait for him to make more, more entries, eventually dropping those quotation marks from about the word, a sign of his technical dexterity.

On the plane, when life was again descending into the flames of Texas, I met Miss Jordana, therapist of brains and feelings, Quevedo might say, and her radiant Theo shining like little Elías, and they both made me doubt the words of that devastated Bolaño character quoting Nietzsche who had told me, Being alone makes you stronger. He surely couldn't have meant the solitude of unconsciousness brought on by a desperate hug about the neck of a poor horse in Carlo Alberto Square. Or the solitude of lament who desperately throws their hug about the neck of a red cow statue on Lavaca Street. So to whom do we owe our insanity? To a brain always practicing, like a blind man going hoarse believing he's breaking the silence by whispering his need of feelings at passers-by? To Ferlinghetti forging soliloquies from streetcars and second story poetry sections? Come on, nuage! You and I should be thinking louder, letting raindrops scratch our throats and sting our eyes with their unstoppability. Too soon our August 25, 1900 rolls around and there are no more silences for us to whisper.

El domingo pasado me llamó desde Lima mi amigo Diego Trelles Paz y me contó de su reciente encuentro en Las Cruces con Nicanor Parra, quien el próximo lunes cumplirá 97 años y a quien hice referencia en mi última colaboración (del ¡15 de junio!) para esta "invención diabólica" de mi amigo Sean Manning. Si logro superar mi impericia técnica y llega a haber una próxima "entrada", prometo mostrar la foto que documenta la reunión entre el nonagenario poeta chileno y el treintañero narrador peruano.
De paso: por Austin anduvo, el fin de semana pasado, otro ex-estudiante y amigo, Oswaldo Zavala, quien me entregó un ejemplar de "Siembra de nubes", su primera novela, que acaba de aparecer en México.


Hace un rato, cuando interrumpí la escritura de estas líneas para tomar una taza de té con Ida, cayó en mis manos una entrevista a Armando Uribe Arce, otro gran poeta chileno con quien sólo conversé dos veces en mi vida: una en México y otra en París, allá por los años setenta. Podría reproducir ahora algunas de las cosas que, entre pasiones y razones, se dijo y me dijo: las guardo, indelebles, en mi memoria. Como muchos de sus poemas, que me acompañan desde hace tantísimo tiempo.


Cuando "La edad, señor doctor, pide Jordán", como dice el gran Quevedo, y el mundo en que vivimos (y morimos) parece venirse abajo, cómo expresar el bien que (me) hace recordar a quienes tanto les debo. Aunque ellos ni siquiera se acuerden de mi existencia, perdido como estoy en el 1800 de la calle Lavaca y a la espera de mi 3 de enero de 1889. Aunque Austin no es Turín y aunque no sé si el abrazo de ese día en verdad me justificaría.