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Poetry
Poems I've written or am writing
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I did it! Over the past year or so, and for the first time in my life, I have filled a notebook, a yellow pad, with ideas towards poetry and fiction (much of which I have been revising and posting here) and am moving directly into a new notebook -- what has generally happened in the past is that I would start keeping a notebook and... lose interest over a couple of months' and/or pages' span...
This new notebook (which I bought at the same market in Oaxaca where I bought my favorite shoes ever, highly recommend it) is gorgeous! Hard covers and thick soft, recycled paper allow me to write on facing pages, unlike the yellow pad. So I am starting a project writing a bilingual text, Spanish on the left and English on the right like a parallel translation, but rather than the same text in both languages, it is two separate threads of a narration: The left is poetry by The Modesto Kid, the right is my character Peter's journals during his time translating that poetry. This is the idea I'm working towards anyway, I haven't quite managed yet to get the ideas to cohere properly. I will hopefully be posting drafts of some of this here in the weeks to come (if all goes according to plan...); a beginning is in comments to this post.
(en que me hago sin objetivo fanfarroneas. Might as well, I don't see anyone else about to give me a rave rev)
Morir al final de un dÃa cualquiera
Imposible escapar de la violencia.
Imposible pensar en otra cosa.
-- La universidad desconocida
I find this statement of Bolaño's strangely comforting, strangely reassuring. Me demasiado preocupo sobre el valor de mi obra, de mis intentos a poesÃa y a trabajo. El cuento que tengo en progreso, soy convencido de que ese cuento va a hacer una lectura convincente, fascinante, se hace en verdad ya casi completo. Y lo mismo los poemas que componÃa usando los de Bolaño como provocaciones...
El pasaje del tiempo es lo que muere se mueren
los amigos de la infancia
envenenados por tiempo en los pueblos y las colinas de Nueva York
Playhouse lies in pieces and the bolts that once connected them
the once (and future?) construct
scattered sunlight on the lawn
scattered sunlit lifeless hollowed out
the paint like skin that's covered over
veins of douglas fir and cedar
veins of age-old wood and creeping
vitiating rot
Drill battery is charging and I look out my back window
at the stillness of the breezes blowing
pushing round the trees
pushing blowing round the green enclosure
manifold imposing over
arching, dark reality
the creeping, pungent real story
never write it down, I'll never
write it down because it's hidden
hidden dark unnameable
illicit hanging conversation
twittering between cicadas
translate text of endless grayed-out
sussurating stop.
Finished two old projects yesterday -- The playhouse I built for Sylvia in 2005 and which Bill helped me pull down a few weeks ago is now completely disassembled (and Scott has indicated he'd be interested in using the wood to build something for Sasha and Maya); and the Windsor chair I built on my 2002 trip to The Windsor Institute is finally painted, a handsome shade of green. Lee Valley milk paint is the best.
the automatic CAUTION door swings open and my heart beats faster panicked panting racing down the corridor I know not where
(click through for the dulcet tones of Dolph Chaney)
I'm headed what I'm fleeing whom I'll see if I look back behind me emptiness of ignorance and fear and pain and nervous sound
the automatic PANIC switch engages and I'm climbing up the walls I'm falling paralyzed and endless should have seen that coming no way back tonight my friend the waterfalls of history are soaking me I'm sweating broken searching for the path to bring me home
the automatic wicked bolt of FEAR slides home and punctures my resolve I'm quaking trembling feverish looking in the mirror what I see is sending waves of manic pity through me tell me truly help me I can't find a hand to hold a charge of hope and love and weary resignation say you'll keep me in my pit of fear and solitude and quavering frustration help me turn toward these scaly walls and understand my history my saving grace my destiny my almost unrequited FEAR
paralizada
sus movimientos lentos
crecen como las nubes
que crezca hipnotica, paralizada
que sea la totalidad
que sea la madre de la noche
lejano la miro
le sonrío
a ella
paralizado
(another poem written to a prompt from La universidad desconocida...)
PoesÃa que tal vez abogue
por mi sombra
en dÃas venideros
cuando yo sólo sea un nombre
y no el hombre
que con los bolsillas vacillos vagabundeó
y trabajó
en los mataderos del viejo y
del nuevo continente
Mis sueños no tan fáciles
que tengan como antecedente
alguna trauma desconocida
alguna pesadilla anterior
los dejo y caen
no soportados de ninguna
referencia exterior, no enlentecidos
abajo de mi paracaidas, y
¿a dónde? y ¿cuándo
pararán, cuándo van a poder
descansar?
Hm... merging a couple of the themes I've been writing about here lately. Writing/revising poetry, writing and thinking in a language not my own, the different voices of the writing process and translation process.... This is a poem I started working on in Oaxaca keying off the rhythm of the first line. (+first line should serve as a clue that I spent a lot of time in class working on imperative and subjunctive voices.) Mil gracias a Paty de ICO para sus direcciones y sugerencias. I added two more stanzas and reworked the first a bit in the past week or so, and turned it into what I think is a coherent poem, a pleasant read.
Primitivo -- sofisticado
¡canta!
que tu graznido
atraviese
vacilente
el micrófono, y los amplificadores
y las lágrimas
Me toca me bendice padre
no bendÃgasme, mi padre
aunque he pecado
Directions
(by The Modesto Kid/tr. Peter Conlay)
Listen; hear. Look: see:
What are you hearing, my friend? Hear me
screaming in my pit of terror?
Your face brings it all back, things I had forgotten:
tell me something, make me laugh, some lie
for me to remember instead of all that.
Confused man, almost blind, go look
for friendship or rejection
—seek some treatment—
Listen; hear. Look. See.
Caveman — sophisticate —
sing!
slowly your cawing
will seep
across
the mics, and the PA
and the tears
Touch me bless me o my father
Don't bless me father
Even though I've sinned
I uploaded a reading of the Spanish text to SoundCloud. That is a not-quite-final revision, I think the rhythm and clarity of it are really improved by the addition of "Oh" at the beginning of the seventh line. (If memory serves, this is an example of an edit to the original text prompted during the process of translation.)
posted morning of September third, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation
El caballo loco gritaba y
