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Brett Alan Sanders
Upon Translating the
Prose-Poetry of Mar�a Rosa Lojo
MAR�A ROSA LOJO was born in 1954, in
Buenos Aires, of immigrant parents from Galicia (her father fought on
the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War). The author of three
books of poetry, Lojo is best known for her historical narratives,
among them the widely acclaimed novel The Passion of Nomads
(La pasi�n de los n�mades, 1994, Atl�ntida) and the recent
collection of short stories Singular Loves From Our History (Amores
ins�litos de nuestra historia, 2001, Alfaguara). But, first
of all, she is a poet: one with a fabulist's sensibility and a
satirist's eye for detail. Both qualities are prominent in the six
prose poems that follow from Esperando la ma�ana verde
(Awaiting the Green Morning, 1998, Francotirador). Consider,
for instance, "Knocking at the Doors of Heaven", in which a tired old
woman climbs and descends from a tree that seems part Tower of Babel
and part Jack's Beanstalk, though with nothing of the latter's rewards.
Or, these images in "The Noticeboard", mutely witnessing Argentina's
ongoing historical trauma: "voices in tatters, the mutilated faces of
political candidates," images that evoke the same long sorrow of
feminine captivity, separation, and loss that informs all her writing.
In "The Structure of Houses", my work benefits
from a knowledge of Lojo's own history. For "la abuela"
I translate "Grandmother", capitalized and without the ambiguous
definite article, since the allusion here-according to Lojo herself-is
to her own grandmother. Similarly, in reference to Lojo's brother, I
chose "vanished" instead of "disappeared" for "desaparecido,"
to avoid claiming a political association that might not be there: his
status among her country's disappeared is not due to any generals'
"dirty war," but to drugs.
Often, of course, in order to capture the full
sense of an image, the translation requires something more than a
standard equivalent. The choice in such cases is more art than science;
my labor in such dilemmas both stimulating and deeply pleasurable. And
I owe much gratitude to Lojo herself for entrusting me with her
beautiful words; and likewise to our mutual friend Eva Gillies, without
whose unsparing critiques these translations would be much inferior to
what they are.--Tell City, Indiana, November 30, 2003
Mar�a Rosa Lojo
The Noticeboard
THE NOTICEBOARD HAS been hanging for
many years on the first floor of the high-rise. It covers the windows
and the empty rooms; it covers the lights of the automobiles and the
speed of beings that are losing legs and arms, shoes and watches, as
darkness hides the streets and patios where the dead have walked.
On the noticeboard
there are voices in tatters, the mutilated faces of political
candidates, advertisements for a soap that removes all stains, the
shadow of a few vacations to the mountain where sea level is barely a
submerged memory of winter.
In the morning the
sun will age the colors and dry out the layers of paper that have
merged into one, compact and inconspicuous like the stone. Someone will
try in vain to read the first words, until once more the night puts its
shine on the noticeboard and flattens it like a dance floor, trodden
down by invisible steps.
(Translated from the Spanish by Brett
Alan Sanders)
Mar�a Rosa Lojo
Lines
IN ONE OF the lines of your hand there
is a bridge that flows into the sea; in another, a truncated balustrade
that opens onto the garden onto nowhere. Between the garden and the
sea, that city where you are.
There the heavens
keep the tranquil custom of the sun and of the rains and a nocturnal
roof protects you from the implacable stars. But someone kills and
someone dies, trains stop in the middle of their journey and unknown
visitors poke through the garbage of big white houses, before, in light
of day, the world becomes clear.
When you go to lie
down you close your hand as if crushing glass, while the whole city
crumbles into the sea, and your shadow dangles from the dark
balustrade, dreaming of somewhere to live.
(Translated from the Spanish by Brett
Alan Sanders)
Mar�a Rosa Lojo
Knocking at the Doors of
Heaven
"Knock,
knock, knocking at Heaven's door. . ."
-Eric
Clapton
KNOCKING AT THE doors of
Heaven to borrow a cup of sugar, half a lemon, some wine, the needed
spoonfuls of oil.
Knocking at the doors
of heaven, neighbor to tempests, raising little platters of
supplication with a list of small favors that a Hand refuses to grant.
And the cultured voice answers, "He is not at home, He has gone out, I
cannot give you anything in His name, come back tomorrow morning, at
that hour you will find Him, very early, before dawn."
She climbs down, humiliated and enraged, breaking the branches of the
tree she has climbed, maybe some of them won't grow back and the ladder
will get shorter. She throws herself on the ground, crumpling the paper
in her hands with the empty cup. She has never arrived early enough to
find Him in, she never will. He knows that the suppliant's greed knows
no bounds, that the sugar and the wine and the oil trickle through the
hollow of desire and that all favors will burn vainly in stills of
transmutation.
But she will knock
again at the doors of Heaven asking for a cup of sugar to deceive the
mouth of death, a dark wine to enclose time within the feast of the
body, some salt of memory to record the air of days that have gone
away-while she climbs, clumsy and obstinate, up the broken tree,
growing old, in her nightgown and winter slippers, to knock at the door
of Him who withholds His secrets.
(Translated from the Spanish by Brett
Alan Sanders)
Mar�a Rosa Lojo
Qualities of Winter
WINTER IS ROUND like a walnut and hollow
like a crystal planet where furious winds blow. But in its torrid
center boil the fruits of sea and earth and the fugitives of tempests
come together.
Winter is a house
that in its trunks keeps memories of the most ancient love, the warmth
of a lap, a voice predating the word-all enclosing the sleeper in their
ball of silk.
The bodies of winter
become linked in profound kinships, weave into each other like blankets
to provide shelter, light up like candles in order to guide whoever
stumbles in his silence, seeking an embrace.
(Translated from the Spanish by Brett
Alan Sanders)
Mar�a Rosa Lojo
The Structure of Houses
WITHIN A THIMBLE there was a sewing room where Grandmother would
embroider roses when she, as a child, had to stay on the shadow side of
light so as not to be led astray by the noises of the world. Within a
photo of the father there was a young man who returned to the mountains
crossing fields burnt by war, and there were bodies finished off by
firing squad rotting at the bottom of his eyes.
Behind an old glove
there was a vanished brother, in an empty pill bottle madness lay in
wait; from the chipped plates a family ate, seated around an oak table;
within a chest the mother kept letters from men who had courted her,
and with the letters, hope and privation and pens advancing slowly over
the rough paper of past lives.
In your history there
were histories impossible to clean up, and closed rooms that would
never open, because the structures of houses are interminable and
concentric Chinese puzzles (boxes within boxes within boxes)--and
mysterious in the same way.
(Translated from the Spanish by Brett
Alan Sanders)
Mar�a Rosa Lojo
Apertures
THE HOUSES OF summer are opening with a blast of fragrant wood, as if
they were new. A rustling of bread flies out of windows that are
upended toward the day, and restrained dawns overrun their borders into
the water that flows beneath the doors.
Mouths that talk and
hands that grasp and eyes that adhere to the light are opening. Delayed
communications and codices of foreign voices are opening. Exploratory
doubt and the contradiction that makes things crash in order to leap
and give birth to their flashes of light are opening.
Streets overflow and
glisten like strips of mercury and feet wean themselves from their
straitened riverbeds. Hidden secrets lose their ambiguous attraction
and the gift of languages sets heads on fire in order that they
articulate scorned loves, so that all that is opaque now become
transparent.
(Translated from the Spanish by Brett
Alan Sanders)
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