"Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," by Adrienne Rich

(Leader of a woman's climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak,

August 1974. Later, Shatayev's husband found and buried the bodies.)



The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder then the wind
died down and we slept

If in this sleep I speak
it's with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say with voices)
When the wind tore our breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For months for years each one of us
had felt her own yes growing in her
slowly forming as she stood at windows waited
for trains mended her rucksack combed her hair
What we were to learn was simply what we had
up here as out of all words that yes gathered
its forces fused itself and only just in time
to meet a No of no degrees
the black hole sucking the world in

I feel you climbing toward me
your cleated bootsoles leaving their geometric bite
colossally embossed on microscopic crystals
as when I trailed you in the Caucasus
Now I am further
ahead than either of us dreamed anyone would be
I have become
the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind
the women I love lightly flung against the mountain
that blue sky
our frozen eyes unribboned through the storm
we could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt

You come (I know this) with your love your loss
strapped to your body with your tape-recorder camera
ice-pick against advisement
to give us burial in the snow and in your mind
While my body lies out here
flashing like a prism into your eyes
how could you sleep You climbed here for yourself
we climbed for ourselves

When you have buried us told your story
Ours does not end we stream
into the unfinished the unbegun
the possible
Every cell's core of heat pulsed out of us
into the thin air of the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountain which has taken the imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and minute
as those we underwent
to bring each other here
choosing ourselves each other and this life
whose every breath and grasp and further foothold
is somewhere still enacted and continuing

In the diary I wrote: Now we are ready
and each of us knows it I have never loved
like this I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love

In the diary as the wind began to tear
at the tents over us I wrote:
We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together but till now
we had not touched our strength

In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:
What does love mean
what does it mean "to survive"
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow We will not live
to settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives


(1974)



Aunque este poema participa de identificaciones colectivas, y yo no soy mucho de identificarme con el jodido mundo, creo que transmite una fuerza y una emoción maravillosas. Ayuda la empática presencia de la muerte. 

"An Unsaid Word," by Adrienne Rich

She who has power to call her man
From that estranged intensity
Where his mind forages alone,
Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
And when his thoughts to her return
Stands where he left her, still his own,
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

"Cuisine Burgeoise," by Wallace Stevens

These days of disinheritance, we feast
On human heads. True, birds rebuild
Old nests and there is blue in the woods.
The church bells clap one night in the week.
But that’s all done. It is what it used to be,
As they used to lie in the grass, in the heat,
Men on green beds and women half of the sun.
The words are written though not yet said.

It is like the season when, after summer,
It is summer and it is not, it is autumn
And it is not, it is day and it is not.
As if last night’s lamps continued to burn,
As if yesterday’s people continued to watch
The sky, half porcelain, preferring that
To shaking out heavy bodies in the glares
Of this present, this science, this unrecognized,

This outpost, this douce, this dumb, this dead, in which
We feast on human heads, brought in on leaves,
Crowned with the first, cold buds. On these we live,
No longer on the ancient cake of seed,
The almond and the deep fruit. This bitter meat
Sustains us . . . Who then are they seated here?
Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?
Are they men eating reflections of themselves?

Poetry, by Marianne Moore.

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
It, after all, a place for the genuine.

“Sincerity” is a tricky ideal, since, as Jean-Paul Sartre showed, being
intent on sincerity focuses attention on the role one is playing and
detracts from the attention to the object one is claiming to be sincere
about. Therefore sincerity is a dangerous model for cultural authority
because it honors the appearance of virtue rather than demanding
that virtue prove itself by actually getting down to work that engages
the interests of other people.

Charles Altieri

The Bath-Tub, by E. Pound.

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

Recordando un Temblor en el Bosque de los Muertos, de Luis Rosales (borrador de traducción)

Remembering a Tremor in the Forest of the Dead

If the heart lost its foundations,
if the earth and lumber from the forest
of blood quivered, and if all your flesh
could put itself into gentle and absolute

motion, like an avalanche slowly crawling,
erasing a frontier in each step,
and if a fixed light were blindness,
and if between the seeing and staring the wind could stay,

and if your dearest dead formed
a burning forest under the naked sea
-the forest of death where a sun yields,

already in another sky, its silent gold-
and if a swarm flew among the branches
where the tremor raised the first leave.



Si el corazón perdiera su cimiento,/ y vibraran la tierra y la madera/ del bosque de la sangre, y se pusiera/toda tu carne en leve movimiento

total, como un alud que avanza lento/ borrando en cada paso una frontera,/ y fuese una luz fija la ceguera,/ y entre el mirar y el ver quedara el viento,

y formasen los muertos que más amas/ un bosque ardiente bajo el mar desnudo/ -el bosque de la muerte en que deshoja

un sol, ya en otro cielo, su oro mudo-/ y volase un enjambre entre las ramas /donde puso el temblor la primera hoja...