THE WHOLE ISLAND: SIX DECADES OF CUBAN POETRY / Mark Weiss

.Una nueva antología bilingüe de poesía cubana, realizada por el poeta, traductor y editor Mark Weiss, que incluye una amplia selección de textos y autores de cuatro generaciones:

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Nicolás Guillén, Eugenio Florit, José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Samuel Feijóo, Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Fina García-Marruz, Lorenzo García Vega, Carlos Galindo Lena, Francisco de Oraá, Roberto Branly, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Fayad Jamís, Heberto Padilla, José Álvarez Baragaño, César López, Antón Arrufat, José Kozer, Miguel Barnet, Belkis Cuza Malé, Nancy Morejón, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Lina de Feria, Delfín Prats, Excilia Saldaña, Raúl Hernández Novás, Amando Fernández, Soleida Ríos, Lourdes Gil, Reina María Rodríguez, Abilio Estévez, Iraida Iturralde, Ruth Behar, Ángel Escobar, Ramón Fernández Larrea, Roberto Méndez, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Ismael González Castañer, Juan Carlos Flores, Pedro Llanes, Sigfredo Ariel, Frank Abel Dopico, Alberto Rodríguez Tosca, Omar Pérez López, Antonio José Ponte, Heriberto, Hernández, Pedro Marqués de Armas, Damaris Calderón, Alessandra Molina, Carlos A. Aguilera y Javier Marimón.

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Esta antología incluye dos textos de mi primer libro La patria del espejo, traducidos para esta edición por Chris Brandt.
.GLASS WALLS.

In this room the light is too heavy,
……the shadows are bone-white
……and you can’t open the windows before daylight.
The saddest of girls could not dive beneath these waters,
……skirt them,
……or declare she hears music transparent and soggy.
Here there’s no impersonating an angel,
……and it’s not enough to undress.
Those who sometimes don’t listen may not sit at this table,
……there will be no dinners on white tablecloths,
……no jugglers, nor zither players, nor birds, nor fish.
The girl who will be lying down next to us
……might be naked, might be sleeping in the grass
……or nakeder still if she senses she’s not alone:
……but she could never divide herself,
……nor fly nor be troubled,
……nor hold our breast to say she dreams;
……she couldn’t dream she lives in a snail shell and sometimes

....................../loses her way.
In this room the shadows are very white,
……someday you might think they’re ours and ask them to sing,
……to fall down.
One could think that sometimes we don’t sleep,
……but to talk of insomnia,
……that might impel us to say the night is the narrowest of

....................../margins
……where we can exist only by turning away.
Once at this place they spoke of stags and shapes that loosed

....................../bent arrows;
……but everyone was thinking about music,
……everyone wanted tamer animals, shapes more frozen.
One morning they brought a stone,
……and set it very high, so high that from time to time

....................../it turned;
……never again did we think of being solitary, dark,
……of our terrible desire to bite,
……a tree like that shape where at times we stayed silent.
Then we thought about selling our smile,
……but who could buy something that can disappear,
……who could die of sadness when the shadows are so white.
In this room the light is too heavy,
……turning around would be enough,
……it could be easy to dream we’re alone,
……that we open the window and no one pushes us or

....................../reminds us
……how sweet it would be to jump.
That way, drunk, we could imagine we are the least remembered
……and take off with the suicide’s heart, the musician’s box;
……then we’d be calm
……though no one would tell how we came back filthy,
……and threw down the walls, tore out the floors
……and shouted to all that the window was a sweet blue lie;
……though none would reveal that we’d been a little afraid,
……that the mirror
……was beginning to show us the darkest shadows.
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.FABLE OF THE DOLPHIN AND THE BIRD’S SHADOW.

Seated between two corpses, the bird’s shadow transformed

....................../into flight, shadow on shadow;
……seated like a wound between two corpses: beer foams up

....................../in a wave chest-high
……and by our side two corpses punching holes in the faces

....................../of conversation.
The truth is not the bird’s flight, it’s the plumage

....................../that penetrates the song’s ambiguity,
……the song like a small sound stabbed into the chest’s

....................../emptiness.
In the drinkers’ glasses, the beer foam like the voice of the

....................../child who sings between two deaths,
……it’s an excavation skirting along the crease,
……a slow penetration of plumage into the dark squalor

....................../of sound.
Here come the acrobats with the words from the last time

....................../he misspoke,
……the last secret impulse to be blind.
Once he saw his blue laughter and the blue behind the laughter

....................../of one who knows he has received the latest news;
……it’s the scarf, the silvered star in the scarf that launched

....................../the dolphin, now it seeks in the water

....................../the depths through which it must escape,
……but the child has already stopped opening his heart,

....................../he begins to join together the fragments of the leap,
……but it’s already leapt again and the windowpane shatters,

....................../it falls like a rain of salt on the eyes.
The drinkers raise their glasses, take deep draughts of beer

....................../and of death,
……but the song has ceased, the child holds the stained glass

....................../windows to his chest,
……the dolphin has returned to leap again: the bird flies over,
……the bird’s shadow transformed into flight,
……the dolphin has returned to leap again
……and the child is lying by the water, his chest covered

....................../with dry leaves.

The bird flies over, the truth is not its shadow.

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