Paul Hoover is the recipient of a 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of “Nightmare Running on a Meadow of Absolute Light,” by María Baranda. One of the leading Mexican poets of the generation born in the 1960s and a powerful presence in all of Latin American poetry, Baranda is best known for her sweeping and incisive long poems. Her cry is resoundingly of sea, sponge, ant, and prayer, as related in rapture. Hoover deftly captures the drama of her cadences in Spanish. Read Hoover’s essay on translating “Nightmare Running on a Meadow of Absolute Light” here.
The world enlightened and I awaken
—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
And nevertheless, here
almost
unsuspected, tired of seeing the voices
stripped from the land
—another earth, other lips of another cutting—
the modesty
of the flowers that torment, how much
brightness looms
at the edge of everything
and therefore
what’s not known.
And I,
why don’t you know
of me?
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
Otherworldly, delirious,
unapproachable
at a point
pertaining to and named
pendulum
in the eye
uncorked: covered in dust: placed
removed
and
discarded.
It burns and declines
alone,
infinitely alone,
pounded, dismembered, broken
despised and deflated
it arises
in the shadows:
nightmare
running
on a meadow of absolute
light
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
. . . and when I ask myself
who could be persuaded
seeing that sonorous sky,
the open breach in the wall,
the movement in its measure
and the field in a fabric of herbs
sustained in its membranes,
alone, so alone, exhaling
a new punctuation, a long
cry in the aggravated night,
forced to see
a glimmer of what was,
telling yourself the same:
bad, worse, ill-fated,
and I think about this disproportion
of thought,
in the astonishment before a pause,
a compass stopped
on a non-existent phone or on a CD
timorous and solicitous, a now
in its intent to be flame
between even darker lips
when the fish,
you said, were twice
speechless
always in the cavern
where the sun opens
disobediently
a defense
against the darkness
or a simple opaque
form
that you saw among atoms
and molecules,
dreamed?
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
You briefly switch on a galaxy and touch your childhood sea. The world is a dark road where night is the voice of what you say. At the sound of water you think of celestial birds, clouds, and a bit of sun in a story that begins without words.
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
. . . because I look far away
fallen to the bottom, caught in the mud,
hidden in slow, solitary thickness,
because I say fire
and it rushes from my mouth
in flames,
because I name you now
as then
and the birds are more fragile and the clouds
no longer exist,
because I see you on the path of high stone
that imagines high meadows, diverse,
and the inhospitable matter
where articles
in the same reflection
that walks and talks and evaporates
and because everything is a page of hunger
where you reconcile the impossible
with only the single sun in syllables of the Advent,
because the night,
this night,
night vitreous and tiny
the most furious and insistent
which oxidizes itself as lightning
with this high form
has a putrid empire
with its eyes wide open, its field
of aromas in cages
its cry like a mean mule
that never forgets
-no-
and that it is there together with us
in order to die a little
from time to time and with the sleep
that is night,
that night
unique and pyramidal,
and completely yours.
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
The dogs of night break out of their dreams together. They lose their eyes.
You clarify reality with the laughter of the waters. Then the world goes missing to ride
on a single wave like a lament in the burning arousal of cholera.
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
. . . and when I hear of the style
in which the wind howls over those old
flowery faces of clay, I think
of what this city reveals
and hastily burns
in my hands,
in that same history
corrupted,
where I gulp it down blindly
in dark streets of ink and iron
traced in the dust
that roars alone,
where I see it plainly
and I am soon ready
to take slow sips
among the rats
and garbage dumps
centuries ago where you sang
and I feel it, her crush
on you
in my throat
like a cry
and stings
in its orphanhood of mud
and presents itself and me
dislocated
while the dogs
lick saltpeter
from the dead walls
and roll tinplate cans
kicked by the laughter
of children
Its rattle brings up in me
a flower of rapid water
in their drains
and leaves me
beneath scabby heaven
listening to its gravel
the color of vegetation,
its separate arms
extending
a dry cry, slow
in the repentance
of fire.
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
Toc-toc-toc, change your name. You appear like a woodpecker in the evening. Nothing now remains. Outside, rocks growl in the jaws of the fog. You’d like to be an alphabet that spells the flight of the insect, a disappointment of the relentless sun, with the high force of your instinct splitting to pieces.
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
Light blindly, light
uncertain, light of mud,
light undulation of time
in the uproar of my fronds.
Light
of water, light incomplete,
light morally unfolded
uprooted pleading with your own
lips
don’t let me
fall
into the heavens I don’t know
stars to me
nearby
and deep in the dream
of the dream
that moans me and establishes what only I recognize.
This translation is available for publication.
This piece is part of PEN’s 2014 translation series, which features excerpts and essays from the recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants.