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| since I have posted here. Not sure I want to maintain it since I have been using Blogger a lot the last year. | | |
| You lead a pod of sharks
With those flashing scythes,
Your eyebrows tipped with soot
And smeared from chopping up hearts.
You stepped inside me, and you
threw a mesh of rusted rootwork in me.
This net is voracious, it bides its time
before it commences to dominate.
Salt of my heart, whose sunny disposition
Sprouted a sunflower
from the yellow of your eye:
a mosquito bite I must keep scratching,
a fish trapped inside a bottle,
a hammer fed up with its anvil.
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| When will this static lightning
leave my heart, with its feral dogs,
its anxious forges, the smitheries
where the molten metal wails?
And when will this stubborn stalactite
snub the come-ons of the cowgirls,
like the swords and bonfires of my heart,
that moos and softly lows?
This beam won't tire out or quit.
It sinks its roots deep into me
and inside me releases its wind-up demons.
This obstinate crag protrudes from me
and I am the bullseye of its pelting,
annihilating rays.
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| The flesh-eating stilletto
gleams and dances in the air,
a flashing killing whirly-wing
making loop-de-loops of my life.
This beam of clenched metal
plunged into me,
it pecked a hole in the side of me
and padded its nest of sadness there.
The overhanging balcony of my skull,
Of my youth, is dark.
My poor friend my heart
has gone gray.
There is no force so deadly
as that spiraling ray,
I dwell on things past
like the moon over a small town.
I scrape my tear-salt with a rake
I scourge my soul with my lashes.
I festoon my depression
with the petals of cobwebs.
Where can I go that
my ruination won't come looking?
You stop at the seashore
But I am called out to sea.
There's no rest from the work
of the hurricane of love,
or of hell, that sadness just
goes on and on.
Sooner or later I will do you in, my heart,
my bird and lightning bolt
from out of the earth, for you
have warranteed my death.
So keep turning, knife,
keep spinning and flying and carving.
One day the yellowing of time
will settle on my snapshot.
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|  In my twenties I embarked on an ambitious career to be a poet. For ten years I gave it my all, then gradually got lured away by things more promising, like making sense. But in that time I wrote gloriously about the solipsistic tumult that was my life. Some of these projects remain in print online. and can be downloaded for free from my poem site: Home Trees, The Movie under the Blindfold, and Lucky You.
But there was a fourth item that has never seen the light of day, until this dubious day. It is a book of translations of poems, mostly sonnets, by the shepherd poet of the Spanish Revolution, Miguel Hernandez. Its title: El Ray Que No Cesa, "The Lightning that Doesn't Stop."
In those days, I considered myself fairly adept at reading Spanish, and I was a huge fan of the many poets then being ushered into English for the first time, Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca, Jiminez, etc. Translation was helping people like James Wright and Robert Bly make names for themselves. I thought, Why not me, too? So, without knowing too much about Hernandez, except that he was a protege of Federico Garcia Lorca's, I chose him, and this short book of poems to translate.
A publisher, Red Hill Press of San Rafael, California, liked the poems very much and agreed to see them into print forme. I believed that I was poised to become a credible translator. I worked hard at cracking the poems, going over every word with a stack of Spanish/English dictionaries. Since Hernandez was unabashedly surrealistic, it didn't bother me that very little made sense. It was only after I finished polishing the translations and sent them to Red Hill that the poems were rejected because a native Spanish speaker declared the to be confused. It was embarrassing. I believed that many translators of the day weren't quite sure what they were translating. It being the 70s, no one stopped to ask why. I was hoping to be swept along with the general credulousness.
Well, it didn't happen. My book was quashed, and I squirreled the book away in a box for thirty years. But this weekend, roaming through my crawlspace, I came upon it, and was beguiled by the beauty of the images -- whether they are apt translations or not.
So I am going to put some up. Don;t think of them as the ultimate word about Miguel Hernandez. I'm certain there are better versions of these poems somewhere in English. But take them for what they are -- ecstatic utterances from the depth of depression, from an evil place of sorrow that many of us have dwelt in. | | |
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