Each day old Anaximander
sat beneath the shade of youth in flower.
The famous sage had grown so old
that his lips no longer parted, nor did he smile nor seem even to understand
the play of golden hair the laughter, the sly, flirtatious games
of the loveliest girls in Corinth.

It was towards the end of his life,
when as he passed folk would comment
that there was left to him at most
the wilting of three or four sunflowers,
it was in that small morsel of time preceding death,
that Anaximander discovered
the solution to the enigma of time.

There, in Corinth, by the bay, encircled by the flowering girls.
That he would shelter at noon beneath a green and blue parasol had been accepted
as a harmless eccentricity.
He had ceased greeting his age-mates, he no longer frequented the places
     where the old would gather,
nor did he seem to share with those in the agora
anything other than years and the snow encircling their jaws: Anaximander
would sit, mute, in the time of flowering youth,
like one who goes abroad to cure an old illness.

It began at noon in the sonorous shade of the girls of Corinth;
impassive, his parasol open, he dragged his feet to where he would sit
          in silence,
to where he would seat himself among them, listening to their cooing,
          observing the delicate geometry of knees the color of wheat,
          glancing furtively at those fugitive pink doves
that flew beneath the bridge of shoulders.
                                                          He said nothing,
and nothing seemed to stir him beneath his parasol, sensing, among
          the sweet girls of Corinth, time's passage, time become a
          shower
of golden pins, resplendent as ripe cherries,
time flowing around the ankles of the flowering doves of Corinth,
time, which in other places brings to the lips of men a draught of
          poison which none may turn away,
here offered the nectar of an ambrosia so singular
one would have thought that time itself wished also to live, to become
          incarnate, to delight
in smooth skin or in the reflection of a blue-green eye.
                                                                         Silently Anaximander
floated like a swan each day between clouds of beauty, and endured;
there, within time and beyond it, he tasted the slow fragrance of
          eternity, while his cat purred beside the fire. At evening he
          would return home
and pass the night writing tiny poems
for the noisy doves of Corinth.

The city's other sages muttered ceaselessly.
More even than the harvest festival or the comings and goings of ships,
          Anaximander had become
the preferred topic of tiresome conversations:
                                                             "Always have I told you,
wise men of Corinth," his old enemy Prodicos proclaimed, "that he
          was no true sage nor even of average importance. His work?
Plagiarized. Repetitious. And hollow at the core. Hollow as a barrel of
          wine after the Thebans have come to taste the sunlight of
          Corinthian vineyards."
Impassive, Anaximander walked through the streets of Corinth to the bay,
his blue parasol open above him, catching the latest news in passing:
day after day some wise old man would pass below. Day after day the sages
would be summoned by Proserpina, their ashes only
flowing towards the sea, the violet-covered waters of the sea at Corinth.

All passed, and Anaximander remained, encircled by the girls, seated beneath the sun.
A fold of Atalanta's blouse, Aglae's voice
when she sang to the heavens her hymn in imitation of the nightingale,
Anadiomena's smile, were all the sustenance Anaximander needed,
          and he was there, still there, when everything around him had vanished.

One day he saw in the distance
a small boat on the horizon of the Bay of Corinth.
Within, a little man rowed with an asthmatic's exhausted tenacity.
His head was covered with a straw hat, a white straw hat with a red band.
          From its confines
the little man looked out upon the entire bay and saw, on its furthest shore,
a blue parasol, a small circle as golden as the sun. He rowed
towards it. Stubborn, tenacious, whistling a tune, the little man with gloved hands
rowed ceaselessly. Anaximander began to smile. The boat, immobile on the bay,
had also conquered time. Slowly the white straw hat announced that
          the little man was receding into the distance homeward.

                                                    That night, shortly before retiring,
Marcel Proust, exhilarated, called from his home:
"Mother, bring me more paper, bring me all the paper you can.
I'm going to begin a new chapter. I'm going to call it
"In the Shade of the Flowering Girls."

 

Translation c opyright © Mark Weiss, 2005.

---

Gastón Baquero was born in Banes, Cuba, in 1918 and died in Madrid in 1997. A child of rural poverty, Baquero trained as an agronomist, earning a doctorate in Natural Sciences from the University of Havana before turning to a career in journalism and literature. He was a founder or collaborated on all of the most important Cuban literary journals of the 30, 40s and 50s, including Orígenes. As an editor, journalist and essayist he worked for several newspapers and journals closely connected to the Batista regime, and he left Cuba immediately after the revolution, spending the rest of his life in Spain. Thereafter he was officially nonexistent in Cuba, unpublished there and written out of the history of Cuban poetry. His poetry, including the work published after he left, was nonetheless widely known to poets on the island. In the last decade he has been "rehabilitated", and is once more publicly acknowledged as one of Cuba's major poets. A bilingual selection of his poems, translated by Mark Weiss, will appear eventually. Baquero published numerous essays and eight collections of poetry. The present selection is drawn from Magias e invenciones (Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, Madrid, 1984). The poem featured here is structured around the title of the second volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, called in the standard English translation Within a Budding Grove.

Mark Weiss is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Fieldnotes (Junction Press, 1995) and Figures: 32 Poems (Chax Press, Tucson, 2001), and Different Birds (Shearsman Books ebook, 2004). He runs Junction Press in San Diego and is particularly active as a translator from Spanish. In 2003 he co-edited with Harry Polkinhorn the volume Across the Line / Al otro lado, a bilingual anthology of poetry from Baja California. He is currently editing an anthology of modern Cuban poetry. His translations of José Kozer will appear in the next issue of the magazine.