In Ecbatana the rainbow is only visible in a state of holiness.

The grove to the right among the ruins is clogged with corn flowers.

Within each flower is lost another star another blue corpuscle of God.

Antares (white) Alpha Centauri (black) Regulus (purple) Aldebaran
     (blue) (its blue even now not true-blue): orange (Arcturus)
     silver (Altair) gold (Vega).

There's a power latent in Vega's blue: its corpuscle now scores the gold
     reshapes to the right a last clump of corn flowers in the grove.

The name of the star still darkens one of the family names of Beatrice,
     still darkens (lapis lazuli, remembered) Guadalupe's pregnant
     body: it doesn't know (at bottom) the statue of salt. The blue
     intensity of the corpuscle in Guadalupe's gaze (guide) to the
     right in the grove.

To the left (at bottom) the salt is crumbling (the statue recognized): a
     dark green pool reflects beneath the midday sun the intensity
     of a myrtle.

Lead me, myrtle, to fields of corn flowers (lead me) past the pillar of
     salt to Guadalupe's lapis lazuli eye to the imperishable
     sphere (Beatrice) of the star in ruins now overhead to the
     left (Guadalupe) to the right (at bottom) lead me from jasper
     to amethyst to the foot of the hill of splendor.

 

 

Original text copyright © José Kozer, 2005.
Translation copyright © Mark Weiss, 2005.

Editorial note: The above poem resists accurate setting in HTML. The first line of each stanza is flush left and right, but subsequent lines are indented left and right, and justified, so that the stanza appears like an inverted top-hat.

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José Kozer was born in Havana in 1940, one of the leading lights of the neobarroco movement in Latin American poetry, is the son of parents who migrated to Cuba from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and the grandson of a founder of Cuba's first Ashkenazi synagogue. He studied law at the University of Havana, left Cuba in 1960, and received a BA from New York University in 1965. He taught for many years at Queens College, City University of New York, retiring as a full professor in 1997, after which he lived for two years in Spain before settling in South Florida. He is the author of over 15 collections of verse. His most recent, No buscan reflejarse (2002), a selection from past volumes, is the first poetry collection by a living Cuban exile to be published in Havana. Two small bilingual collections of his poems, The Ark Upon the Number (1982) and Prójimos / Intimates (Barcelona, 1990), both translated by Amiel Alcalay, have been published. Stet, his own far more comprehensive selection of poems, will appear in a bilingual edition, with translations by Mark Weiss, from Junction Press in 2005. A selected poems will appear from Vizor in Spain in 2006.

Mark Weiss is the author of Fieldnotes (Junction Press, 1995) and Figures (Chax Press, Tucson, 2001), amongst other volumes, and of Different Birds — a Shearsman e-book. He runs Junction Press in New York 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. Forthcoming are Stories as Equipment for Living: Late Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff, as editor with Marc Kaminsky (University of Michigan Press); Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer, as translator and editor (Junction Press); and The Whole Island / La isla en peso: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, as editor.