Translated from the Galician by Erín
Moure
because individuals resemble persons but are institutions. The mother-territory
contacts the daughter-territory to find out how we are; i answer we’re
fine, that they’re going to perform a hepatic extraction on you.
If the mother-institution were a person i’d tell her your liver (i
saw it) is full of stars, which isn’t very precise, i should say “your
hepatic cells are star-shaped”
it all happens so fast; the earth that wasn’t the same, nor that
of the hereafter–promise but a Florida, vanishes and the desert grows
(under my feet, obviously)
i must produce earth. Earth manufactures itself from an precise position
of the body in space. The poem can survive in the kingdom of snows
this journey might have happened at any lost point in the youth of Mariana
(any woman today aged between 40 and 55). Night, lying on the blue train
seat, head against the window, she contemplates the grandiose Canadian
landscape of lakes – which a light wind ripples – and interminable
birch forests. Preference for noctural-moving panoramas. London, at dawn,
uve-K enters the clinic, M heads for the British, later the Tate: Rothko,
Naum Gabo, Pevsner. The bison of Nevada interrupt the journey
the same thing all over (with mosquitoes)
now you’re in what may be a perfect parallelepiped with stairs to
the roof and two italianate alcoves communicating with twin tunnels of
white fog (coral fossilized and smelling intensely of sulphur). There’s
writing on all the walls. The bartender, an old cupid with quiver and arrows,
sets a stone cup on the table. You don’t drink, you memorize the
countersigns of poems (celtic warriors, baked into corn bread). In instantaneous
mutation, you enter, stand up, fade out
what fascinated me about the radio were its keys (elephant ivory) and
the greenlit mermaid eyes of a glide that registered sound intensity; i
was mesmerized and pretended it was me making that music (i made as if
playing the piano) soaring over the savannah, with two hundred thousand
elephants, from the jungle
truly (uve-K)
warm objects, of writing
(in the sanitorium washroom, a clear space)
a group of actors sip tea
delight themselves with the minutae of the tray-coffin: the cups
resemble funerary urns and the napkins shrouds
INMATE (he) #1— it seems she’d rinsed them –my curls–/and
with gold she tied them
INMATE (she) #2—my brother grabs the device –a cathodic vitrine–,
eats there, sups there; doesn’t rise from his chair all day –three,
four A.M.– eighty pills
We, working men and women of Galicia, together in Vigo under the most
adverse circumstances our class has recently known, wish to take the floor
to proclaim . . .
INMATE (he) #3 – i’m in a rush, i know, it’s suffocating
to recount this soap opera
seeds came out of me, the rule took its time letting me go, i lost
half a stone, spent a fortune on underwear, new swimsuits, shoes. On Saturday,
Fernando’d stayed with a friend to go to the chalet, i was officially
supposed to go with Teresa to watch Holy Sunday videos. I get on the plane
soaked in sweat, after endless waiting
MAXI – when the party’s over, the muse runneth over, enters
the dream of men
chews cellophane, pale viscera of Dionysus
this is politics sampled
cold
----------------
CUT
---------------
cut the roses, make a
bouquet
bestow it on me
Original copyright © María Xesús
Pato Díaz, 2004, and © Edicións Xerais de Galicia,
Vigo, 2004.
Translations copyright © Erín Moure, 2007.
Chus Pato (Mariá Xesús Pato)
was born in Ourense, Galicia, in 1955. She teaches college History
and Geography in the interior of Galicia. In her words: “writing
metabolizes the world, even that world that cannot be absorbed
into writing.” And: “I have a predilection for those
constructions which investigate the possibility of a language-thinking
that refuses to repeat the already-written and lives in contact-lamination
with the seams of the unsayable, of what hasn’t yet been
written into the corporeality of the poem.” “To me,
the poem is a freedom-machine.” “My autobiography?
It does not always seem to be mine; sometimes I would rather
have other lives. Insofar as all autobiography participates in
fiction, I prefer not to be forced to choose, so I opt not to
have one.” Her work: Calpurnia (Urania, Ourense, 1991),
Espiral Maior (Heloísa, A Coruña, 1994), Toxosoutos,
(Fascinio, Santiago de Compostela, 1995), Nínive, (Xerais,
Vigo, 1996), Noitarenga (A ponte das poldras, Santiago de Compostela,
1996), m-Talá, (Xerais, Vigo, 2000), Charenton (Xerais,
Vigo, 2003), and a selection translated into Spanish: Un
Ganges de palabras, (Puerta del Mar, Málaga, 2003).
Erín Moure is a poet and
translator based in Montreal. Her last-but-one book of poetry, Little
Theatres, won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and
was also nominated for both the 2005 Governor General’s Award
for English-language poetry and the 2006 Griffin Prize. Her latest
collection O Cadoiro was published
by House of Anansi, Toronto, in October 2007. A section of her
translation of Chus Pato’s m-Talá appeared
as a chapbook in late 2003 from Nomados in Vancouver. She has also
translated poetry by several French and Hispanic poets. Shearsman
Books published the complete Charenton in late 2007, in collaboration
with BuschekBooks of Ottawa.
