[translated flash prose] Take this seed. Plant it in an olla that has only been used to make coffee. Water it lightly Tuesdays and Fridays around midnight. It will grow into a plant with black flowers. Cut them with a man’s knife and grind them up in a new lava stone mortar. You will be […]
[translated fiction] Dime-a-dozen, fair-weather friends—the ones you met to do nothing but sit around, drink beer, and gab. The night we hung out was of the same kind. On one side of the booth sat men who wanted a one night stand. None of the ladies on the other side were seeking Mr. Right, either. […]
[translated poetry] What do we know? Who then understands the depths of things? The sunset glowed in the rose-hued clouds. It was the end of a day of storms, and the west Set the showers aflame in a ferocious blaze. Near a ditch, at the edge of a rain puddle, A toad looked at the […]
[translated fiction] Right at the beginning, at that very first meeting in the park, there were twelve of us, half of which I didn’t even know. There, upon that gentle slope behind the house, you could hear the fountains splashing and the trams squealing down Kastanienallee. It was the end of June and rather hot. […]
[translated poetry] Excuse Us Excuse us for fleeing the wars that you fed with your own arms Excuse us for getting poisoned with the toxic waste buried by your powerful industries Excuse us if you’ve bled out our land, depriving us of any possible resource Excuse our poverty daughter of your richness of your neo-colonialisms […]
[translated fiction] “Martín!” “Ñoraa!” “You think the river’s gone up?” “Definitely, the snowmelt’s really letting loose down the sierra, bursting like you wouldn’t believe.” “Will the cows go into the woods?” “I couldn’t hold them back even if I tried.” “But be careful on the way back, son, the river’s treacherous.” “The river won’t get […]
[translated poetry] The Fourth Astral Plane We bolted from empty stores, Army bullies, Chernobyl, Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Happy drunkards euthanized in the snow. We were afraid that tomorrow another curtain would fall, And the pogrom-happy Czar would return, or the dictator, or the terrorists, So amidst the hot Brooklyn spring we came To the Hasidim […]
[translated poetry] “Tights” She likes the taste of her knee. In the summer, she’ll eat it straight from the skin. In the winter, she’ll do so until all the cotton hair has shed on her tongue. In her head stuck on the knee, the child puts together the things she knows. An ant rubbed between […]
[translated poetry] He had said, My woman, come to the lamppost when the coldest night arrives / There will be a rock / Sit on it / Or at least set your heart on it / The fog will envelop you from all sides / On this canvas of fog, your breath will be visible like sweeps of […]
[translated poetry] LONELY POET, QUIET RESTAURANT Words in the head, restaurant nearby Clouds have amassed in the month of Asharh reminding of Distressed days—streets are bumpy all over. Who knows when they’ll be cleared of mud-heaps! In these hours he has to find a way out. Poetry and coffee are waiting for him. Suddenly rain starts, […]
[translated poetry] Chinese Fable When I was small my father’s coworker ran off coming back with one of those briefcases full of money close, smutty talk filled our town about what he’d done to get it he smiled and disappeared again Next we heard he’d been sentenced to death for drug trafficking a family member […]
[translated poetry] I Given in measurement. Play seasons. Beneath bushes of fog, face blades, get knotty, all the while be back, pelvis, exchange of oxygen and photosynthesis. Lust as shears. Slight air supply, then: Breathe, raise arms shoulder-high, a beelined shoot axis. Put up defense with leaves (thorns, bugs, spiderwebs), evaporation of the slightest. The […]
[self-translated poetry] Roses and spines The widow’s shaven head Welcomes the knights of the apocalypse Sunbeams Arrows of the day The husband’s soul Escapes from the body The widow’s shaven head Welcomes the knights of the apocalypse Antidote He was handsome but ”la fille de Joie” [1] did not let herself go. Love is […]
[translated fiction] In his account of traveling along the Orinoco, Humboldt describes a strange ritual in which the native people go into the depths of a cave to catch birds with pitch-black feathers that they call tayos. As they penetrate the cave, the men bang together enormous river-bottom rocks and shake rattles made of dried […]
[translated fiction] Just a moment please (they all look at me: they’re recent graduates, twenty-four, twenty-seven years old), then you can try out the program and do what you have to do, but before you download it be aware that it isn’t compatible with Macs or the latest version of Windows. So, if you’re using […]
[self-translated poetry] Feast of the Sacrifice and no sacrifice neither wealth nor goats yet each one a sacrifice— It hurts hurts of hunger and thirst hurts of fear and belittlement sacrifices of the invaluable, the self Feast of the Sacrifice and each one is Ismail under the looming hand sacrifice small and weak witnessing the […]
[translated fiction] Where was he coming from? The question lacked any possible answer. Other than “from home.” For the following reason: a cat never arrives anywhere, he returns. Each time I see him returning from his walk, I tell myself the same thing. That’s the feeling a cat always gives you. Even when he sets […]
[translated poetry] Soldiers Are Sleepless Prey Do the coarse fingers of soldiers who are fighting wars touch their children’s soft hands? Did they ever know tenderness? Were soldiers who are fighting wars born soft-skinned babies with a refined laughter? Did their mothers bathe them with hot water and laurel soap and smilingly comb their hair? […]
[translated poetry] First Afternoons in Lesbos Remember those afternoons in November. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The rain would make the patio a cloister, and the smell of the earth would reach the window from which we leaned. It was then that the house was our refuge, the island where we made our hands mature, our bodies barely debuted. […]
[translated fiction] The compartment door banged open and the conductor informed us that we’d arrive in Montpellier in one hour. I repacked my things, freshened up, and went out to the corridor, waiting to see the city that would be my new home. I don’t really remember why we’d picked Montpellier for me to attend […]
[translated poetry] Rhapsody on Stench Don’t stay at cheap hotels—just don’t, he said prostitutes that knock on doors at midnight, just like disposable containers containing disposable sex disposable toilet paper and paper cups, rusty faucets manageresses who apply too much fake perfume even the artificial lighting and white bed sheets all have stench for forty […]
[translated poetry] * This is how, oh so quietly, with their eyes closed, babies are dropped into the world. Like grains of rain, in the dark, from the palm of a giant hand into tubes, into a spider’s tent, a cold apple. The world is quiet, in the transparent beehive cells the babies slumber, estranged […]
[translated fiction] Class struggles had been replaced by racial animosity, which was being replaced by an unprecedented form of resentment, primitive, unclassifiable, unstructured, and all-encompassing. People hated people all day, every day. Days of wrath, days of tremendous anger, and every evening he had to convince these embittered adults to buy a contraption they had […]
My haunt my drinking place was there, lit by a moon I was not there. My intoxication personified, was there Not I. On the slippery slope to that bar, lips craving wine I was not there An eon of thirsts tottering, was there Not I. Maikada mai-kada thā chāñdnī thī maiñ na thā […]
© Éditions Inculte (2014) *or who shot him first or who shot him second or who is the first to have seen him dead or who is the one who in the helicopter sat on his body or who made it all up to have a story to tell Based on real facts and […]
Gravedigger The song of the factory’s fans and the telephone that announces: life is so fragile like this state in which one writes. There’s a reason the trees shake at the bottom of this painting, as if somebody had opened a door through which the wind is expelled, house distorted by memory. But like a […]
Violet and Sydney Schiff were an extremely sophisticated English couple, rich, cultured and cosmopolitan, who moved between London and Paris. He was a translator and writer, using the pseudonym Stephen Hudson, but first and foremost he was a patron of the arts, on friendly terms with Modernism’s greatest talents. She was an elegant and captivating […]
Night, and your absent memory crept into my heart As in a wasteland, spring blossoms quietly As in a desert, the zephyr sways gently As to a dying man, relief comes, unexpectedly. Rubai Raat yuuñ dil meñ tirī khoī huī yaad aa.ī Jaise vīrāne meñ chupke se bahār aa jaa.e Jaise sahrāoñ meñ […]
A sin of beauty is a toy forever: I transgress; I jumble up words, fumble for the right age, mislabel Keats for Yeats, bumble between the present tense and the past tense. For elegance, for beauty, for my inflexible desire, I dismiss faithfulness and disable meaning. I mistranslate flyable twilight as an unshakable rock in […]
1 The ogre is bad-tempered He throws a fit Hurling rotten stones Giant stale rocks, to be more precise The ogre wants fresh stones And the dream doesn’t leave him alone: I want stones Timely stones My exhaustion wants them Living stones Stones that break away from your seconds fall over me Stones that pour […]
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