Three Poems from Ghost Planets
Tidying Up
You left my floor littered with beautiful ideas.
No way to pick them up,
no way to erase the impure line
left by thinking on the floor.
Kneeling, I learn the ritual:
I scrub the beautiful stain
—the daring traces of thought
its circle of chalk—
spreading unceasingly
across the world.
I scrub the stain like an assassin,
I struggle to postpone my confession.
That beauty is insufferable.
Your beauty sullies
and would take demolishing.
But there is no way to truly clean thoughts.
No way, no shape,
or form can escape their persistence.
So, I lay down
at their side
on a new,
luminous morning.
Original Text in Spanish
Limpieza general
Me habéis dejado el suelo lleno de ideas hermosas.
No hay forma de limpiarlas.
No hay forma de borrar la línea de impureza
que deja el pensamiento por el suelo.
De rodillas aprendo el ritual:
froto la hermosa mancha
—los trazos atrevidos de la idea,
su círculo de tiza—
que se extiende sin pausa
por el mundo.
Froto la mancha igual que el asesino.
Me esfuerzo en posponer las confesiones.
Que la belleza es insoportable.
Vuestra belleza ensucia
y tendría que ser aniquilada.
Pero en verdad no hay forma de limpiarlas.
No hay, de ningún modo,
manera de evitar su persistencia.
Y junto a ellas me tumbo
en una nueva
mañana luminosa.
Climates
When we’ve moved the furniture around
and hit the lights for the last time,
when people stop picking up their things,
lost in euphoria or revelation,
when we’re at the door
and want to inaugurate the temple once more,
when we’ve cleaned the dust from the chairs,
carried it elsewhere, though you can’t quite
get rid of everything
growing in the margins,
when no one mentions us all day long or
speaks our names at home,
remind me of a time when moving
was only molting.
Tomorrow I won’t want to go home.
Original text in Spanish
Los climas
Cuando hayamos cambiado los muebles de lugar
y apagado las luces para siempre,
cuando nadie recoja los objetos del suelo,
perdidos en la euforia o en la revelación,
cuando estemos delante de la puerta
queriendo inaugurar de nuevo el templo,
cuando hayamos limpiado el polvo de las sillas,
llevándolo a otra parte, y aunque nunca se elimina del todo
lo que crece en los márgenes,
cuando nadie nos nombre en todo el día
y nadie diga en casa nuestro nombre,
recuérdame aquel tiempo en que mudar
era solo mudarse.
Mañana no querré volver a casa.
Sacking the Temple
The party had ended
our house was no longer.
All the guests stole away
with leftovers like stones
pulled from a gorgeous Greek temple.
We watched them go at first light,
touch their faces and quicken their pace.
A tree fell without sound.
No one heard it; the tree never was.
Where will we fall ourselves?
We are left to the open air,
no walls, no house, no love of the things
no longer ours.
We lay the dirty mantel on the floor,
admiring how quietly
sacred places can vanish.
No one in the forest, no one in the city.
We better find a word
for the act of staying behind
home where the rest have left.
This is what we are.
Call it devotion.
Original text in Spanish
Saquear el templo
La fiesta terminó
y la casa ya no era nuestra casa.
Todos los invitados se llevaron consigo
un trozo de la fiesta, como el que arranca
piedras de un bello templo griego.
Los veíamos marcharse con las primeras luces.
Tocándose la cara, acelerando el paso.
Un árbol cae en el bosque sin hacer ningún ruido.
Nadie lo escucha. Nunca ha existido el árbol.
¿Dónde caemos nosotros?
Nos han dejado aquí a la intemperie:
no hay paredes, ni casa, ni amor para las cosas
que ya no poseemos.
Tendemos en el suelo el mantel sucio
y admiramos con qué silencio pueden
desvanecerse los lugares sagrados.
Nadie en el bosque, nadie en la ciudad.
Deberíamos buscar una palabra para nombrar
el gesto de quien queda en la casa
cuando todos se han ido.
Esto es lo que somos.
Se llama devoción.
Translator’s Statement
Rosa Berbel’s second collection takes its title from the term for a heavenly body that we know is there but cannot see. In the poems, a ghost planet is a way to comprehend the pull of a party or lover who is just out of reach. The poems speak for how it feels to be young while the world is deteriorating; many of the pieces were written during the pandemic’s early lockdowns.
These particular poems come from the final section of the collection, “When the Party Ended,” where the image of an empty house containing only “leftovers” and the ghosts of partygoers appears, inviting readers to question how the house may compare to reality on our planet. Other recurring images—the spell-like gesture of naming, the fallibility of language, too much or too little water—build to create the collection’s constellation-like logic. By this section, the body of work has suspended the accessible and the abstract and the scientific and the fantastical to create a sublime presence—a heavenly body that defies rationalization, at some turns taunting logic through cliché—while appealing to the grief-heavy heart and the five senses.
I began translating Ghost Planets in earnest at the 2023 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. I quickly understood that these poems travel across registers: from a timeless register linked to the author’s fascination with covens and witches, to the everyday speech of a young woman on a road trip through a desert ravaged by climate change, to a third register that attempts to integrate desire and beauty into post-apocalyptic environs. While translating, it was important to me to render a consistent voice across each one.
Rosa Berbel (Sevilla, España, 1997) has published two books of poems, Las niñas siempre dicen la verdad (Hiperión, 2018) and Los planetas fantasma (Tusquets, 2022). Her numerous awards include the XXI Antonio Carvajal Youth Poetry Prize, the Andalusian Critics’ Award for Best First Book, and the 2019 Ojo Crítico Poetry Award from Spanish National Radio. She was recently selected for a highly competitive residency at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA) scheduled for September 2025. Berbel also published a chapbook titled Bright and Chaotic in 2021, and her work has appeared in many anthologies both in Spain and abroad. Berbel’s poems and work have been translated completely or partially into English, Polish, Italian, German, and Dutch. She currently works in the Department of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada.
Jane Stringham is a translator and fiction writer. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, as well as MAs in comparative literature and bilingual education. Her work has appeared in Circumference, the Arkansas International, Plath Profiles, and elsewhere. Her translation work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. She has taught writing at the University of Arizona, Salt Lake Community College, and in high schools across Spain, though she is most at home in the mountains. She is at work on her first novel in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains.
