The poems translated here come from Vitale’s 1980 collection, Garden of Silica, as well as her most recent work, uncollected as of yet in a single volume, but encompassing the section “Antepenúltimos,” [Second-to-Last] which opens her Poesía reunida (Tusquets, 2017). In the case of the former, the translations originally appeared in an anthology of her work we translated and published in 2010 with Salt Publishing (UK), also titled Garden of Silica. These have been thoroughly and completely revised. As for the latter, this is the first time they’ve appeared in English.
Tracing through Transparency
Clear-cut afternoon
abundant with solid attempts
—trumpet, telegram, shreds of Girondo—
reserves sadness among its drupes.
Autumn forebodes transfer
transfers foreboding,
wastes its splendid veils
on dark rituals.
All nettles,
hieroglyphic ashes persist.
Just love holding
swift walls,
postpones
collapse.
Through transparency
you see the fire
devour
the tallest barks
in the climbing gardens.
A warble, terse
compass, endures.
Distance Square
Never mind if you are
on the summer stage
at the center of its defiance.
Far from its fires
you walk alone
among snowy statues,
along the stones of Charles
Bridge, infinite.
You see yourself walk,
watching how ice curdles
in short-lived islands,
running downriver,
it yokes at a point
far from here
—what here?—
between new shores.
Lightning is unspeakable.
Return then in the opposite direction,
reclaim uses and customs,
sea,
dead sand,
this clarity,
while you can.
But preserve in your blood
like a fish
the sweet clash of distance.
Summer
Everything is blue,
what isn’t green
and burns,
I.N.R.I.
—igne natura renovatur integra—
in this grave summer oil;
the one who weighs bird journey is falling
and curses the flightless bird,
verbal excrescence is falling =
soothsay = trophy,
jewel upon the same old skin.
Whoever sits at the shore of things
glows from things shoreless.
from Garden of Silica
Resources
The shockwave outside the poem or inside the poem, scarcely air held.
To read and then reread a phrase, a word, a face. Most of all, the faces.
To go over, to weigh what they silence.
Since you’re safe from nothing, try yourself to be something’s salvation.
Walk slow, see if time tempted follows suit.
Vegetate
Is vegetating so bad? Would you have to put down roots, with all the permanence that implies? Perhaps a pinch of sand is enough, but then it would be a cactus pushing through. Undeniably it would be better to find some good black soil for the experience, because not just any soil would be open to the adventure about to begin. Would just a few plantlets count? But no matter how willing you are, they just aren’t going to pop up anywhere unless you have a bit of root. And for that you need stillness. Sinking and stillness?
from Second-to-Last
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
