Three Poems
translated by Zachary Bos
Las canas, como un cáncer,
después de la cabeza,
colonizan las barbas y las cejas.
Metástasis de nieve,
semáforos de tiempo:
oscura juventud,
grisácea madurez,
vejez clarividente.
El síntoma fatal
de que ya somos viejos
es cuando se blanquean los pendejos.
Gray hairs, like a cancer,
when they’re done with my head
colonize my beard and eyebrows.
Metastasis of snow,
traffic signal of time:
dark youth,
grayish maturity
clairvoyant age.
The fatal sign
that we’ve gotten old
is when our pubes whiten.
En Cartagena de Indias
hacia el final de la mañana
el sol es tan intenso,
la densa luz tan clara,
el diáfano fulgor tan luminoso,
el resplandor total tan excesivo
que en el deslumbramiento,
llegué a verles, lo juro,
la sombra a dos fantasmas.
In Cartagena de Indias
towards the end of morning
the sun is so intense,
the dense light so clear,
the diaphanous glow so bright,
the total radiance so excessive
that in the bedazzlement,
I was able to see, I swear,
the shadow of two ghosts.
Escondían tus versos
debajo de las baldosas sueltas
como se esconden armas
o granadas o planes de atentados
y conspiraciones secretas.
Decías que en Rusia,
solamente en Rusia,
los versos pueden matar.
Tus versos, tus simples versos al invierno.
Y cuando ya no hubo forma
de esconderlos en ninguna parte
los memorizaron tu mujer, tus amigos.
Si los cogían presos,
en las celdas de Stalin,
los obligaban a recitarlos, bajo tortura,
con la brillante idea
de que con sólo decirlos
serian olvidados
y luego dispersados por el viento.
Moscú
They hid your verses
under loose floor tiles
as weapons are hidden
or grenades or plans or plots
and secret conspiracies.
You said that in Russia,
only in Russia,
verses can kill.
Your verses, your simple verses to winter.
And when there was no other way
to hide them somewhere else
your wife, your friends, memorized them.
If they were taken as prisoners
to Stalin’s cells
and made to recite them
under torture
with this brilliant idea
just by uttering them
they would be forgotten
and then scattered on the wind.
Moscow
HÉCTOR ABAD FACIOLINCE (b.1958) is a Colombian novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor, counted among the most prominent figures of the post-Latin American Boom writers in Latin American literature. He is best known for his novel Angosta, and more recently, the memoirEl Olvido que Seremos. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy before returning to his homeland in 1987. Since 2008, Abad has been a member of the editorial board of El Espectador, Colombia's oldest newspaper. The poems appearing in this issue are taken from his collection Testamento involuntario, published in 2011 by Alfaguara, 2011.
ZACHARY BOS is production manager of The Battersea Review and editor of New England Review of Books.