The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 22–JAN 23

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DEC 22–JAN 23 Issue
Poetry

three


Afuera está la serpiente



Afuera está la serpiente, siguiendo el mismo camino.
Con reglas dentro de reglas, ahora muriendo por sombrero.


Con ricos y pobres con los mismos odios, las mismas sonrisas.
Con los mismos intereses en la guerra.


Esta es la única guerra. Nunca termina.
Antes los países pensaban que las reglas formarían nuevos mundos,


pero ahora la guerra tiene un rostro individual.
Así la serpiente crece con esto.


Es como un lenguaje, una prisión,
el aire entero del bosque lleno de lluvia.


From El enemigo de los thirties [The Enemy of Thirties] by Juan Arabia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2015).







Outside Lies the Serpent



Outside lies the serpent, seething along the unchanged path.
With rules within rules, now dying by hat.


With kings and paupers sharing a common hate, similar sneers,
With the same common interests in the war.


This is the only war. And it never ceases.
In the past countries held that rules would lead to new worlds —


Yet nowadays war wears an individual face.
So with it the serpent swells.


Much like jargon, a penitentiary,
the whole air of the forest in roaring rains.









Bulmenia III



Por un momento, y quizás por muchos años,
se agotaron los peces de Brescia
mientras el disparo del suicida coronaba las flores
más blancas y frescas del mercado.


Por eso bendice a los muertos esta noche
que desde su aburrimiento asfixian tu lámpara,
desde su silencio llenan tu copa
con el soplo estéril de sus vientres.


O ilumina tu rostro como el de un océano,
respira la profunda tristeza de los débiles,
camina por las calles menos transitadas
y llena tus bolsillos del oro defecado por el tiempo.


Ese alucinador que repta como un cangrejo
cambiando todos los espacios y direcciones.
Así llenaron tus pulmones de cisnes negros,
de tu corazón formaron una alcantarilla.


From Bulmenia [Bulmenia] by Juan Arabia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022).







Bulmenia III



For a moment, for years perhaps,
the Brescia fish sold out
while the suicide shot crowned the flowers,
the whitest, the freshest flowers in the market.


For this bless the deceased tonight
who from their boredom extinguish your lamp,
whose silence fills your cup
with the sterile breath from their guts.


Or illuminate your face, oceanic,
inhale the deep-seated sadness of the weak,
let your foot fall on the less frequented streets
and fill your pockets with the ore defecated by time.


That hallucinatory one who crawls like a crab
changing every location, every distance.
This way they filled your lungs with black swans
and from your heart they created a sewer.









Hilda Hilst asiste a su entierro



De la ceniza de un cigarro
      cae la luna


y las flores voltearán su cabeza
      de erguida juventud


mientras se multiplica el recaminar
de la especie, sin centro ni forma


una poeta visita su entierro animal
sentada en las voces de lagunas rojas







Hilda Hilst Attends her Graveside Burial



From the ashes of a cigarette
falls the moon


and the flowers will turn her head
her head of spiraling youth


as the proliferation of the species
staggers on, off-centered, formless


a poet visits her own graveside animal burial
she sits over the voices of rufescent lakes

Contributors

Patricio Ferrari

Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. Born in Merlo to Piemontesi and Calabresi immigrants who settled in the outskirts of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century, he left Argentina at the age of 16 to attend high school and play soccer in the United States as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. His most recent editions and translations are The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (with Forrest Gander; New Directions, 2018) and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa (with Margaret Jull-Costa; New Directions, 2020). Forthcoming translations include Verde amargo by Martin Corless-Smith (with Graciela S. Guglielmone; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022), Habla terreña by Frank Stanford (with Guglielmone; Pre-Textos, 2023), and The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Pessoa (with Jull-Costa, New Directions 2023). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southwest Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Buenos Aires Poetry, Perfil, among others. Currently residing in New York City, he is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as at Rutgers University.

Juan Arabia

Juan Arabia is a poet, translator and literary critic. Born in Buenos Aires in 1983, he is founder and director of the cultural and literary project Buenos Aires Poetry. Arabia is also in-house literary critic for the Cultural Supplement of Diario Perfil and Revista Ñ of Diario Clarín. Among his most recent poetry titles are Desalojo de la Naturaleza [Eviction of Nature] (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), Hacia Carcassonne [Towards Carcassonne] (Pre-Textos, 2021), and Bulmenia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022). After the publication of El enemigo de los Thirsties [Enemy of the Thirties] (2015), awarded in France, Italy, and Macedonia, Juan participated in several poetry festivals in Latin America, Europe, and China. In 2018, on behalf of Argentina, he was invited to the “Voix vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée” poetry festival in Sète (France). The following year he became the second Latin American poet to be invited to the “Poetry Comes to Museum LXI,” sponsored by the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum. Arabia has translated works by Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, and Dan Fante, among others. Two of his books have been translated into French (L’Océan Avare, trad. Jean Portante, Al Manar, 2018) and Italian (Verso Carcassonne, trad. Mattia Tarantino, Raffaelli Editore, 2022). He lives in San Telmo (Buenos Aires) with his wife — the designer, poet, and literary translator Camila Evia — and son Cátulo.

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The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 22–JAN 23

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