Breve recopilación de textos que diferentes personas alrededor del mundo han traducido de la autoría original de Enrique.

Katherine Silver and Robin Myers – Inglés

Katherine Silver es una traductora norteamericana que ha traducido y publicado más de treinta libros; fue directora del Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Ha traducido a José Emilio Pacheco y Julio Cortázar, entre muchos otros. Igualmente es intérprete voluntaria para solicitantes de asilo.

Robin Myers, traductora basada en la Ciudad de México, ha sido galardonada por Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets, e incluso ha sido publicada en diferentes revistas especializadas. Sus colecciones han sido publicadas en ediciones bilingües en México, Argentina y España.

Palabra sola/A Word Alone. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

19 de diciembre de 2021

There it is, all alone, a beautiful word
with its long hair loose, facing the sea
proud to exist, to be on the beach, naked,
all voice, sheer presence, like the sea
with its vocalic breasts and its adjective skin,
transparent word, child of memory
at the mercy of the sand, of the waves and the air,
of everything the sea contains, includes:
What can it do against the water? 
against the sun that sets it on fire?
against the sound of the wind that silences it?
Could it say at least one word—like sea,
for example—and include all the water?
—which rises up in waves and revels in the foam
and flowers in the sand, in rocks and salt.
Poor word, alone, face-to-face with the sea:
our only eyes, our only voice,
our only way of being, facing the sea.

Carro pintado de azul/Blue car. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

My grandmother says the first car I saw was blue.
When I remember that I remembered, I say it was green.
The car no longer exists.
Like an image scratched by a branch in the water,
memories fuse, confuse.
That’s how fragile the past is.

Memorial de los grandes/Memorial to the Greats. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

The Greats commissioned it
as expression and proof of their glory.
It was perfection. A tall monolith
of perfect crystal. Its structures—
hard algebra and transparent stone—
formed invisible iridescent
cathedrals, concentric.

They called it diamond:
an entire diamond obelisk.
It would be a pure fount of reflections,
a deep mirror for the sun.
It would tell time. It would mark solstices.
It would guide nomads. Above all,
it would speak of the Greats for the rest of time.

But the gods, who only contemplate,
deemed otherwise,
giving other names
to the meager materiality of the glinting obelisk:
Ice. Foam.
And they watched it crack, collapse
within a few geological eras.

Elegía/Elegy. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

Every evening a young man plays his Tarahumara violin
in his room. Jesús Hielo. Jesus Ice.
My sister remembers him, in Cerocahui.
—Outside the world grows, concrete and vast,
the hills, endlessly trees, conifers
sown fields, grasses, sands, stone.
He died today.
He was mestizo, they tell me.
He has very indigenous features, I answer,
then have to correct myself: had.
How sad, that first time, to use the past tense
when speaking of someone.
The living, solid verb gives way in the end:
he spoke, he said, he had, he was.
Hielo used to play his violin in the mountains.

Eventos/Eventos. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

The dissolution of Precambrian land masses,
so slow and so long ago by now.
India (unnamed) crashing
into Asia (everything then unnamed).
The emergence of the Himalayas,
such extraordinary mountains.
The change of climates, slow, ironic;
deserts that had been seas, for instance.
The extinction of the dinosaurs (colossal stones
tumbled from the skies).

Or things such as: the arrival of these or those.
The discoveries.
The conquests.
The voyages so many made.
Things like that.

But I was born in the year nineteen hundred and fifty-eight
of the Christian era. I will not live for centuries
and I can barely watch the loss of a majestic jungle.

I’ve been unaware of other great events.

Ilegal/Illegal. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

I’m in another country, say the maps,
history, or some other detail—
unfamiliar faces, laughter laughing
in a foreign accent.
It’s true this city
couldn’t be my own.
But if I stick a shovel in the ground,
the ground, dampened by winter
splits open as it does back there, and the worm
writhes stateless, in love with life.
And the very same flies also alight
on piles of garbage.
And the reed beds and the cold
speak a language I understand.

Lunas/Moons. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

Come and look at yourself in the moon, an old voice said, and the moon
was the mirror’s golden vessel, standing tall before me, approaching
from the wall. With iridescent edges and timbers older
than the voice of that aunt who always swayed and smiled.

The mirror left.
Men took it down and covered it with cardboard and paper,
then removed it from the living room. The house had a long hallway.
That moon left. It was definitive.
Because my aunt had already died, and I no longer remember how.
Remote images of furniture departing, some relative asking
for a vase, a crystal to remember her by. That’s it.
And now all of it is dim and mute. The dust of memory.

And now the moon is only the one in the sky, forever.
Beyond my dreams and memories. Beyond this body that
is no longer a boy’s body.
The slow moon, remote.
In the coldest terms, it’s a different use of voice. Words
age, too; this is trivial.
But language lives, plays, and there’s nothing nostalgic
about a chance metaphor that turns the moon, the one in the sky,
into a mirror once more:
Lagoon of Rains, Ocean of Storms, Sea of Serenity
where from closer up
there’s only dust and silence. Aerial silver, the moon
of distant silence.
The one in the evening sky.

Nota para un regalo/Note with a Gift. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

for Margaret Feigin

I give you this lotus, as simple as a flower.
It is a flower.
It appeared in the water at the park within some circles, shadowy vegetal rhythms
out of the slow layer of detritus, something
like a fallen black mass: potential flowers. At first it was a bud, closed
coffer, unopened fingers—then
it slowly offered its perfection.
I pulled it toward me with a stick, a modest branch, hunter of symbols.
It is a symbol.
Put some sugar in the water,
place the lotus in the vase. And make sure it has some sun so it can live a little longer,
because
it is just a flower.
It will close at night—it’s tiring, being so much light, but the air is young, the year
begins anew, and tomorrow it will open again
more weakly, more
finally. And when it does
make the flower unfurl
in flames:
star symbol,
lotus perfection.

Trino de luz/A Trill in the Light. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

I stop.
Midday peace among the trees.
And then, not a sound:
a transparent flame
spreads through the air.
Violent and luminous, 
like the burning day.
Like sex.
Like the summer sun.
Above the lone street and the gardens:
the eternal sky.
And that light we hear
dripping from nowhere. A stubborn trill
that transcends forms:
the limits of the tree and the earth,
the borders of the body and those of the world,
the weight of things.
Fleeting mystery, at the peak of the day:
the thrilling mystery
of that trill in the light.

Primavera/The spring. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

On that ruddy evening, after our day in the countryside,
at last we reached the spring, together,
which was water in silence, mineralized in the depths
of the earth’s fire, almost wholly in silence.
We reached a dream after the plains. A dream,
but true. Blue and ochre waters surrounding us
on that unreal evening. And I remember other things:
the sweeping land, the color of the salts,
the embraces, the kiss: I closed my eyes
and the world dissolved
into a placid surge of joyful emptiness.
Just two existed, that was all:
the taste of lips, a tender nakedness.
Only two bodies close and loving in the desert
of time and the world,
and overhead, an open skylight
among nitrous trunks
—which once were trees, sweet huizaches
or mezquites of the arduous world—
revealed a purple sky, barely visible.
And a first star came to us from far away: the distant
and fanciful sun of happiness. The gentle fire
that dreamed of forms and bodies
in a ceremony of zenithal golds
making us feel, grow, know each other
to delirium. Wells of holy water and
life’s caress:

this memory
is still a spring.

Esteban habla/Esteban Speaks. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

My spirit is a canvas that’s been left
out in the rain too long
and now

large umber stains—
revealing mountains, hollows,
heavy clouds—have covered it
and now
the slightest wind can tear it

Soñando en la sierra madre/Dreaming in the Sierra Madre. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

I leaned against the trunk of a tree.
A few faint clouds dilated the sky, and the light
was pure sweetness.
Rocks spread out beneath the endless air,
the color of embers or a fire’s agate.
I breathed deeply, that’s all, under a tree.
It was neither dawn nor a dream.
That’s what the world was like.
Gleaming, the pines were languid greenery
and I could hear the pine nuts crackle as they fell.

Mediodía/Midday. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

For Pilar, Ana Elena, and Gabriela

And I’m here too.
Around me,
members of two families
who chat and laugh.
A glass table, its volcanic stone plinth,
and on the clear glass, in disarray,
everything is in its place.
I look out the window, and the branches of the trees
melt into greens
—heightened breath.
And the sunlight in the young hair of my sister.
And through the cups, the joyfulness of ice.
Where will it be brighter: here indoors, or outside?
Because if I go out, it will all be new—
the air, the mountains, the borders of the day.
Where is there more light?

Oración del avestruz/Prayer of the Ostrich. Katherine Silver + Robin Myers (Translation)

Spare me the clamor, O Lord—
the hum of things that split and spoil,
the unbearable sound of things collapsing.
And if I hear it, let
me slip into my house
and hide.

And if it comes in loud and clear
through the cracks in doors and windows,
let me take cover in the bathroom.

And if the echo seeps into the drains,
then let me shut my eyes and fall asleep
to keep the clamor out.

And if I close my eyes,
then let the noise not overwhelm
my perfect dark.

Belinda A. Butler – Inglés

Nativa bilingüe inglés/español con raíces mexicanas del estado de Chihuahua, Belinda Butler fue amiga personal del maestro Servín. Graduada por la Universidad de Harvard, es actualmente profesora de literatura inglesa en un colegio privado en Carolina del Norte. Traducciones previas incluyen trabajos para el Municipio y la Cámara de Comercio de la ciudad de Chihuahua.

Mi padre frente al mar/My Father Before the Sea. Belinda A. Butler (Translation)

I run through silver slopes and hills
I feel my body as perhaps never before.
The air is a clean mantle coming
From beyond the grasses. From a place
Uninhabited and vast. All is luminous and green.
I chase a bird that rises, descends, rises again
At times conflated with the sky but reappearing
And the silky grasses form swift ripples.
I breathe, there is so much light. I climb a hill
And suddenly you appear before the sea
And the bird, that I cannot reach, flies above us, moves
away and is lost.
But you are there. You say something to me, barely,
and smile the way you were.
How many things we must have recalled. How many
things loved and understood. And for me to see you again
before the sea.
How well you looked, father. How well death agreed with you.
How much silence and distance accumulated in these
strange years of your absence
To see you once more, how sweet. And the sea
That we never saw together, how it shone
from the slow swells, like something
incomprehensible, and at peace.
But suddenly a noise, a rough movement on the road woke me
And around me remained the murmur of the bus in
which I traveled the deaf darkness of the distances without limit. 
The return to a journey less beautiful and more sad, 
in the middle of the desert.
The cold windows, a few
glimmers of unspeakable forms in the night: the long
highway to darkness.
Which city was I nearing? Where did I want to go?
What was I chasing?
You, a moment ago, there, so far away, before the sea
Me on this side now, on this side of dreams
doubting as always, tense and quiet
journeying through the deep desert of the night
Toward cities not mine.