Aural

 

Gritty frost from
the radio speaker
in the car's
nomadic shadows:
a swamp of sounds
in which hearing's
needle can
barely move.
Out of nowhere,
a torch singer
slices through Wittgenstein
with the cutlery
of cante jondo...
How does she do it? -
unstitch, unseam
language itself,
make the world flow and
if that wasn't enough
hit the twin peaks
of grace and tragedy?
The car
anointed with music
slips into the night.

      David Huerta 

The Dream of the Stone

The dream of the stone is long and cold
its gray nature
kept nothing of the splendor of the fire.

How frightened I am by what goes off and remains!

Burning, quiet,
under the night of my senses
imprisoned
I only ask for heat.

How frightened I am by what goes off and remains!

                        

Dolores Castro 

Transl. by Toshiya Kamei

There Was No Plot

 

There were neither plots nor characters,
only places. Neighborhoods sliced
in half. Terraces and corridors
between roofless rooms. Profiles only. 
Staggered
spaces. Far off a group
was sucked up
into its own restlessness: the after-dinner
conversation, the waiting, shuffle between 
one door and another, shifts
in posture; remarks that from here,
where you hurried to leave, 
were already beyond hearing.

 

Coral Bracho

Transl. by Forrest Gander

The Spiritual Canticle (fragment)

Songs between the soul and the Bridegroom

Bride

Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning? You fled like the stag after wounding me; I went out calling you, but you were gone. 

Shepherds, you who go up through the sheepfolds to the hill, if by chance you see him I love most, tell him I am sick, I suffer, and I die. 

Seeking my love I will head for the mountains and for watersides; I will not gather flowers, nor fear wild beasts; I will go beyond strong men and frontiers.

Saint John of the Cross

La teoría del duende

Federico García Lorca desarrolló una teoría estética donde despliega sus ideas acerca del proceso de creación artística: "El teatro y la teoría del Duende", conferencia dictada primero en Buenos Aires y luego en La Habana, en el año 1933. Aquí, Lorca manifiesta que el gran arte depende de un conocimiento cercano de la muerte, de la conexión con los orígenes de una nación y de un reconocimiento de las limitaciones del raciocinio. 

http://www.literaterra.com/federico_garcia_lorca/la_teoria_del_duende/

Theory and Play Of The Duende

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Between 1918 when I entered the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, and 1928 when I left, having completed my study of Philosophy and Letters, I listened to around a thousand lectures, in that elegant salon where the old Spanish aristocracy went to do penance for its frivolity on French beaches.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Translated by A. S. Kline 

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

Crece en la plaza en sombra

Crece en la plaza en sombra

el musgo, y en la piedra vieja y santa

de la iglesia. En el atrio hay un mendigo...

Más vieja que la iglesia tiene el alma.

Sube muy lento, en las mañanas frías,

por la marmòrea grada,

hasta un rincòn de piedra... Allí aparece

su mano seca entre la rota capa.

Con las òrbitas huecas de sus ojos

ha visto còmo pasan

las blancas sombras en los claros días,

las blancas sombras de las horas santas.

Antonio Machado

The Hills

Purity, solitude? There. They are grey. Intact greys not even the idle foot surprised, supremely light. Greys beside Nothing, melancholy and beautiful, which the air shelters like a soul, visible
because so true to its object: waiting always. To be! And even more remote, for smoke, for eyes of the most distracted, a secure Nothingness: the perfect grey on tender aridness, grey of those hills!
Jorge Guillén
translated by Julian Palley 

Touches Its Depths and Is Stirred Up

A wave of solid light, its fire intact.
A current, a soft breeze
that arouses everything, that scorches and unravels everything,
that refines everything
back to its pure lines. A high tide waterfall
that the sun throws down (its stars
breaking free, its joyfulness,
sustained
falling, its rootballs
of crystals, formed by fire: opening furrows, opening wakes,
wading across, sinking down). Depth opens
on the surface.
-All
the ocean and the calm
of soothing itself, all that burning thickness of sand,
of plough-turned land, of salt, touches its depths
and is stirred up.


Coral Bracho

La Extranjera

She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.

The Stranger
Gabriela Mistral

The metaphysical countrygirl

You, functional space
variants in voltage, the only light
Transitory effect of Love
several different lights
Sustain
Sustain them
you sustain them.

Omar Perez
"The Metaphysical Countrygirl" from Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?, 2010.