From "Narrar" (To Tell)

Here's the opening movement of Maria Baranda's Narrar, published in 2001 by Ediciones Sin Nombre of Mexico City.  This translation also appeared in eleven eleven 15, published by California College of the Arts.  The word tokonoma refers to a poem by Jose Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet who inspired the neobarroco movement in Latin American poetry.  A tokonoma is a room in a Japanese house that is designed entirely to give pleasure and a sense of calm through the beauty and balance of the objects in it.  In addition to Narrar, I have translated Baranda's 55-page poem Yegua nocturna corriendo en un prado de luz absoluta (Nightmare Running on a Meadow of Absolute Light).

To Tell

María Baranda                                                                  

Her horrendous voice, not her inner sorrow

-Góngora

 A cry

a single cry

just a cry

to the open air

a cry of porpoise or dolphin

of incandescent fish by the water

a cry of the sea that breaks and repeats

that empties

and in the time of salt

says everywhere what it says

that swells
that glows

a cry

a single cry

just a cry

of the blue inconceivable sky

that repeats

that advances

that grazes among the algae

the fetid rumor of the brackish

a providential cry in the voice of air

an unsustainable rhythm

in the throat

A cry that knots itself

in symphonic circles of joy

A terrible cry

that announces the first death

that stands on precarious feet

and dismantles shadows and grumbling

A cry that must choose

for between the walls the liquid deepens 

The wall as a cardinal point

an agonizing smile

in the punctual

sweetness

of the one who is drowning

 

A cry disbanded

in a garden with thickets

a dream of  blue light for the birds

A cry that in itself

is the size of the sea

and lives at the center of  rapture

and with each step it yields

to the delirium of a sponge

that inflates in sweat and gives glory

to the time of silent prayers

A cry is the caiman’s vigil

the unleashed whip of an ant

the fan of  yes the same immaculate

air of an inhospitable grudge

that bends

The cry that smells of salt

a wild beast dry

horny

in the dusky collapse

of your herd

The cry distilled from minutes

marks the world that is world forever

in an open moment where never

passes nothing and everything dissolves

hurling itself to the bottom

Nothingness is reason falling

finally it’s emptiness

its bend in the road most refreshing

when the tree

is erected in delirium

in order to sing from its purgatory

its novice illusions

almost vertigo

 

A cry is sleepless in its dream

faded almost hoarse it stuns itself

like a crippled animal

the cry breathes sleep inside

its eyes and evokes a sacrifice

a dark joy in a spiral of weeping 

The cry moans weeps wallows

glacial polygamous decrepit

sinking into flakes and scales

into mud

the cry sleeps alone

in the hollow of useless blindfolds

its intoxicated pallor

in its cadence and fatigue

it buzzes between the glasses and the cans

the remains are still ripe
and the sweet song

of the flies to vacancy

The cry is deeply in love

and sweet together with the soft souls

Rosa in order to tell it to Rose

is a corrupt luxury

a brief heart

that detracts

The cry is the insistence

on misery is the sharp bite of hunger

under the yoke of a sugar mill

a fire burning

among dogs and rats

is a shadow that crosses

the fetid waters of wonder

and it’s the clamor of three nights

of the sickness of women, hens, and female deer

when the gods

lose their harmony and quickly

offer their shame to the twilight 

The cry is air

air that only blossoms

in the half-light of funerals

The cry is the voice of the obsequies

a wafer in the pupils

which prays “Praise be to God

without God’s silent cry

infinitely bitter and dry

and the newlywed God the round impostor

who belches who vomits who repeats

fragrant at the pit and doesn’t say

not to purify the skin

devour candles and beautify

blind beneath the definitive sun

lethargic in the accounting

of a glass beaded God summit

red-hot incredulous God

who doesn’t ask for pardon

in the omen of dead birds.”

 a cry

a single cry

just a cry

it whips in lines

and looks dissolved

between the vertices of song

(sings among the captive petals

And don’t forget me in the diaspora

sing sing deadly like an archangel

about about to shout his song)

The cry is erased

between the breasts that slander

sinks convenes seizes

becomes and is consumed

penetrates licks fits

in cartilage of fire

where it resides

 The cry is just a number

a notch at the base of the wall

as meticulous

as a tokonoma

utmost swiftness of spirit

freezes the Cuban’s print

bevels the aperture in the absurd

that dominates corners of the language

that exposes itself as a maelstrom

of all the whales in the sea

is an emaciated shell

adhering to the pale shadow

that crosses our sleep

The cry

is a mixture of sperm

and civil life

in living circumstances

a sign of those black fruits

where peace putrefies

streaked by oblivion

where their error is overheard

in a Parthenon of voices

and the air unfolded fornicates

voluptuously and never knows

of the children awakening

in endless tunnels

lost

Joropo en Barinas, Venezuela

This performance of joropo music and dancing was arranged to greet me at the small airport in Barinas, Venezuela, when I arrived as part of the 9th Annual Festival Mundial de Poesia, held in honor of poet and photographer Enrique Hernandez d'Jesus.  Sorry for the confusing turns of the camera.  Joropo music is played by three instruments, here as is traditional a harp, guitar, and maracas.  Barinas is in the south of Venezuela and on Los Llanos (flatlands) not far from the Andes.  A book of my poetry, Intencion y su materia, translated by the wonderful Mexican poet, Maria Baranda, was published by Monte Avila Editores and presented at the conference's main site in Caracas.

En el idioma y en la tierra

I just had a beautiful bilingual edition of my work published by Conaculta in Mexico City.  Many thanks to the publisher and to the amazing poet Maria Baranda, who translated the work and so generously made all this possible.  Titled En el idioma y en la tierra (In Idiom and Earth), it consists primarly of work from Winter Mirror (Flood Editions, 2002), Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), and Edge and Fold (Apogee, 2006).  The book was just published last week so it will be a few weeks  until the book is available to the public at Conaculta's bookstores in Mexico.  Thanks also to Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary, Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and Alice Jones and Ed Smallfield, the original publishers of the work.  I'm pasting in below Maria's translation of "Driver's Song":

Canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,

distante y solitaria Danville.

Carro negro, luna pequeña,

en el asiento trasero la cerveza.

Porque olvidé todos los caminos

nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio.

En las llanuras, a través de Indiana,

donde también estuve solo.

Carro negro, luna amarilla.

Mi padre muerto me observa

desde la ventana de arriba.

Qué camino más largo desde California

y en qué coche más rápido–

invisible para el alma.

Más allá veo a la muerte moviéndose lenta en el camino.
Sé que tocaré su vestimenta
antes de que jamás llegue a Danville, Ohio.

Distante y solitaria Danville.

Maria Baranda's Ficticia

Published 15 August 2010

Translated by Joshua Edwards Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611238.

Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice:

The sky is in my eyes.
I have fallen silent before the hurricane of its proverbs,
the jaws of thirst rising
from cracks in the mud.
I have fallen silent.
I have fallen silent before the men and children
and women hidden
like raw birds in cloaks of invisibility.
I have felt the shame of being someone
in my own words.
To live in ash inseparable
from filth and extermination,
to accept time covered in mold,
sullen time, time in the throat
that officiates the vertigo
of sacrilege and solitude between its cries.
(Sky Cycle ii)

Download a PDF sampler from this book.

"The most unusual thing about Maria Baranda's dazzling accomplishment as a poet is that her most recent books are her very best ones. She keeps honing one of the most expressive lyricisms in contemporary Mexican poetry. Her complex prosody—the pitch and tempo rising in plangent cadences that break into sharp, percussive counterpoint—are here, in the poignant, sea-haunted book length poem Ficticia, at their best. And Joshua Edwards, a supremely gifted poet himself, brings out the full force of Baranda's music."—Forrest Gander

"María Baranda is one of the finest poets of her generation, those born in the 1960s, her work demonstrates adherence to the Mexican and Hispano-American tradition—that of the long meditative poem, with sinuous syntax and rich diction—with the not so frequent capacity for conceptual synthesis and precision of imagery and metaphor." —José María Espinasa

"María Baranda is today one of our country's necessary poets. During the past twenty years she has been able to start a conversation between recent Mexican lyric poetry and its predecessors: from the great pre-Hispanic poets to the those who in the 1960s changed the course of poetry in Mexico and in Latin America. María Baranda watches and listens. Her poetic speech passes through the senses before becoming language; it is this that gives her verses their spellbinding quality." —Eduardo Hurtado

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The Room

The Room

for Maria Baranda

She assented so quickly
to undress you, you hoped
the person you seemed to be

would hold her, and be
loved, and turn to the wall,
blow out, as she requested,

the candle, to darken
all shapes in the room
and those within the window,

her darkness, eyes,
the light she felt then
blindly, it was something

gathered deeply, in you, as
simply your being and hers,
and a wellspring so insistent,

yet of the world apprehensive, when,
while she slept, the wall
paintings approached too near

and spread then
within you, as she
darkened, faded, and

your true life was
benighted, enormous, rare,
bathed in time, and ending

or not ending, when, at that
time, you lost her, being
your right, and that was awful.

She undressed to sleep,
reversed your life,
spared nothing,

it is now forever
all. She knows
it is gone, but you

insisted as you wept
and departed, no
longer empty, that here

by your remaining
when all’s attained,
a darkness comes

of the night rising
and final evenings
in the room.

-Paul Hoover

A Thousand Buddhas: Hong Kong

I Traveled to Hong Kong last week for an international poetry conference. Among those invited by conference organizer Bei Dao were Regis Bonvicino of Sao Paulo, Maria Baranda of Mexico City, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko of St. Petersburg, Russia, Tomaz Salamun of Slovenia, C.D. Wright of Providence, Rhode Island, Bejan Matur of Turkey, Paul Muldoon of Ireland and Princeton, Vivek Narayanan of India, Silke Scheuermann of Germany, and Xi Chuan of Beijing, who has a book coming out from New Directions in English translation. Also present were Yuan Jian of Yunnan and Yao Feng of Macao, whom I'd met on a trip to Yunnan in 2005. One afternoon, Maria and I encountered these figures at the nearby Thousand Buddhas Temple.

Ficticia by Maria Baranda

Recently available at www.spdbooks.org: Ficticia. Price: $15.00. Pages: 80 Poetry. Translated by from the Spanish by Joshua Edwards. FICTICIA was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of "Letters to Robinson," and a "Sky Cycle." While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.

Author Hometown: Mexico City MEX