3 translations
ELLIS ISLAND
They have decided to leave the land,
leave behind the father's house and the closed coffin
and the country
where memories rot.
They have heard that the nation
among all the nations,
the blessed one,
whose name shines more than any other
because once it was on the lips of the prophets,
It is found on the other side of the sea.
The future
sold in first and second class tickets
in the ports of Naples,
of Trieste,
of Constantinople,
grows on the haze of Bremen
or the drizzle of Hamburg
or the loneliness of the Liverpool docks.
The dispossessed come to the call
with their bodies exposed to cold and pestilence,
with a prayer so like a complaint
and the stinging,
and failure,
they are the ones who march towards the promised land
because theirs was taken from them
or because when they were born
the whole earth had an owner
and they did not find a way to feed
but to reproduce
beside bakeries
on the deck of the boats
in the waiting rooms of hospitals
or in landfills
they gave birth to crowds of mouths and bellies
to spread their poverty
and to be then the strength of the factories
or of fields under cultivation,
the ideology of the victors,
the justification,
the name of the country and the authority of the others.
The multitude sails towards the wharves of America
and reaches them looking sickly
and stinks
and fear crouches below hope
which is more fertile than wheat
and can rise over the oceans,
grow in the drought
or multiply over misery.
But the weak and the sick will not enter the promised land
neither the invalids
because the chosen people will be the race
that he receives in his hands as the future.
The return will be the destiny of the infected
because malaria also travels over the decks
and it is more fertile than wheat
as fertile is the typhus of the tropics,
the cholera of the Mediterranean,
the hookworms of the humid earth of Ireland,
the ringworm of Poland and Hungary,
the trachoma that grows on the legs of Ukrainian flies.
The promised land will not be a kingdom for the blind
nor for the mentally ill
nor for those who refuse to undress
because they carry their money stitched to their clothes
out of fear.
It has nothing to do with greed,
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
God bless the men who reached the land
of freedom.
God bless the chosen men
for the great harvest of the future.
RACE
Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents,
all the time past,
are earth.
But also language,
words like Spanish, gypsy, black or immigrant.
Words that rise like swords, walls that are constructed with words,
the old continents, the new continents,
with the fading kingdoms and kings over there,
on the same ruins,
on the myths and oracles,
America rises.
Into it pour the children of the children of the grandchildren of civilizations.
Children of Rome and Greece, settlers of Egypt, nomads of India,
its rivers flow into the womb of the Mississippi,
they bring the water in their veins, they water the fertile land
and then they are food for the trees,
oxygen in the lungs of other men,
water again in combination with hydrogen.
America is watered with the blood of civilizations.
Past is the word that keeps the balance on their lips,
the present is yesterday,
the future is yesterday,
the fruit after a storm was bitten.
I say Spanish, and I do not understand.
I say Spain, and my eyes fill with melancholy
but also my heart with flowers gone, of a mineral taste,
as if it were the smoke of a distant fire.
Only the color of the land where I grew up is as certain
a race.
A reddish earth, often bathed in blood.
Land that saw Phoenicians die, Romans,
Arabs, men
of all land and country,
and also to my grandfather,
and my grandfather's father,
and also the old blesseds who come every morning to the parish of San Juan de Dios,
and the men who try to cross the strait and are returned to the shores of my country
by the waves of the Mediterranean,
and to the people who suffer and always look toward the ground out of shame
or weakness,
or simply because they want to put an end to the journey.
My race belongs to that land,
and the word land,
and the water that cleans it
without paying heed
to
the
blood
that
drags it away.
THE COUNTRY IS A MOTHER WHO DISTRIBUTES LUCK AMONG THE MOUTHS
To have been born
with this language of words
and of ashes.
To have seen the light breaking through
in a country
with rifles trained on the enemy,
in a country
mother of all my equals,
all opening their mouths at the same time,
hunger choosing with unequal fortunes,
that is the homeland.
Blessed be its name,
its mark etched on the teeth
and in the face bitten by smallpox,
its children
see the high seas,
they sight ships,
their interrupted dreams
rippling like war,
now they can
sacrifice their lives,
now they are ready,
they have braved
storms,
they have left their dreams
floating
like cargo
that once nourished them,
they have felt doubt
and they have cried out,
dissatisfied,
hungry and betrayed,
rifles trained
on the enemy,
in a country,
made of earth and blood.
Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM and the Sorbonne). His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. For his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco he was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014. He is a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, EEUU). His poems have been published in magazines like Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem by Day or Poetry.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher, and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov. Forché is currently University Professor at Georgetown University where she directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Carolyn Forché was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019.