Translation of the Poet Antonio Guzman Gomez
The black of my pen
is much darker than the night
yet in its colour
a lunar roundness forms the
lips of a poem’s first kiss.
Te ijk’al ts’ibojibale,
ijk ’suk’suk ’jich bit’il ajk’ubal,
yich’ojbe sbonil
sepel u
bit’il nichimal k’op ya sbujts’iwan.
Mi pluma negra,
como profunda noche,
lleva en su tinta
a la redonda luna
como un poema que besa.
Antonio Guzman Gomez is a poet of the Maya Tseltal community. As the contemporary literature of Maya Tseltal develops, Antonio has chosen to write in the haiku form because he would like other traditions outside of the West to be a part of his mother tongue's literary formation. Guzman Gomez’s translator, Kiran Bhat, believes that his poetry and its cross-pollination between these four linguistic cultures (Japanese, Maya Tseltal, Spanish and English) has created works of art deserving of international attention.
Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 135 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world... (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3:AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other journals. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He is currently bumming around Mexico