trans. Julia Leverone

Today, a Hearing

When this house,
where I have lived for years,
has
an exit, I will close
the door to keep in its heat;

I will open it
so winds
from all over come
to lick its face;

to lift it from the ground
in that way that intentions
fly,
apparitions, memories to return,
and what startles someone
though it hasn’t yet occurred.

Francisco Urondo (1930–1976) was a prolific Argentine poet and intellectual who participated actively in militating against Argentine state repression. He was compromised and killed in a police chase, and his assassins were finally sentenced in 2011. Urondo’s politics were inseparable from his poetics; along with some of his contemporaries, including the late Juan Gelman, he developed a mode of representation and confession that fought to spread knowledge of the socio–political turmoil of his country.

Julia Leverone teaches Spanish and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. Her translations of poems by Paco Urondo have appeared in publications including Witness and The Massachusetts Review. Julia is an assistant editor at Asymptote and the editor of Sakura Review.