VConsider, my soul, this which is a compact structurefor a moment, and then diffuses, among the clearings that the shadowseeks. Trying to grasp this watery memory that evades yousumptuous, like silk through your fingers.To a primary root it bows, but it doesn’t give up.It doesn’t reach the inaugural water, doesn’t get wet.Stone by stone the building of lines rises against the sky.The patios. The silence: the gardens.And the recovered shadow is backWith diffuse air, with the afternoon that evadesall possibility of memory, the stone of the awning.To whom does this texture speak, wet gravel on a largesurface, on a barren land?
Un Mar En Madrugada (excerpt)
Silvia Guerra
Translated from the Spanish
Consider, my soul, this texture roughto the touch, which they call life—Rosario Castellanos
Feature Date
- July 6, 2021
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Copyright © 2021 by Silvia Guerra.
English translation copyright © 2021 by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Pitas.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Silvia Guerra (1961, Maldonado, Uruguay) is an Uruguayan poet, critic and editor whose books include Un mar en madrugado (2018); Pulso (2011); Nada de nadie (2001); Idea de la aventura (1990); De la arena nace el agua (1986) and Fuera del relato (2007), a fictionalized biography of Lautréamont. In 2012, she was awarded the Morosoli Prize in Poetry for her career. Un mar en madrugada/ A Sea at Dawn, is forthcoming from Eulalia Books.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia for which she was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Translation, and Love Poems by Idea Vilariño, which was long listed for the 2020 PEN Best Translated Poetry Book Award.
Jeannine M. Pitas‘s most recent translations include Carnation and Tenebrae Candle by Marosa di Giorgio (Cardboard House Press 2020) and We Do Not Live In Vain by Selva Casal (Veliz Books 2020). She is an editor at the Song Bridge Project and Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. She lives in Iowa and teaches at the University of Dubuque.
Vol. 50 No. 3
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