Marriage Proposal
Keep going my love. You must. We must both keep going.Only by being together will we thwart them.Only together can we overturn marriage,split it apart like matchwood!Leave them muttering, openingand shutting, the lips of the Excuse.Take your ear away from the mouthof your whispering tutor.What can he tell you? What elsedo you sense on his breath, my dear,but the subtle and sickening odour of deathand the cold air of emptiness?Look out...what do you see? Whatbut the sparse darknessand the lone shroudpallid in the depths of the grave?Be wary of the married who leave early.Be afraid of them.Of the Husband, of his Job, of his Wife, be afraid of them.Don't touch them or let them touch you. I'm afraid of them too.Against us they married.Against you and me, my dear,they leave for work early:the producers, procreators, publishers of books.They're the Devil. The Devil, busier than God.The Evil One with his gang of industrious dead.Should you hear a noise. Any noiseon the other side of the world, on the other sideof the night;any discreet and dubious noise, of false day,of dismal backstreet workshop,of dodgy factory from the past;step up your idleness.Pit the now of your powerful impermanence against them.My dear, they're always the same!The dead burying their dead! Unburying them and burying them and yet again unburying them!
Feature Date
- July 25, 2019
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- Translation
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English translation © Roger Hickin
from Carlos Martínez Rivas, Poesía Reunida
edited by Pablo Centeno-Gómez, Anamá Ediciones, Managua, 2007
© Pablo Centeno-Gomez
Used with the permission of the Instituto Nicaragüense de Cultura
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Carlos Martínez Rivas (1924–1998), a passionate and linguistically brilliant Nicaraguan poet — celebrated throughout the Hispanic world, but still almost unknown to English readers — who raised a “solitary insurrection” against society’s oppressive orthodoxies and hypocrisies. Only a few English translations have appeared over the years in journals and anthologies, and Roger Hickin’s in Threnody for Joaquín Pasos are the first to be published as a collection. An aversion to public success and its trappings, along with a dread of typographical errors, contributed to his reluctance to see his work in print, and El paraíso recobrado (Granada, 1943) and La insurrección solitaria (Mexico, 1953, reprinted numerous times) were the only books of his poetry he permitted to be published in his lifetime.
Roger Hickin (b. 1951) is a New Zealand visual artist, poet, translator, book designer & publisher. His Lyttelton-based Cold Hub Press publishes New Zealand poetry & bilingual editions of international poetry. His own Waiting for the Transport (Kilmog Press, Dunedin) and The Situation & other poems, the initial Cold Hub Press poetry chapbook, both appeared in 2009. He has published two chapbooks of translations of Chilean poet Sergio Badilla Castillo: La cabeza de la Medusa/The Medusa’s head (Cold Hub Press 2012) and Espectros y sombras / Ghosts and shadows (Cold Hub Press, 2013). He has edited, and translated with Cola Franzen & Steven F. White, So we lost paradise (Cold Hub Press, 2013), the selected poems of Chilean poet Juan Cameron. In 2013 he also published Cactus Body, a chapbook of translations of Nicaraguan poet Blanca Castellón; in 2014, 3 Poems, a chapbook of three previously untranslated poems by Ernesto Cardenal, and Si no te hubieras ido / If only you hadn’t gone by Mexican poet Rogelio Guedea. 2016 saw the publication of Threnody for Joaquín Pasos & other poems by Carlos Martínez Rivas, and Water for days of thirst, the selected poems of Blanca Castellón. Punctuation, a second volume of translations of Rogelio Guedea appeared in 2018.
Lyttelton, New Zealand
“Few poets have loved and hated life as much as Carlos Martínez Rivas. His whole oeuvre is one of rebellion and daring, of a profound tenderness and an irrepressible anger."
—Nicasio Urbina
“A lone voice...at once surreal and deeply human.”
—Rogelio Guedea
"Our extraordinary wild cat who once took the elite of Spanish America by surprise...who remained at the margins he favoured, untamed and unique...our greatest poet after Darío.”
—Blanca Castellón
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