Prism

Manuel Maples Arce
Translated from the Spanish

I’m a still point in the middle of the moment,equidistant to a star’s castaway shout.A handlebarred park goes shadow numb,the wound-down moonoppresses me in shop windows.                                                                 Golden daisies                                                                 wind-plucked.Rebel city of luminous newsafloat in almanacs,and where, from time to time,electricity bleeds in the ironed street.Insomnia, like a vine,embraces vert telegraph scaffolds,and noises pick locks whilenight grows thin licking memory.Yellow silence sounds over my eyes.Prismal, my diaphonous one, to feel everything!I left her hands,but in that graytrain station hour,her wet words were flung at me,and a locomotive,thirsty for distance, snatched her from my arms.Today her words sound more frozen than ever,Edison’s madness in hands of rain!The sky an obstacle for an inverted hotelrefracted in shadowed mirror moons;violins rise like champagne,and while ears hear early morning,bony winter shivers on coat racks.My nerves pour out.                                Memory’s starshipwrecked in waterof silence.                You and I,                                coincide                                in terrible night,meditation on a themeplucked bare in gardens.Locomotives, shouts,arsenals, telegraphs.Love and lifetoday for Labor,and everything expands in concentric circles. PrismaYo soy un punto muerto en medio de la hora,equidistante al grito náufrago de una estrella.Un parque de manubrio se engarrota en la sombra,y la luna sin cuerdame oprime en las vidrieras.                                                               Margaritas de oro                                                               deshojadas al viento.La ciudad insurrecta de anuncios luminososflota en los almanaquesy allá de tarde en tarde,por la calle planchada se desangra en eléctrico.El insomnio, lo mismo que una enredadera,se abraza a los andamios sinoples de telégrafo,y mientras que los ruidos descerrajan las puertas,la noche ha enflaquecido lamiendo su recuerdo.El silencio amarillo suena sobre mis ojos.Prismal, diáfana mía, para sentirlo todo!Yo departí sus manos,pero en aquella horagris de las estaciones,sus palabras mojadas se me echaron al cuello,y una locomotorasedienta de kilómetros la arrancó de mis brazos.Hoy suenan sus palabras más heladas que nunca,y la locura de Edison a manos de la lluvia!El cielo es un obstáculo para el hotel inversorefractado en las lunas sombrías de los espejos;los violines se suben corno la champaña,y mientras las ojeras sondean la madrugada,el invierno huesoso tirita en los percheros.Mis nervios se derraman.                                                La estrella del recuerdonaufragada en el aguadel silencio.                                Tú y yo                                                             coincidimos                                                             en la noche terrible,meditación temáticadeshojada en jardines.Locomotoras, gritos,arsenales, telégrafos.El amor y la vidason hoy sindicalistas,y todo se dilata en círculos concéntricos.

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Manuel Maples Arce (1900-1981), the first avant-garde poet in Mexico, led the Stridentist movement with a barrage of manifestos, promotional savvy, and three books of the era’s most radical poetry. Born in Papantla, Veracruz, he studied law in the city of Veracruz and Mexico City, where, in his early twenties, he published the first Stridentist manifesto and followed it with several poetry collections. In 1925, he returned to Xalapa to serve in the revolutionary government of Vera Cruz, and used his position to turn the city into a center of revolutionary art, attracting artists from throughout Mexico and the world. When the Vera Cruz government was deposed in 1927, his artistic community scattered and Maples entered the foreign service, serving in numerous foreign diplomatic posts. Though he later abandoned both the politics and the Stridentist poetry of his youth, his major works of the period, Andamios interiors (1922), Urbe: superpoema bolchevique en cinco cantos (1924), and Poemas interdictos (1927) remain key texts of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

KM Cascia, fka Brandon Holmquest, was born in Michigan City, Indiana. Leaving school at 17, they lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York at various times. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Calque and Asymptote, they are also the author of two collections of poems, Goethe and Days, as well as numerous translations published in small outlets on- and offline, such as Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous.

Cover of Stridentist Poems

New York, New York

A complete bilingual edition of the major early works of Manuel Maples Arce, founder of Stridentism, Mexico’s most radical avant-garde movement of the 1920s.

"Maples Arce appears, passing out molotov cocktails to girls, waving to twenty-eight year old revolutionary generals from a speeding motorcycle, listening to Jazz with his stomach while military trains unload the wounded, telling poetry, From now on your name's Adventure."
— Roberto Bolaño

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