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"0" by Lauri García Dueñas, translated by Olivia Lott

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September 25, 2021 

0
Lauri García Dueñas
              translated by Olivia Lott
 a cold zygote lives in my heart oblivion has your shadow you know how to count the stairs between us you know at what point i begin to boil they took the tops off the manholes on my street today i was the same as always today the woman you never see break into folds a porn star of feelings who wants to smash open a piñata the city lingers in its broken wires the men on the street are ghosts who wander around mine is an untimely escape i learn to reject your daily punishment the oppressor feeds on the pain of the defeated the defeated are going to rise up the boy dogs know about the howling but the girl dogs yell too nothing is absolute in the animal kingdom i have to get out of here the lack of movement is killing me i wasn’t born to be a sedentary figure collecting holes and blood i want to sleep surrounded by the streetlights on alameda central on a caribbean island i trace my enumeration in notebooks i make plans for what i want to write i’m naive and i want to devour the world with a bang man fleeing on a bicycle fleeting excuses for the same certainty delirium of you unwillingly over my flesh the victim’s face in your hand my victim face in your hand i want to snap the umbilical cord tying us together i’m tired of being half of your uncertainty the sisyphean madness of not repeating the course i’m going to throw stones i’m going to stone the old woman who found her way into my arteries trespasser i don’t want to keep on bleeding out my reborn i is going to break the chains of centenary torture i’m going to fight primeval fascism this time this time i’m going to breathe cry stockpile mutinous springs lacustrine landscapes maritime landscapes the neighbor has bedroom problems my issues are more complicated than a sheet with five corners how many people fit in a moldy relationship existence is god making a face i don’t like his jokes you have to put the body in writing the body in writing the body uproot thought the new man’s downfall you have to burn the old clothes turn thirty go on a trip kill time once and for all float naked with somebody in green fountains walk barefoot on pavement become beggars so as to stop the suffering to blow up the past present-day paradise dragged along by deluge come clean the kitchen pay the bills sleep with me to the rain looming over mexico city open your jaws for us make kids laugh dogs bark straightforward metaphors of us i lost the gas tap i lost all that we were don’t say memory to me let’s not say dying i’m hungry night is vengeance i say celestial noise and the sky over the city is crashing down
un cigoto de frío vive en mi corazón el olvido tiene tu sombra sabes enumerar los escalones que nos separan sabes el punto en que ocurre mi ebullición hoy fui la misma de siempre la que no ves quebrarse en pliegues la porno sentimental que quiere romper una piñata la ciudad persiste en sus alambres rotos los hombres de la calle son fantasmas que rondan intempestiva fuga la mía aprendo a rechazar tu castigo cotidiano el opresor se nutre del dolor de los vencidos los vencidos van a rebelarse los perros saben del aullido pero las perras gritan también nada es absoluto en el reino animal tengo que irme de acá la falta de movimiento me está matando no nací para ser una figura sedentaria coleccionando huecos y sangre quiero dormir rodeada por los faroles de la alameda central en una isla del caribe calco mi letanía en los cuadernos hago planes de todo lo que quiero escribir soy nahïf y quiero comerme el mundo a zarpazos hombre que huye en bicicleta excusas temporales para la misma certeza delirio de ti sobre mi carne sin voluntad el rostro de la víctima en tu mano mi rostro de víctima en tu mano quiero romper el cordón umbilical que nos ata me cansé de ser la mitad de tu incertidumbre la demencia de Sísifo no repetir el camino voy a aventar piedras voy a lapidar a la vieja mujer que se me metió en mis arterias intrusa no quiero vivir desangrándome la yo renacida va a romper cadenas de centenaria tortura voy a luchar contra el fascismo primordial ahora sí ahora sí voy a respirar llorar coleccionar primaveras amotinándose paisajes lacustres y marítimos el vecino tiene problemas de cama mis asuntos son más complicados que una sábana de cinco esquinas cuántas personas caben en una relación enmohecida la existencia es la mueca de dios burlándose no me gustan sus chistes hay que poner el cuerpo en la escritura el cuerpo en la escritura el cuerpo desterrar el pensamiento perdición del hombre nuevo hay que quemar la ropa vieja cumplir treinta años irse de viaje matar el tiempo de una vez flotar desnudos en las fuentes verdes caminar descalzos por el pavimento convertirnos en mendigos para dejar de sufrir dinamitar el pasado alud que arrastró el paraíso presente ven a limpiar la cocina a pagar las cuentas a dormir conmigo lluvia cernida sobre la ciudad de méxico ábrenos las fauces haz reír a los niños ladrar a los perros metáforas simples de nosotros he perdido la llave del gas he perdido todo lo que fuimos no me digas recuerdo no digamos morir tengo hambre yo digo ruido celestial y el cielo de la ciudad se cae

Copyright © 2021 by Lauri García Dueñas and Olivia Lott. Published in Poem-a-Day in partnership with Words Without Borders (wordswithoutborders.org) on September 25, 2021 by the Academy of American Poets.

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Today’s Poem-a-Day poem is presented in partnership with Words Without Borders and is a winner of their 2021 Poems in Translation Contest judged by Airea D. Matthews. We will feature each of the two winning translations in Poem-a-Day on the last Saturday of September, which is National Translation Month, and the first Saturday of October.


“Though birthed on an altogether different continent in an altogether different country, ‘0’ moves with the same lush rebellion and avant-garde flair as a poem in the twentieth-century infrarealist movement. Marked by a free, fluid, and layered aesthetic, readers leave this work with a sense of the author’s urgent integration of art and life. Though unrestrained by grammatical structure, this translation heightens craft by presenting the implicit and explicit—the personal and shared experience—as dually embedded.”
—Airea D. Matthews

“As a child, one of my first fascinations was time that doesn’t come back. ‘0’ is part of my poetry collection El tiempo es un texto indescifrable (Time Is an Undecipherable Text), which was published by Editorial Literal in 2012. It is an homage to Mexico City and also to Mexicali, on the United States border. Images following one another without commas or periods try to represent the speed of the city, love, desire, and time that does not stop, that does not end.”
—Lauri García Dueñas, translated by Olivia Lott

Lauri García Dueñas is the author of Filigranas (La Chifurnia, 2017). She lives in San Salvador,
El Salvador.
 

Olivia Lott is the translator of Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020) by Lucía Estrada. She is a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow in Spanish at Kenyon College and lives in Gambier, Ohio.
Katabasis
(Eulalia Books, 2020)
“Assiduously” by Claudia Castro Luna
read more
“I come from the fire city.” by Eve L. Ewing
read more
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