Two Poems

Abstract

Visit the WLT blog to read a bilingual version of “Universidad–Indios Verdes”alongside Dixon’s post about the challenges he encountered while translating it. top photo : himanshu nerurkar dixon photo : sydne gray 14 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2016 Two Poems by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza The Ant Let it go back to the anthill. If it brushes inattentively against your fingers climbs them and daydreams in the furrows of your hand, don’t chase it away or squash it. Let it go back, as best it can, to the anthill. Guide it to where it belongs. Surely the others, those smart-asses, will make fun of its new habits, of its stubborn disorientation. Let it go back, if it can, to the anthill, even though it carries no shred of a leaf on its ant’s back. Don’t kill it. There, others, but not many, will welcome it and find it a place in the crowd. Maybe it (just like you in the poem) confuses, without arrogance, the mystery of the world with the palm of your hand. Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza (b. 1962, Caracas) is a poet and essayist. He has published various books of poetry and literary scholarship, and he received the Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 1999. Cuidados intensivos (2014) is his latest verse collection. Arthur Dixon works as a translator and as managing editor of WLT’s affiliated journal Latin American Literature Today. Universidad–Indios Verdes Why force out dreams and nightmares if everything here convulses until it tames amazement? This, only in part, is what Breton realized with his naïve eyes as they drifted across the surface of these lands. In those days the subsoil was a depth conquered by water, mud, and ruins more ancient than the gods of Lautréamont. Since half a century ago, without resorting to imagination, the inhabitants of this valley have traveled underneath the streets, excavating, day by day, its foundations. A bustling, flowery market (with special offers and suffering) travels along tunnels and train cars pressing the existence of those who rush by, of those who seek shortcuts underneath everything. A blind man, maybe not watching, plays a melody on an electric piano with his right hand as he keeps the beat sinister with the other, between trip-ups, with a cup that is maraca and collection box; quality chocolates and peanuts are advertised for ten pesos (“they cost what they’re worth”); women in face masks look sideways at couples that embrace and kiss like moles in heat. Every kind of advertiser enters and exits the train cars, station to station: people selling self-help books and biographies of Che; evangelical preachers; vendors of chewing gum and lozenges for the good of throats and mouths; dazed deaf-mutes; paraplegics in casts; DJs with backpacks and singers with electric-acoustic guitars who offer ballads and rock in English and Spanish. All struggle, body against body, like the wounded of extinct battles. The father of surrealism noted none of this in his log, not while visiting these stops nor while marinating his subconscious in the waters of the Seine. Translations from the Spanish By Arthur Dixon editor’s pick Guus Kuijer The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis Trans. Laura Watkinson Seven Stories Press, 2016 The Bible has occupied a central position in Western culture since Constantine’s conversion to the Christian faith. Once universally recognized as the infallible word of God, the texts that make it up have been incrementally opened up to other modes of reading. Guus Kuijer, better known in his home country of the Netherlands as a prolific author of children’s books, presents a compelling vision of the Bible as a storytelling vehicle to explore the nature of doubt in his book The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis. The title is somewhat misleading as Kuijer’s reframing is more about uncertainty than disbelief. Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening chapter, leading off with a creation myth wherein the first thing created is God in the form of a word. Kuijer leaves open multiple explanations for God’s creation ex nihilo...