The following translations of Peruvian poet Blanca Varela are forthcoming in Rough Song [Canto Villano] (Song Cave, 2020). Of Varela’s work Roberto Paoli said, “The poetry of Blanca Varela is a seeking that, in advance of itself, also expresses a painful acceptance of reality and its metaphysical limits, a stoical bid, addressed to both you and everyone not to feed on puerile chimeras.”

TÀPIES (doors)

1

man in the window
half-blacked-out
an angel blind or asleep

2

a door with night above
below and inside

3

plaster udder plaster tear
footprint in the middle of a cloud

4

like the world
a door between shadow and light
between life and death

5

the just blow
the hand the music of the hand
the remains in the fire


ROUGH SONG

and suddenly life
on my plate of poverty
a thin slice of celestial pork
here on my plate

observe me
observe yourself
or kill a fly unmaliciously
annihilate the light
or create it

create it
like one who opens her eyes and chooses
an overflowing sky
on the empty plate

rubens onions tears
more rubens more onions
more tears

so many stories
indigestible black miracles
and the star in the east

cloistered
and the bone of love
so gnawed and so hard
shining on another plate

this hunger itself
exists
it is the urge of the soul
which is the body

it is the rose of grease
that ages
in its sky of flesh

mea culpa the cloudy eye
mea culpa the black morsel
mea culpa divine nausea
there is no other here

on this empty plate
but me
devouring my eyes
and yours


FLOWERS FOR THE EAR

flowers everywhere
and just now I found them by listening
flowers for the ear
slow silent hastened
flowers
for the ear

walking down a street
being jackhammered apart
I felt the horror of spring
of many flowers
blooming in the air
and closing
with many echoes
curly black petals
trailing
to the edge of the seashore
newly opened

I know that one of these days
I will end in the mouth of some flower


LADY’S JOURNAL

the mouse considers you ecstatically
the spider does not dare descend one
more millimeter toward the earth
the coffee is a blue specter on
the burner
willing to disappear forever

oh yes my dear
it’s seven in the morning
rise and shine girl
bunch up your hair for the photo
expose your forehead your smile
smile next to that child who
looks like you

oh yes you do what you can
and you are identical to happiness
that never ages

stay still
there in that paradise
beside the child who looks like you
it’s seven in the morning
it’s the perfect time to start
dreaming

the coffee becomes eternal
and the sun eternal
if you don’t move

if you don’t wake up
if you don’t turn the page
in your little kitchen
in front of my window


CURRICULUM VITAE

let’s say that you won the race
and that the prize
was another race
that you didn’t drink champagne
but your own sweat
that you didn’t hear cheering
but dogs barking
and that your own shadow
was your sole
and disloyal competitor


MONSIEUR MONOD DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SING

my dear
I remember you like the best song
that apotheosis of roosters and stars that you are no longer
that I am no longer that we will be no longer
and yet we both know too well
that I speak through the painted mouth of silence
with the agony of a fly
at the end of summer
and for all the badly closed doors
conjuring or calling that treacherous wind of memory
that record scratched before it’s even heard
dyed in accordance with the spirit of the time
and its old diseases
or red
or black
like a disgraced king in the mirror
day of eve
and tomorrow and past and always

you precipitate night
(is what the song should say)
loaded with omens
insatiable bitch ( un peu fort )
splendid mother ( plus doux )
fertile and barefoot always
so as not to be heard by the fool growing inside of you
so as to better crush the heart
of the sleepless
who dares listen to the wretched step
from life
to death
a mosquito pit a torrent of feathers
a storm in a wine glass
a tango

the order alters the product
machinist error
a rotten technique to keep living your story
in reverse like in the movies
a dream heavy
and mysterious that thins out
the end is the beginning
a little light wavering like hope
a light egg color
the scent of fish and spoiled milk
dark mouth of the wolf that conveys you
from Cluny to Salazar Park
treadmill so fast and so black
that you no longer know
if you are or are becoming the living
or the dead
and yes an iron flower
like a last bite twisted and filthy and slow
to better devour you

my dear
I adore everything that is not mine
you for example
with the mule hide that covers your soul
and those wax wings that I gave you
which you never dared to try
you know not how I regret my virtues
I no longer know what to do with my collection of lock picks
and lies
with my childlike indecency that needs an end to the story
now it’s too late
because the memory like the songs
the worst the desired the only
does not resist the next blank page
and it doesn’t make sense that I’m here
destroying
what does not exist

my dear
in spite of that
everything remains the same
the philosophical tickling after a shower
the cold coffee the bitter cigarette the Green Slime
in the Montecarlo
this enduring life is fit for all
intact the stupidity of clouds
intact the obscenity of geraniums
intact the shame of garlic
the little sparrows shitting themselves in heaven
in April
Mandrake raising rabbits in a circle
of hell
and always the little crab leg trapped
in the trap of being
or not being
or I don’t want this but that
you know
those things that happen to us
and should be forgotten so they may exist
viz the winged hand
yet without the hand
the story of the kangaroo –the one from the pouch or from life–
or that of the captain sealed in a bottle
forever empty
and the empty womb with wings
yet without the womb
you know
passion obsession
poetry prose
sex success
or vice versa
the congenital vacuum
the speckled egg
among millions and millions of speckled eggs
you and me
tú y yo
toi et moi
té para dos in the immensity of silence
in the timeless sea
on the horizon of history
because ribonucleic acid is all we are
yet ribonucleic acid forever in love


SPEAKING SOFTLY

slowness is beauty
I copy these lines outside
I breathe
I accept the light
beneath the thin air of November
beneath colorless grasses
beneath a tinny grey sky
I accept grief
and festivity

I have yet to arrive
I will never arrive
in the center of everything is the poem
intact sun
inescapable night

without turning my head
I maraud the light
the shadow
an animal of words
I smell the splendor
sniff the tracks
the remains
all to say
that I was ever
attentive disarmed
alone
nearly dead
nearly on fire

 

Blanca Varela was born in Lima, Peru, on August 10, 1926, into a family of artists and writers. She studied at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos where she met Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, Francisco Bendezú, and Jorge Eduardo Eielson, with whom she would define a Peruvian poetry movement called “la Generación del 50”. It was there that she also met her future husband, the painter Fernando de Szyszlo. Octavio Paz wrote the prologue to her first book, Ese puerto existe (1959), for which he also helped find a publisher in Mexico. Varela and de Szyszlo lived for at various points in Florence, Italy and Washington D.C., where she worked as a translator, before returning to Peru in 1962. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian, among other languages. She won the Octavio Paz Prize for poetry in 2001 and was the first woman to win the Federico Garcia Lorca City of Granada International Poetry Prize in 2006. Varela was honored in 2007 with Spain’s Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. She passed away on March 12, 2009.

Carlos Lara is a Nomaterialist writer and translator from Chula Vista, California. His translation of Blanca Varela’s book Canto Villano (Rough Song) is forthcoming from The Song Cave in 2020. He is also the author of Like Bismuth When I Enter (forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2020) and The Green Record (Apostrophe, 2018) and the co-author, with Will Alexander, of The Audiographic As Data (Oyster Moon, 2016). He has lived in Brooklyn, Washington state, and Saudi Arabia, and currently resides with his wife and son in the greatest goddamn city on the planet, Los Angeles. Author's website: carlosrichardlara.com