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Claudia Prado: Poems from THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

November 12, 2020 Poetry, Translation

Poetry by CLAUDIA PRADO
Translated from the Spanish by REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL

Poems appear in both Spanish and English.

Translator’s Note

These poems and versions are from Claudia Prado’s El Interior de la Ballena (Editorial Nusud, 2000), a novel-in-verse based on Prado’s agrarian family legacy in Patagonia. Prado is an Argentinian poet and filmmaker known for making groundbreaking, socially progressive art. El Interior de la Ballena was her debut, a poetry collection that received the bronze Concurso Régimen de Fomento a la Producción Literaria Nacional y Estímulo a la Industria Editorial del Fondo nacional de las Artes (this is the third place award for the biggest literature prize in Argentina). Mixing fiction with oral history, Prado imagines her ancestors’ 19th century migration from the Basque Country into Argentina and, ultimately, southward into the oceanic desert. These poems offer a rare look at the Patagonian plateau between 1892 and 1963, years of intense immigration and population growth, written through a feminist lens. In addition to poems written in the poet’s own voice, the book also makes wide use of monologue and persona techniques, weaving together this intergenerational story through a multiplicity of voices: here speaks a woman who, against her will, is taken to that desert; here is revealed the thoughts of an orphan laborer; here, a chicken thief celebrates his sad prize. In El Interior de la Ballena, Prado uses her page to privilege the often unseen and unheard, composing in silence as much as sound, and in so doing creates a poetics of Patagonia itself. When read together, the poems quilt a place, time, and lineage through a story of strong women, wounded and wounding men, and a rural and unforgiving landscape from which hard-scrabble labor is the origin of survival.

—Rebecca Gayle Howell

On Halloween

November 4, 2020 Dispatches, Translation

By VASYL LOZYNSKY

Translated by the author and JESSICA ZYCHOWICZ

Hudson, NY

I feel greedy, I have a frog in my throat because of this
expensive beer. I start to ask around, like a detective,
and immediately get some info
from the writer sitting at our table nearby,
whom I got to know just now.
The house of Ashbery has likely mahogany doors facing
the square, probably where city hall is.
I don’t even think about visiting without letting
someone know first. I stop and read a few poems in a bookshop.
You won’t repeat the jokes, I say,
you’ll go around to all the apartments on Halloween
with pumpkins, like I used to do
in my childhood, but then the main thing was trick or treat,
not to force someone for an interview or a photograph.

Another Education

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Translation

By CRISTINA CARLOS
Translated by JETHRO SOUTAR

At school I learned to count—one plus one is two
I learned to multiply—one times one is one
And subtract—one minus me is zero: Nothing!

Brief Exchanges

October 28, 2020 Essays, Issue 20, Issue 20 Essays, Lusosphere, Translation

By SUSANA MOREIRA MARQUES

Translated by JULIA SANCHES

1.
It begins with her saying I’ve never told anyone and ends with me saying Neither have I. And in between, a single sentence on how the love we feel for a child is not necessarily immediate, on how we need time to get to know and fall in love with another being, even though they were once inside us. We talk over the phone; this may never have happened face-to-face, or as we looked one another in the eye.

two chairs

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Translation

By JARID ARRAES

Translated by MARGUERITE ITAMAR HARRISON

tell me
about how tough everything is
and even the beer’s out of reach
and even writing has dried up
tell me

Sea of Azov

October 28, 2020 Fiction, Issue 20, Issue 20 Fiction, Lusosphere, Translation

By HÉLIO PÓLVORA
Translated by AMANDA SARASIEN

The sea was unfurling bolts of cotton on the beach.

But now, at least in this cove, the sea is muddy. The waves sprawling on the sand, under the spotlight of an intense sun, exhibit a strange hue—a corrupt, corrosive red that might be called ocher, as if the sea, in its incessant flow, had passed through steep, muddy ravines before subsiding here, and dislodged clumps of earth that dissolved to contaminate green water, bluish water.

Ascendant Scorpio

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Translation

By MATILDE CAMPILHO
Translated by HUGO DOS SANTOS

for José

On the night Billy Ray was born
(New York, 28^th and 7^th)
not one soul contemplated the geraniums
There was, however, the sound of the world falling
like multiple stalactites
in the area surrounding the hospital

Alone, I Arrive in a Looted City

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Poetry, Translation

By JOSÉ LUÍS PEIXOTO
Translated by HUGO DOS SANTOS

Alone, I arrive in a looted city
and walk slowly, my arms hanging
loosely, I look through open doors,

The Mermaids’ Cry

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Lusosphere, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Translation

By LEONARDO TONUS
Translated by CAROLYNE WRIGHT

The Common Magazine · The Mermaids’ Cry (Leonardo Tonus)

they say that the most impressive of all crossings
is not thirst
or the fear
afterwards.
The humiliation
no longer wounds
what does not exist
they say
bodies in a boat
of bodies
veins
eyes
skin
penis
nails
vagina

Exile

October 28, 2020 Fiction, Issue 20, Issue 20 Fiction, Translation

By CLARA OBLIGADO
Translated by RACHEL BALLENGER

On December 5, 1976, I arrived in Madrid from Argentina. I flew Iberia airlines, caught the plane in Montevideo because I was afraid of the disappearances happening at the border. I left wearing summer clothes, as if I were a tourist heading for the beaches of Uruguay, then, two or three days later, landed in Madrid, where it was winter. My father and sister saw me off. It took me six years—the years of the dictatorship—to return.