By LUIS MUÑOZ
WHAT ALWAYS PULLS AT ME
What always pulls at me, like a persistent hand tugging on my shirt sleeve or at my pant leg, is the poem I haven’t written. Hey, it asks me, when is it my turn?
The blank code of my unwritten poem is inflated with announcements of what it could be and swagger. Much more than a poem already written, where limitations have already ended up imposing themselves and where initial intentions end up lowering their head in embarrassment…
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
A little man walks
Through the golden dust
It is a summer’s morning
A morning fresh and mild
As other mornings, other sorrows
He walks across roads
Where no one else walks
With a tiny wooden coffin
Tucked under his arm
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
On the unbolted gate to the garden of the dead I wrote
Voi che entrate and was pulled short swift and sharply
As the strain of writing in an unknown tongue rather than
Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES
Harvard Professor Emeritus,
thank you for coming to my reading,
though you had so many other attractions to choose from,
upstairs Šalamun was speaking, Pamuk two doors down.
Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES
A night train glides like a bobsleigh down the gutter of winter,
down a valley wreathed in the amber glow of sleep,
a nameless little town, where I first
Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONE
Down a long corridor walks the surgeon, he’s just
finished operating on my father. He’s walked
Translated by MARTHA COOLEY and ANTONIO ROMANI
— You stay here in the shade all day, said the young girl, don’t you like going in the water?
The man gave a vague nod that could have meant yes or no, but said nothing.
—Can I use tu with you?, asked the girl.
—If I’m not mistaken, you just did, the man said and smiled.
Today, The Common is featuring two translated short stories from the book Nella Citta Nuda by Antonio Monda. The Common in the (Eternal) City on May 21 features Monda in conversation with Larissa MacFarquhar.
That winter they hired a small bus—Mother had suggested that Father should be buried in the village. Where he was born.
Sasha hadn’t argued.
“What do you think, son?” asked Mother in a completely unfamiliar tone. Until then, there had always been a man’s voice that had the final word in the house. Now, that voice was dead.
For every beast of the forest is mine,
and the cattle upon a thousand hills.
Ps. 50:10
. . . And the vixen ascends, staggering,
On all her cinnamon-colored fours.
And the bear shifts his vision forward,
As if it’s a hop-fingered hand.
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