Roberto García de Mesa, SPAIN
The Poems
Song
The beginning of everything remains underground.
It tries to germinate from the same source.
The bow expels doubt
and the being is transformed in each shot.
How many have sought the seed!
We are exhausted,
submerged in the dream and the disaster.
To say that the tension hits the air with insistence
is nothing more than losing consciousness,
than to recover the oldest voice.
The city doesn’t germinate, no.
The city gains slaves.
You suffer in the midst of swarms.
Too many cuts and wishes.
All laws contain pain:
the same song plays underground.
Canción
Bajo tierra permanece el principio de todo.
Intenta germinar desde la misma fuente.
El arco expulsa la duda
y el ser se transforma en cada disparo.
¡Cuántos han buscado la semilla!
Agotados estamos,
sumergidos en el sueño y en el desastre.
Decir que la tensión golpea el aire con insistencia
no es otra cosa que perder el sentido,
que recuperar la voz más antigua.
La ciudad no germina, no.
La ciudad gana esclavos.
Se sufre en medio de los enjambres.
Demasiados cortes y deseos.
Todas las leyes contienen el dolor:
suena la misma canción bajo tierra.
*
Exile
I gift the passage from one time to another.
Because of the exile we live.
Who knows when to flee again?
Through the window you can see the wolves,
like ideas, like a war sketch.
And we will only feel tongues, mouths, assaults,
screams, defeat.
Exilio
Regalo el paso de un tiempo a otro.
Por lo del exilio que vivimos.
¿Quién sabe cuándo hay que huir de nuevo?
A través de la ventana podrán verse los lobos,
como ideas, como un boceto de guerra.
Y solo sentiremos lenguas, bocas, asaltos,
gritos, la derrota.
(Spanish orginals part of the poetic series Cristal y nido,
published in La cima inversa, by Roberto García de Mesa,
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Poetry, 2021.
English translation by Roberto García de Mesa
and revised by Mario Domínguez Parra).
The Poet
| Roberto García de Mesa (Tenerife, Spain, 1973) is a poet, playwright, dramaturge, narrator, essayist, philologist, exhibition curator, stage director, visual artist and musician. He holds a licentiate in Law and Hispanic Philology, and a doctoral degree in Hispanic Philology. He is Associate Professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) and Tutor at the National Distance University (Spain). He has published sixty-six books of poetry, theatre, short narrative, essays, conversations, paintings and critical editions, and four cds with his musical compositions. His works have been translated into English, Greek, Romanian, French, Italian, German and Portuguese, and have appeared in magazines of eighteen countries. He has his own company of Theatre. In Greece, García de Mesa has published seven books of poetry and theatre translated into Greek by Ati Solerti, Basilis Laliotis, Konstantinos Paleologos and Ifigenia Ntoumi. |