Skip to main content

Breaking Heads - Two Rompecabezas From Nicanor Parra


 


PUZZLE by Nicanor Parra

 

I give no one the right.

I love a piece of rag.

I shift tombs back and forth.

 

I shift tombs back and forth.

I give no one the right.

I'm a ridiculous sort

In the light of the sun,

The plague of soda fountains

Dying of rage.

 

I am a hopeless case,

My own hairs accuse me

On the bargain altar

The machines give no pardons.

 

I laugh from behind a chair,

my face fills with flies.

 

I am the one who can’t say what he means

Talking in long rows of what.

 

I stutter,

With my foot touches a sort of foetus.

 

What are these stomachs for?

Who made up this mess?

 

It's best thing is not to let on.

Thinking one thing I think something else.


(Translated by W.S. Merwin)


Rompecabezas

 

No doy a nadie el derecho.

Adoro un trozo de trapo.

Traslado tumbas de lugar.

 

Traslado tumbas de lugar.

No doy a nadie el derecho.

Yo soy un tipo ridículo

A los rayos del sol,

Azote de las fuentes de soda

Yo me muero de rabia.

 

Yo no tengo remedio,

Mis propios pelos me acusan

En un altar de ocasión

Las máquinas no perdonan.

 

Me río detrás de una silla,

mi cara se llena de moscas.

 

Yo soy quien se expresa mal

Expresa en vistas de qué.

 

Yo tartamudeo,

Con el pie toco una especie de feto.

 

¿Para qué son estos estómagos?

¿Quién hizo esta mescolanza?

 

Lo mejor es hacer el indio.

Yo digo una cosa por otra.


Notes:

The poet works the metaphor - in the end, it's better to say one thing for another

Agonizing puzzles of aging, the passage of time and love, the inevitable confrontation with death and the bewildering realization that one becomes conscious of beauty and youth and potentiality only when one is losing them

Mescolanza – confusion, disorder – also blended whisky


PIANO SOLO by Nicanor Parra

 

Since man's life is nothing but a bit of action at a distance,

A bit of foam shining inside a glass;

Since trees are nothing but moving trees;

Nothing but chairs and tables in perpetual motion;

Since we ourselves are nothing but beings

(As the godhead itself is nothing but God);

Now that we do not speak solely to be heard

But so that others may speak

And the echo precede the voice that produces it;

Since we do not even have the consolation of a chaos

In the garden that yawns and fills with air,

A puzzle that we must solve before our death

So that we may nonchalantly resuscitate later on

When we have led woman to excess;

Since there is also a heaven in hell,

Permit me to propose a few things

 

I wish to make a noise with my feet

I want my soul to find its proper body.

 

- Translation by William Carlos Williams

 

Piano Solo

 

Ya que la vida del hombre no es sino una acción a distancia,

Un poco de espuma que brilla en el interior de un vaso;

Ya que los árboles no son sino muebles que se agitan:

No son sino sillas y mesas en movimiento perpetuo;

Ya que nosotros mismos no somos más que seres

(Como el dios mismo no es otra cosa que dios)

Ya que no hablamos para ser escuchados

Sino que para que los demás hablen

Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen,

Ya que ni siquiera tenemos el consuelo de un caos

En el jardín que bosteza y que se llena de aire,

Un rompecabezas que es preciso resolver antes de morir

Para poder resucitar después tranquilamente

Cuando se ha usado en exceso de la mujer;

Ya que también existe un cielo en el infierno,

Dejad que yo también haga algunas cosas:

 

Yo quiero hacer un ruido con los pies

Y quiero que mi alma encuentre su cuerpo.

 

- Both poems from Poemas y Antipoemas 1938-1953 by Nicanor Parra


Notes:


Piano - carefully, softly


Action, flotsam ('espuma'), utility (wood to furniture - perpetual transformation)


The urgency of solving the puzzle ('rompecabezas') of life and death - 


Concluding couplet - I want to make some noise, with my feet, so my soul can find (locate) it's body


Discovery through sound, the first sense for the poet


Movement, desire in action, 'yo quiero ...'


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Levine's Acid Rage - They Lion (lie and) Grow

  THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968)   Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow.   Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow.   Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow.   From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bow
Post a Comment
Read more

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.   I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’
Post a Comment
Read more

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence)   ---   “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977)   ---   When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished
Post a Comment
Read more