Vijay Seshadri
Poeta y ensayista. (Bangalore, India, 1954). Nació en la India y vive en Estados Unidos desde los cinco años. Es autor de Wild Kingdom (1996; The Long Meadow (2003), ganador del premio James Laughlin Award; y 3 Sections (2013), ganador del premio Pulitzer de poesía en 2014. Ha sido editor de la revista New Yorker y Profesor en el Bennington College y en el Sarah Lawrence College, donde dirige el programa de postgrado en escritura creativa.
Teteras brillantes de cobre
Amigos muertos que vuelven a vivir, parientes difuntos
que hablan lenguas extintas y vivas, sus mentes alertas,
sus cinco sentidos intactos, sus huellas como las de una mariposa,
la misericordia brillando en sus despiertas faces—
pocas cosas me gustan más que esto.
Me gusta tanto que duermo todo el tiempo.
Luna de día y sol de noche me encuentran disperso
profundo en los sueños en que ellos aparecen.
En campos dorados, en la ciudad de las siete pirámides,
ante la emperatriz de la cara derretida, bajo
el altísimo sicómoro, llegan sin avisar.
“Todo bien”, parecen decir. “Como siempre”.
Son corteses y tímidos.
¿Quién iba a saber que los muertos eran tan corteses?
No quieren asustarme; sus cabezas no giran como veletas.
No quieren robar mi cuerpo
ni poseer la tierra y vengarse.
Están muertos–ustedes lo saben–no existen. Y además,
¿por qué iría a importarles? Son subatómicos, horizontales. Analicen ustedes
Uno de ellos humildemente me ofrece un lápiz.
Los ojos bajo los párpados se mueven más y más rápido.
Por el intercomunicador de la casa en que tanto tiempo no hubo música,
el Reverendísimo Al Green canta,
“Nunca podría ver hacia el mañana,
nadie me advirtió sobre el dolor”
Traducido por Francisco Larios
Bright Copper Kettles
Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”
They are diffident and polite.
(Who knew the dead were so polite?)
They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes.
They don’t want to steal my body
and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.
They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
“I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow.”
Paraíso
Hay sequía en la montaña.
Fuegos furiosos raspan las colinas.
Y el mamífero baja por arroyos marchitos
buscando la fuente,
y la encuentra, pareciera mentira,
o más o menos la encuentra. Un fino hilo de plata
sube desde un río subterráneo
y hace que brote vapor de las
rocas hirvientes, y siseos de los guijarros.
Pronto el mamífero podrá beber,
pero antes deberá
detenerse, pensando
su juicioso, impecable pensamiento:
que pensar se reduce a esto—
misterio, nostalgia, sed.
Traducido por Francisco Larios
Heaven
There’s drought on the mountain.
Wildfires scour the hills.
So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills
searching for the fountain,
which it finds, believe it or not,
or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver
rises from an underground river
and makes a few of the hot
rocks steam and the pebbles hiss.
Soon the mammal will drink,
but it has first
to stop and think
its reflexive, impeccable thought:
that thinking comes down to this—
mystery, longing, thirst.
Número imaginario
La montaña que perdura cuando el universo es destruido
no es grande ni es pequeña.
Grande y pequeña son
categorías relativas, ¿Y con qué
se podría comparar a la montaña que perdura cuando el universo
es destruido?
La conciencia observa y se apacigua.
El alma se despeña en los escombros.
El alma,
como la raíz cuadrada de menos 1
es un imposible que tiene alguna utilidad.
Traducido por Francisco Larios
Imaginary Number
The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.
Tres personas
Esa persona lenta que dejaste atrás cuando por fin
dominaste el mundo, y ascendiste a las alturas que ahora controlas,
¿Dónde está él mientras
caminas sobre el inmaculado césped, en bombachos de golf,
organizando tableta en mano
tu ofensiva hacia el mañana?
Ah, me lo he encontrado; de hecho, más de una vez,
empujando su maltrecha carretilla de compras por el bulevar.
Otros ven en ti varios tipos místicos distinguidos
no solo por lo que son sino por las historias
que les inventamos, con comienzos, finales, sorpresas:
el infante Edipo en la ladera de la colina con su pie fracturado
o el perro cuyos ladridos salvan a la abuela
que chapotea en el estanque detrás del dique,
arrastrada por su falda de seda.
Pero él no te ve como una historia.
Te siente como su atmósfera. Cuando tu sol brilla,
él rie en silencio. Cuando tu presión cae
y los cumulonimbos se aglomeran,
él se acurruca bajo el puente y me escribe largas cartas
con los cabitos de lápiz que se roba de la biblioteca.
Me pide que te proteja.
Traducido por Francisco Larios
Three Persons
That slow person you left behind when, finally,
you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,
where is he while you
walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,
organizing with an electric clipboard
your big push to tomorrow?
Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once,
coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian.
Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished
not just in themselves but by the stories
we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises:
the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet
or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother
flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,
dragged down by her woolen skirt.
He doesn’t see you as a story, though.
He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,
he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunderheads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.
The Descent of Man
My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.
I can’t walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.
I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.
The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.
The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods
are shuttered I don’t know why.
“Try," say the good people who bring me my food,
“to make your secret anguish your secret weapon.
Otherwise, your immortality will be
an exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book.”
But I can’t get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.
It takes so long for the human to become a human!
He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,
the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.
Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair
but the two together like curettes
and peel back the pitch-black integuments
to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,
sitting on the sketch of a boulder below
his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
Survivor
We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
Your body has wizened but has not bled
its substance out on the killing floor
or flatlined in intensive care
or vanished after school
or stepped off the ledge in despair.
Of all those you started with,
only you are still around;
only you have not been listed with
the defeated and the drowned.
So how could you ever win our respect?--
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luck.