The White Quay

"Surely is no one who has found the world so upside down as did the taylor in the fairy  tale who went up in his lifetime to heaven and from that standpoint contemplated the universe".

Sören Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

That we would finally arrive and over there it would be always dark night, and that we would walk by moors of dust as fine as paper cinder, dust that would smell as sulfur and saltpeter and would stick to our steps.

That, from there, the planet would look immense and translucent in the coal sky, an imponent sphere made of water with green and gold reflections, noctilucent and secret.

That on the dark side we would find dry oceans, lava seas, mysterious fields of cotton, and that there the night would have no lantern other than the crossing of a frozen comet or the familiar blinking of the stars.

That our history would be recorded on sapphire disks and kept in one of its craters and that, after reading it, someone would rise their eyes to the sky in search of the blue planet where everything happened; but the planet would not be there.

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Photo: A reflection of the sun seen from a plane flying over the Andes.

The Lapis Lazuli Quay

Viridiana

Dolphins dream awake, translucent dreams, mint green mysteries.

Quilt

I sleep on the golden skin of a serpent.

Myopia

The blue lens dances on a tear.

The Heavenly Weaver

Threads of gold, spindles of ivory.

Cold Spring

We would eat the berries of the land, collected when the frost still covered them.

Halloween

As Lilliputian pumpkins, saffron cloudberries from the marshes.

Gospel Oak

A blue and gold tea set, as night lapis lazuli.

Matins

The mist appeared all in a sudden, slipping in the air as it was white smoke.

Chão De Estrelas

Down there, minuscule, the waves, mica scintillating on an ocean wall.

Leche De Luna

The moon is a green coconut.

Gorgona

On the back of her hand, a little azure dragon.

Barcarole

A winter ride through the canals of Bruges. Heads break the frost as they pass under the bridges.

Advice For Horai

Always carry a thimble in your pocket in case you might to give drink to a bird.

Luminosity

Soft brightness of the nights after the snow.

Meravelles

A white amethyst that ressembles a glacier.

Nocturnal

Eclipse: the sun as moon.

Antoaneta

Cherries are the apples of the fays, the minuscule delights of their ethereal sins.

Pictures Of The Floating World

Mouses on the top of the corn spikes and a she-cat all dressed in moon cinder.

Selk'nam

They will be the four ridges of the infinite.

Jigsaw

Arlecchino in ringlets, vertiginous delight.

The Lapis Lazuli Quay

Blue and diaphanous sphere, residence of the blessed.

Llanddwyn

Everything is strangely Saturday or Sunday. A secret birthday picnic, a tea party of birds.

Pangur Bán

Yesterday I met a cat of golden belly.

Sala dell'Infinito

Ice chapel, fantastic aquarium, garden of salt under the Milky Way.

Mirante

Those dolphins that gyrate in the sky...

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Montevideo, March 2022.

Picture: Detail of the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

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The Noon Witch

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Dido with a pointed hat and a linen veil. Dido, a Syrian bride surrounded by white witches. 

(Witches make wine. Sweet wines of Hungary, red wines of Styria, wines as unctuous as raspberry ink. In the deep prairie they sit in circles sprout up suddenly after the rain.)

Aldebaran, Altair. A bright abacus for the nocturnal hours.

Dido extends the skin of a calf, deep blue and splashed with white sparks and rays. There the archon's palace will be erected, with its light filtered by selenite windows.

Behind an indigo tree, a determined guardian of the landscape, the old town can barely be sensed. The rain has devoured it and birds don't exist anymore.

October 31st, 2019.

Images of Jason

.

“Some of the thralls were busied with a mighty bull, others with the axe were cleaving dry billets, and others heating with fire water for the baths; nor was there one who relaxed his toil, serving the king.  Meantime Eros passed unseen through the grey mist, causing confusion, as when against grazing heifers rises the gadfly, which oxherds call the breese. And quickly beneath the lintel in the porch he strung his bow and took from the quiver an arrow unshot before, messenger of pain. And with swift feet unmarked he passed the threshold and keenly glanced around”.

Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, Book III, 268-298,

I

            A rare white-coral beach. I ask the traveler sitting beside me if he is French. “I’m English”, he says, “but in every single trip they ask me that, if I’m French”- “Why?”, I ask, surprised. “Je ne sais pas”.

II

            Dragged by dozens of men, the ship rolls over the sands of the desert, green and crisp like crystals of olivine. Jason, almost naked, has also lost his only sandal.

III

            We have to go down by lava steps, and in the heart of the mountain the wet cold denies the place where we are, and from time to time we have to crawl by tunnels full of mud in which the hardened lava forms stalactites that could easily tear our clothes.

IV

            Nightmare in the deep of the night: Jason has covered his face with mud, maybe with saffron. Under the long light of the lamps, the bearded hero looks as red-haired as Achilles, as blond as a wheat spirit, as tall as Polifemo. His only iris is flashing, deep blue, verdigris, bright golden.

V

            If the seagull can pass between the rocks, the ship will cross as well. The seagull passes –a few feathers come off with a strike— and then the ship sails on.

VI

            Ballet terrible. Medea has sent to Creusa a present: a mantle, a wedding dress. The Furies, with their green locks and their membranous, purplish bat wings, burst out laughing.

VII

            Seven hundred miles out to sea, the salt burns the skin so badly that, at a certain point, one only thinks about calming it with some sweet water.

VIII

            The castle walls are concentric circles. Between two towers, the yard looks like a bullfighting ring. All around the serpent-tree, men with crimson cloaks gyrate.

            There are two white presences, as made of sifted flour: an Alano dog, a woman.

IX

            The gate of the Blue Rocks closes forever, because a ship has been able to cross it. “This door was intended only for you”.

X

            I am not wearing a panther skin but a turtle one: an abandoned shell that I use like a medieval knight would carry his armor.

XI

            Jason has become an English cartographer. It is dinner time, but all what is in the plate vibrates and dances. Around the wooden table, his mates regurgitate fantastic animals. Jason, as if he were Jonah, is devoured and given back by a blue dragon.

XII

            Let us scrape off the sheepskins, let us wash the sands, let us wait with patience that things fall down by their own weight, that the gravel settles, that the gold grains, if they are really there, begin to sparkle.

XIII

            Jason goes through Rome. The temple looks like a petrified forest. Its columns have harpy claws. From the hero’s arm hangs the precious skin.  The shadow advances from one corner. In another the avenging god watches, and his stare pierces to the bone.

XIV

            The serpent licks the hand of Medea, who has given it her sacred herbs as if they were gingerbread. Jason falls on his back, his arms stretched out, his legs opened.

XV

(It is told that, in Colchis, people used to put the sheepskins in the riverbeds and then hang them, full of gold powder, ready to welcome the thieves).

Montevideo, 2017.

Photo: Break!

versión original

Escarabeos/ Scarabs

Enterrábamos a nuestros muertos dentro de círculos de sal o cercos de asta de ciervo, envueltos en pieles, con una perla sobre el labio superior.

Cremábamos a nuestros muertos y los escondíamos en cajas de seda en las grietas de las montañas.

We buried our dead within circles of salt or fences of deer horn, wrapped in skins, with a pearl on their upper lip. 

We cremated our dead and hid them in silk boxes in the crevices of the mountains.
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Foto: Halifax, Canadá.

&%@#!!!

"In English, an insult to one’s parentage uses the dog as the image, while the Spanish hijo de puta is more direct, but the English equivalent whoreson is archaic and can no longer be used. In ordinary usage hijo de puta must be rendered “son of a bitch,” else we lose the emotional charge. The Portuguese is more subtle, filho da mãe  (son of your mother), innocent on the surface, but inviting all the vileness the imagination can bring to bear. I recall an episode in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch in which the hero has pounded his thumb with a hammer as he tries to straighten a nail. “Puta que te parió,” he addresses the nail. If we leave it at that, we get a Hemingwayish “whore that bore you,” but the intent is different. My solution was to have him accuse the nail of incestuous proclivities toward its dam, which is current, ripe, and even maintains a bit of the tone of the Spanish insult. The fact that insults cannot be rendered so closely as we might like means that while words can be translated directly, cultures themselves cannot be without grotesque distortion".

Gregory Rabassa en “If This Be Treason:  
Translation and Its Possibilities”.

Photo: Paris.