Tag: Translated

An excerpt from Manuel de Lope’s first novel to be translated into English.

Nobel Prize-nominee Bei Dao uses travel as a metaphor for life.

…there / was always a lucky one, who carried with him / the mistakes of others, what a burden / it must have been that pushed him down, / but he was pleased by all this pushing.

Men suddenly become meek. / Damn, we all needed it badly.

Too bad for you men who do not see who do not see anything

Around Friday heaven arrives; they no longer supply / hell (it stays on the shelf too long), but I’ve got / hell at home, as well as heaven and the saints.

You take a vacation, you take a plane, and now this. You are running away from knowing this information. This is how things are these days.

The Arab is so stunned, he doesn’t move. Just stands there with his certificate and his rusty key. Not breathing.

Back in our day there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know Albania / who didn’t know it was the bright light of European Socialism / or that the other bright light was us.

we imagine rose tintedly because his hands are in his lady

…fir on a barren rock-sharp wall, the kind / the shepherds around here talk and sing to /

before felling when someone young and single dies.

Night and horses— / is this what history is all about?

The first thing you notice are his eyes.

With these five bones, human bones, / Doctor Chanca makes me a cannibal / by arranging feathers from the hand / of another cannibal

Poor us, we are all kings / when we gaze at the starry sky.

The whole time he tells you what to do. / His voice is chocolate candy filled with hysteria. // He is a loving blackmailer. An owl blind in one eye.

It’s as if for a man battered by the wind, /

blinded by snow—all around him an arctic /

inferno pummels the city— /

a door opens along a wall.

Five rounds passed, without pain or glory. Nothing happened in the ring to excite the sparse crowd.

To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary / to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor /

at three in the afternoon in the month of August.

let me go don’t be a dog / my very dear cage / haven’t we agreed

Space is full of mental rooms where we can go / Like a hunter unleashing his dogs, I freed my spirit into them

I am a poisoned well, / I told the ram / as he flared his nostrils. / Everything in me is poisoned.

No matter the time or place, I’ll always grow for the one who is the sea. / With one thin finger cut in half. / That is why I’m the oldest recipient of your on-again, off-again love.

How it rises out of waves in the bay / and shudders like a gentle thrust / of the sea, which sooner forgives /

than punishes, doomed as it is to feckless birth.

I am given ten cubic meters of darkness / every night I pace over them obediently

In the name of his own history, / in a country mired in mud, / when hunger overtakes him / he eats his own forehead.

We make Buddha ride an elephant like the way a village boy rides on a man’s shoulder, and we let Buddha run and play, then make him cry, and we make him couple blissfully with a buttery woman and call it Tantra…

I’ll give you a roll of barbwire / A vine for this modern epoch / Climbing all over our souls / That’s our love, take it, don’t ask

Yes, that’s right, maybe I’ve run out of / patience, we have certainly run out of cigarettes / and the later, as Cioran used to say // hold more fire than the Gospels in our blessed country.

I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED, / I hear the place can’t be named

Her tears drop on the mirror / and around the guttering lamp insects swirl.

A few horses returned with torn flags we couldn’t make out. / I would have a ceremony for you, but what if you are alive?

I don’t know you personally, but I saw your photo in the paper / and I feel deeply offended

Night—a twelve-wheeler / goes by making the dreams of / the inmates shiver

If I were fire, I’d burn the world down;

By this glass of wine so dark it brims / Like rising nightfall, with a heart whose deepest faith / Is insatiable thirst

This is sanity—when love comes—/to offer a bed, a chair,/sustain and raise it like a pet

perhaps that agate’s circular gaze was your gaze, / which from water in the air unfolds itself

Under pines these riders halt beside a brook / calm like them, yet like them close to sobs

Cowering behind an almost idiotic silence, I avoided looking into his eyes, gripped by the same fear that must have gripped Odysseus as he ran from the singular gaze of the Cyclops.

The sorrows of the world are truly abundant; but wine is abundant too.

Her parents were naked, one on top of the other. Their eyes were closed, their faces contorted; they were breathing loudly and moaning. She watched them for a few moments, terrified; then she walked quietly back to her cot and covered her face with the pillow.

A blue glow / Streams out from my clothes. / Midwinter. / A clinking tambour made of ice. / I close my eyes. / Somewhere

You could look from one end to the other, but for me there was only Castro’s hand, it held me in a hypnotic grip.

The sweetest thing in the soul is the fire / Of your love; still sweeter is the fire / Leaping out of the soul from your love

It happened 31 years ago, / I can’t forget it, / in Singapore, the rain / falling / hot like blood / on the ancient white walls

Like bugs in a bowl / we all day circle, circle / unable to get out.

History may even forget that tonight / I determined who would live / And who would die

to look for a lifesaving buoy in the flood / the destruction of the last drop of man

But your eyelids hold such flowery perfume, / that they breed inside my mind the bastard’s doom

in which city do I want to be? / I want to be in the face / between the realms

Are your recollections really recent or do they reflect a remote past? You feel as if time is not time on the clock, and an aura of unreality surrounds you.

So I hear you’re going around saying you sold your soul to the devil . . .

Since it is very hot out at sea, sometimes someone comes down with a little fever.

We sleep in sleeping bags on the beach, so in order to get close to you I have to slip out of mine first, then slip you out of yours.

We went to a cafe I knew near the bookstore. I tried to please him by saying, they have excellent coffee here.