“We used to trade out countries like pairs of shoes,” Brecht, before he was a leftist writer, committed to the cause, to say it somehow, he was a man whose sense of touch registered the unevenness of the ground, if you’ve walked for an entire morning, over blazing asphalt, by noon you can turn mystic in a department store, looking at a pair of Texan boots, “We used to trade out countries like pairs of shoes,” Brecht, before he was a leftist writer, committed to the cause, to say it somehow, he was a man whose sense of touch registered the unevenness of the ground, I, since I can’t trade my country, would at least like to trade my shoes, dear Virgin, make coin fall from the sky, to buy me some cowboy heels!
Zigzag
The smile of a discreet lady from the countryside / smile of a discreet lady from the countryside / smile of a discreet lady from the countryside, the smile, captured by the forward, his eye on fugacity’s tiniest fleet hares: “Why does he smile, David Trezeguet, the jolly striker, having tried one shot after another, without getting the ball in the net?”
Many goal scorers, the ones called crack shots, when they miss, fall to their knees on the pitch, hands pressed to the sides of their heads, and look up toward the sky as if the answer sat there waiting, the answer to the question that wounds: all of you, living amid violent gestures, maybe you should smile: many goal scorers, the ones called crack shots, when they miss, fall to their knees on the pitch, hands pressed to the sides of their heads, and look up toward the sky as if the answer sat there waiting, the answer to the question that wounds
The smile of a discreet lady from the countryside / smile of a discreet lady from the countryside / smile of a discreet lady from the countryside, the smile, captured by the forward, his eye on fugacity’s tiniest fleet hares: “Why does he smile, David Trezeguet, the jolly striker, having tried one shot after another, without getting the ball in the net?”
For a pair of Texan boots
Kristin Dykstra’s translations and commentary are featured in bilingual editions of books by Reina María Rodríguez and Omar Pérez, among them Did You Hear about the Fighting Cat?, Something of the Sacred, Time’s Arrest, and Violet Island and Other Poems. She is a 2012 NEA Literary Translation Fellow. Dykstra recently completed a mixed-genre book by Rodríguez, Other Letters to Milena, as well as poetry collections by Ángel Escobar and Juan Carlos Flores. Samples of her recent work appear in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Asymptote, Bombay Gin, La Habana Elegante, and The Harvard Review.
Juan Carlos Flores was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962. For decades he has lived in Alamar, a housing community on the city’s east side. In 1990 Flores won a national award for his first book of poems, Los pájaros escritos. His Distintos Modos de Cavar un Túnel, the opening of a trilogy dedicated to “the poetical resurrection of Alamar,” won the 2002 Julián del Casals prize. The poems here are taken from the second book in that trilogy: El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales), or The Counterpunch (And Other Horizontal Poems), published by Letras Cubanas in 2009.
Related Links:
http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/spanish/three-poems-by-juan-carlos-flores
http://www.habanaelegante.com/Fall_Winter_2010/Azotea_DykstraFlores.html