The Expression of Loss | Poems — Agustín Fernández Mallo, Translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington

Agustín Fernández Mallo (Photo by Aina Lorente Solivellas)

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From Joan Fontaine Odisea

4.

A created thing is more perfect
the less it carries the mark of man,

thank you, Bar Code, for still guaranteeing silence,
the ingredient in objects alchemy was searching for.

Underneath this skin is another skin,
and under that another, and another, and another,
and thus, as many layers as you like, until n∊N→∞
antecenter of the center which is finite.
That center is the mask.

[the week has 8 Mondays. The 8^th is the week]

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4.1

This beach is one I don’t recognize. A bottle moves
closer in to shore with the message afmallo@hotmail.com, which
I myself wrote when I was a capsized drifter
and I didn’t throw messages into the ocean but into rivers
which [I didn’t know] goe out to the see whiche is deeth.
You spread out pure,
unoxidized,
unwinged.
On beaches you’ve never walked you now step upon yourself.

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5.

The ball traces a parabolic arc and
the golfer matches its arpeggio with her back.

The sky tenses and her breasts,
more mercury than ever, complete the silhouette
against the ocean of grass.
……………………………….It’s raining
against the grain.

The water’s geometry can’t overcome
the dry thwack of silence when the atmosphere gasps and the ball touches
….down.
Sphere against sphere. Your nipples
[endless and expectant] turn down, the windows
of a beach hotel in winter.
……………………[a car honks, your husband’s waiting].
No caddie could ever
pick your clubs like me.

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5.1

Light at dawn undoes the knots
on bowties, cuts through the make-up,
dissolves smoke and happy new year!s
in that hollowness that lasts a few hours
when the calendar shifts a digit.
………..I surprise myself thinking one day I’ll be an ancestor.
You come in pulling on a bra strap, oblivious
to the black and white confetti stuck to brittle hair,
I want you to know that tonight is my birth, you say,
and I won’t be able to forget you.
In that house we were all
terminal mannequins from Golpes Bajos,
material from childhood [where nothing ever happens
and you have to make it up].
Creation and Apocalypse sometimes coincide.

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5.1.1

The point of remembering is forgetting
oneself, making the heart into
a weathered magnet that leaves
things equidistant from each other,
…………………….spinning
…………………….in their places,
the point is not to try to find out
where the sliver of light under
doors is coming from,
or the sliver of light between your lips.

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14.

At the end I saw my body empty out
………..[1.83 m in 64 kilos]
a pencil with no lead you joked
Saturday afternoons
and Antonio Vega was playing:
I get a chill when I see
your young body and your soul
isn’t in its place anymore.

A suitcase with no destination
is a suspicious object.
A body with no shape
………..[1.83 m for 64 kilos]
is the axis around which
a traveler spins, awkward and pointless,
never my guest again.

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14.1

I look at your smile and I think
all lyric poetry expresses loss.
A child doesn’t write verse,
a diet of memory still hasn’t
passed through him, they still
haven’t shuttered
his local Toys Я Us.

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70.

The first light of day doesn’t stop the night,
it keeps on weary in another
more visible and secret sector.
…………[grass between asphalt cracks,
…………ice on the edge of a kiss,
…………the implosion of planets,
…………the silence of objects].

What you’re seeing isn’t morning,
but the logical opponent of night
produced by binary reasoning,

to wake up is to be reduced to photons,
center and stop-point
of that other nocturnal particle which is sleep
sectioned into petals.
And they fall.

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From Ya nadie se llamará como yo

I see a forest and something more alive inside (prayer)

…………An indeterminate being wanders through the valleys, howls on the peaks, sleeps beneath the snow, its tracks take on different directions all the time. Nonetheless, it senses the Earth’s magnetic field. I know because its footsteps follow the veins of certain minerals. (Cardiology)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………The cells of the retina are the same as those of the skin because when we are embryos the retina is part of the skin. This gives us a clue as to why the literature of every civilization develops a multiplicity of analogies between the eyes, the epidermis, and that which unites them, light. (Great Migrations, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………The wolf rejects us because he knows that in his chest there is an area, no larger than the pit of a cherry, which is incredibly sweet to a palate we believe we have forgotten. (Zoophilia, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………In a big-box store I saw kids playing with balls from the display stand, pedaling around and ditching the bike wherever they felt like it, jumping rope, hitting punching bags with no rhythm; the ones who weren’t yelling were laughing. “These kids here have grown up inside, they don’t know anything else,” he said to me. (Foundational Moments, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………The hardcourt used for the game of tennis is obtained by crushing thousands of bricks taken from abandoned housing developments. (Great Migrations, 2)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………Animals pose in front of the camera lens but not because they feel they are being watched. The pose is older than their looks, even older than their bodies. The pose is blind, but it sniffs, it finds its way. (Speleology, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………In rural areas Nature is strictly separated from the human habitat: specialized physical and climactic barriers are erected between the home and open country to ensure survival. In cities, the urban landscape forms a continuum with the buildings’ interiors, the city enters its apartments in the form of colors, smells, materials, and even flora and fauna. This continuity is what ensures the survival of the inhabitants of an urban space. (Extreme Climatology, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………In me there is no body: I am a ship travelling in the same direction as Earth. (Pet, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………Regarding the ancients and their languages, now dead, we must remember that we only retain their texts, the writings they’ve left us, not the sonic record, and so we have no idea how they pronounced their words. If today we could hear a Greek from the 4^th century B.C. pronounce poiesis, or a Roman say rosae, it’s possible we would hear what would, for us, be grunts or birdsong. Just thinking of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra spouting out sounds like a dog barking, or a whale or a robot, produces a kind of shiver that could knock down a good portion of our idea of History, or even of civilization. What’s left to us is the mute materiality of that writing, and we make up a sonic landscape for ourselves, built as a fantasy. Thus, the only thing that truly brings back the past in real time is sound. That’s why voices are so important for the paranormal, for spiritualists, in live concerts, political rallies, etc. The oldest recorded human voice is a 35-second recitation of the poem, “America,” read in 1890 by its author, Walt Whitman, and recorded on a primitive wax cylinder. 35 seconds which not only seem to bring the poet to us from beyond the grave, but which also establish year zero of human speech such as we know it today. (Spring, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside..

—Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington

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Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña in 1967. He is a qualified physicist and since 2000 has been collaborating with various cultural publications in order to highlight the connection between art and science. His Nocilla Trilogy, published between 2006 and 2009, brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the ‘Nocilla Generation.’ He has also published a book of stories, El hacedor (de Borges), remake, and the essay Postpoesía, hacia un nuevo paradigma. His poetry is collected in the volume Yanadie se llamará como yo + Poesía reunida (1998–2012), and his latest novel, Limbo, was published in Spain in 2014.

Zachary Rockwell Ludington teaches Spanish at Emory University in Atlanta. He received an award in 2014 from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund for Pixel Flesh, his version of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Carne de píxel. His creative work has appeared in Drunken Boat, PEN America, and elsewhere.

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