"90 seconds exactly" (Translated from the Catalan original “Tot just noranta segons” with the author, Antoni Cardona)

 

Photo: https://www.corneliakraft.com/

When Nadia was running downstairs

from the 6th floor, doing up her dressing gown,

cursing the wind and her mistake

she came across the boy from door 4, floor 4

the one who never says good morning

She put the brakes on her crazy run

having seen the second floor was wet,

she was about to fall near the front door:

her slippers were loose

and she hadn’t found the money nor time

to go to the shoe-repairer 

…her precious headcovering flew

and landed at Magda’s feet

the new postwoman, who took it and put it

with sound judgement on a parked motorbike.

Then Fatima, from the halal supermarket, fell

in love with its bright colours,

and although she didn’t wear it,

against her mother’s advice,

she took it thinking to give it

to her close friend Raissa,

who would never dare to go outside

without a hijab covering her hair.

And from the doorway, when Nadia sees

Fatima taking the headscarf off the motorbike,

and the great joy she had on her face

she gave up her claim on the very thing

that Karim, her husband,

didn’t know

was a gift from a clandestine love

with whom, years before,

in Morocco, Nadia had dreamt of a future.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tot  just noranta segons 

Mentre la Nàdia baixava l’escala corrents

des d’un sisè pis, cordant-se la bata,

maleint la ventada i el seu error;

es creuava amb el noi del quart quarta, 

aquell que sempre li nega el bon dia;

la cursa boja frenava uns instants 

veient el terra mullat de la planta segona;

ensopegava a prop de la porta d’entrada: 

les sabatilles li anaven balderes 

i no havia trobat el moment ni els diners 

per dur al sabater...

...el seu objecte preuat voleiava

fins aterrar just als peus de la Magda, 

la nova cartera, que amb molt bon criteri 

el deixava damunt d’una moto aparcada.

Al moment la Fàtima, del súper halal

s’enamorava de la peça de roba 

de colors tan llampants,

 i malgrat que, desoint els consells de sa mare,

ella  no en duia, la prenia pensant 

regalar-la a la Raissa, l’íntima amiga

que mai no gosaria anar pel carrer

 sense hijab cobrint-li els cabells. 

I quan la Nàdia veu, des del portal, 

la Fàtima amb el vel a les mans,

i amb quanta il·lusió aquesta se’l mira,

renuncia a reclamar el mocador 

que el seu home, en Karim, 

no sap que va ser el regal 

d’un amor clandestí

amb qui, uns quants anys enrere, 

al Marroc, la Nàdia somiava un futur.

  

Antoni Cardona i Torras

2022

La mà que va signar el paper* (The Hand That Signed The Paper) – A poem by Dylan Thomas

 (*Translated into Catalan below with Antoni Cardona)

---

La mà que va signar el paper va enderrocar una ciutat;

Cinc dits sobirans van posar taxes a l’alè,

Van duplicar els morts a la terra i van partir pel mig un país;

Aquests cinc reis van fer que morís un rei

La poderosa mà porta a una espatlla inclinada,

Les articulacions dels dits estan comprimides amb guix;

La ploma d’oca ha posat fi a l’assassinat

Que posa fi a la conversa

 

La mà que va signar el tractat va generar una febrada, un excitació

I va créixer la fam, i van venir llagostes;

És gran la mà que manté domini sobre

L’home mitjançant un nom gargotejat

Els cinc reis compten els morts però no suavitzen 

La crosta de la ferida ni fan copets al front;

Una mà governa la pietat i una mà governa el cel;

Les mans no tenen llàgrimes per vessar.

---

Original in English:

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

"The skin of a bull" by Salvador Espriu (my updated translation*)

Sometimes it is necessary, essential
that a man dies for a people
But an entire people must never die
for a single man:
Remember this, Sepharad.

Make sure to keep the bridges of dialogue safe
and try to understand and love
the different reasonings and tongues of all your children.
Drop by drop, let the rain fall on the seedlings
and the air cross the wide fields
like a generous extended hand.

May Sepharad live forever
through order and peace
In work and in hard-won
liberty.

"La pell de brau" by Salvador Espriu (1913 - 1985)

*Thanks to Antoni Cardona for co-translating.

"Early doors day" -- A poem

 (This poem was first published in Burrow here at Old Water Rat’s Publishing )

soft lines of fog trees

not the desert
but quiet like the desert

we look at the stars to see 
what we come from

body not yet the enemy
light slowly befriends you

Pandemic poem

Cut down

Cut down to bone

Cut off to spite it and

Cut off from

Cut away to put away

Stay away

Cut out

Cut out your needy

Cut me down I'm

Not cut out for it

LAUNCH EVENT: Spanish-English edition of Clive James' poetry

A bilingual Spanish-English volume of Australian Clive James' poetry has just been published.

Title: "Fin de Fiesta. Últimos Poemas". (Publisher, Pre-Textos.) Launch: 4 May, 19.00h,

@DocumentaBCN

bookshop, Pau Claris, 144 Barcelona.

Reservations (Max. 20 people:) Email correu@documenta-bcn.com ... OR follow event on Instagram:

@documentabcn

"Natsukashi" -- My latest column for Catalonia Today magazine

This morning, with the dying of this summer and noticing the shortening of the hours of light in the evening, I remembered that exactly two decades ago I went with my new wife to live in the city of Kyoto, in Japan.

It became possibly the single most influential experience in and on my life. 

To look at a period of what became three years and see it as one complete experience (or a collection of thousands of experiences wrapped into one) is obviously unusual. But Japan is exactly that: unusual. 

In fact, it’s unique. Living there, I found myself sometimes saying to myself or whoever was near me, “Everything here is different. Everything!”

Of course not literally everything is, in fact, different there but that was how Japan and its people struck you, especially at first sight. 

Essentially, Japanese people want the very same things as you and I, and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet. We all basically want love, food, shelter, respect and satisfaction. But it often seemed that how they thought they would get these wants was a polar opposite to me, a 30-year-old male from Australia, so geographically close to Japan.

The Japanese language is unique, too, like every language, I suppose. There’s a word in Japanese - “natsukashi” - for which the closest translation in English is “nostalgia”. This translation, though, does not do justice to such a complex, nuanced word that is actually a highly emotional one.

In Japan you would find even primary school children saying this word, not just adults. I think this is because from a very young age in Japan you are taught (or at least influenced) by parents, schools, and wider society to reflect back on your actions, your experiences, and even individual moments. This is a mentality not currently in vogue in much of the Western world, partly because Japan is a very formal society.

There is a structure, a ritual, an accepted composed method and set order (and a set order of words in a phrase) for virtually every daily action the Japanese do; whether it is eating, leaving home, getting to or leaving school or work, or even how you conduct relationships with people. 

To my wife and I and our non-Japanese friends, for at least a year or two, this was mystifying, confusing, frustrating but eventually somehow comprehensible. Although it was quite simple to understand and learn the basics of daily routine, having relationships with Japanese people was another matter, despite the fact that almost everyone was extremely kind to us.

The multiple layers of meaning that everything has in Japan can be seen in my current nostalgic yearning feeling towards Japan through the word ‘natsukashi’.

It turns out that my understanding of this word was not quite on the mark though. After researching it, I find that this feeling is better expressed by the longer word ‘mukashiwonatsukashimu’. ‘Natsukashi is apparently a more simple term for someone or something that is dear, desired or missed.

Next month, I plan to write a follow-up article on some specific examples that illustrate the points I’ve made above about Japan, this most unique of unique places. Until then, I’ll finish with a ‘haiku’ I wrote in Japan. ‘Haiku” is the traditional 5-7-5 syllable simplified form of poetry that’s designed to recall a single moment:

Portuguese song voice

Sweet, controlled, but free and light

Heard in a night street.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2019.]

Australian poet reading at the University of Barcelona

The Australian poet, Peter Bakowski, will be doing a public reading from his work at the University of Barcelona in Gran Via on:

Monday 22 October 9.30-11 a.m. in Room 107;

Wednesday 24 October 4.00-6.30 p.m. in Room 102b.

"A stretched agony" - My latest book review for Catalonia Today magazine

small children trade the world for distraction

deal in statements with the grammar of a road sign

they’re happy to put the sun in the top corner of the page

count backwards from 9 and arrive at the end of this sentence

These lines from Nathan Shepherdson’s newly-reprinted “Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror” are an example of what this award-winning poet does so well: he uses memory to compress sentiments that are without sentimentality and gives us self-revelations that are not self-obsessed.
In one moment he is inside the mind of himself as a child: innocence, naivety and then using exact nuances of expression to capture that uncomplicated kiddy outlook. On another page you get the distinct impression that he is having a (one-sided) talk with his dead mother. The author not only dedicates the book to Noela Mary Shepherdson (who died in 2003) but he also continually shows a deep understanding of women in general, including an appreciation of women’s clothes and ‘finery.'

But this poet’s skills go much further than mere observation. His brilliantly gothic portrait of two crows near his mother’s grave is sixteen lines of the best poetry I have ever read, and his use of personification is equally as deft because it never seems forced or misplaced. Shepherdson also has a way of reminding us of what he calls the ‘tribunal of memory’ and how it can make the settings of people we have been fond of so poignant and emblematic.

I too share his obvious fascination with the insect world (especially ants) and enjoy his regular references to plants, animals and nature in general. It would be wrong though to say that this book is in any way a breezy affair. There is barely a moment of lightness. When it appears it is the bleakest of dark humour (remindeding me of an episode with a waitress in Bob Dylan’s song Highlands.) Shepherdson recalls his mother this way: "you drew a straight line on the wall/laughed and turned/and declared it a self portrait"


Every parent would surely like to be revered with such devotion by a son or daughter, though for this poet it has come at a price. Here, he is filleting his nerves: "this is where I murder truth/cut the bowels out of the clock /this is where you pay the bill/the one you kept under your left breast for years/you had faith/i had you"

The final part of the book is a like a doctor’s chart that puts graphic images on top of one another. It gives snapshots of the brutal physical and mental decline of an emotionally-generous woman, and is a kind of stretched agony. I found tears stinging my eyes while reading the last pages of this book:

take a marking pen

and draw infinity around the eyes of one just departed

you have just created two black holes

marked them out with a warning for light to turn away…
i wish i could draw your fingerprints from memory
exhume entire landscapes from an archive of touch

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2016.]

"You Hated Spain"

(Ted Hughes)

[A poem by Ted Hughes, which I dedicate to my twin-brother Matt (a poet) who is currently visiting us here and loving it.]

Spain frightened you.
Spain.
Where I felt at home.
The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African              
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.
You did not know the language, your soul was empty
Of the signs, and the welding light              
Made your blood shrivel.
Bosch Held out a spidery hand and you took it
Timidly, a bobby-sox American.
You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin
And recognized it, and recoiled                  
As your poems winced into chill, as your panic
Clutched back towards college America.
So we sat as tourists at the bullfight
Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered,
Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier          
Just below us, straightening his bent sword
And vomiting with fear. And the horn
That hid itself inside the blowfly belly
Of the toppled picador punctured
What was waiting for you. Spain              
Was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver
You dared not wake with, the puckering amputations
No literature course had glamorized.
The juju land behind your African lips.
Spain was what you tried to wake up from          
And could not. I see you, in moonlight,
Walking the empty wharf at Alicante
Like a soul waiting for the ferry,
A new soul, still not understanding,
Thinking it is still your honeymoon              
In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,
Happy, and all your poems still to be found.

(Source and commentary here.)

The colours of Asturias: a poem

the flag of the region should be green, black and red

Asturias is certainly verdant green, but it is also black

the black of the miners lung

and the almost permanent colour of his spit

it is also that sightless place of no mercy

at the bottom of the pit where

another of Franco's victims is thrown  

Asturias has a history the color of carbon

the same earthy tint as the blood sausage

that has fed its people

and black like the hide of a cow

who has quietly ruminated on its grassy hills .

and there is that black of a thousand widow’s dresses

mixed with that black of the children’s despair

at their fathers early death

the same dim shade of the early morning forest where

the dictators enemies hid shivering, hungry, but unbroken

and the crucial Asturian black

the lump of its freshly-mined coal

or that frivolous fully-rotten apple

as dark as the night-time ocean that empties itself

into rivers like the Nalón

as brutally stark as an unlit mine

and it might too have been

the charcoal feathers of a bird

that watched all this great grim past

with its darting granite eyes 

and Asturias has a culture full of red

red like some of those ripened apples

that make the people's everyday cider

not as red as those huge painted silos that hold it all

the enflamed red too of the wild flowers that grow here

and the smoky paprika powder that is sprinkled

on yet more cooked potatoes

but it is also the red of the dead

the civil war corpses and the slaughtered soldiers

that ruby rich hue that also inhabits the church wine

and the vino tinto waiting on the table

or even red like the double bars of the Spanish flag

with that saffron yellow lying

in between those royal stripes

and also that arterial red

of those painted iron trains

the ferrocarill

that opened up

the heart

of Asturias

“I lost 15 or 20 years trying to write in Spanish” - an interview with Joan Margarit

  

A fascinating English-language interview with the Catalan poet (and architect) along with an enlightening podcast recording of some of his translated poetry from ABC Radio in Australia.

On Diagonal Avenue

Here is the woman who walks

With a chest like a man

Carrying two

Bowling balls in a bag

And here is the hair-lip man

Who pours two packets of sugar

Into his coffee cup

With two hands as two fists

Here is a different man

Who gesticulates

As if he is

Casting a fishing rod

Just behind is the group leader

In clandestine conversation:

“You said we were gonna do this thing.

Why you wanna back out now?

We came here together

And we gotta be strong

This is no time

To be chicken shits.”

                                 [B.Hetherington]