Bruce Weigl (Lorain, Ohio, EEUU, 1949). Poeta, narrador, traductor. En poesía ha publicado, entre otros títulos: Like a Sack Full of Old Quarrels (1976); A Romance. Pittsburgh (1979); The Monkey Wars (1984); Song of Napalm (1988); What Saves Us (1992) y Declensions in the Village of Chung Luong (2006). Es veterano de guerra y ha traducido a poetas vietnamitas al inglés. Ha sido nominado para el premio Pulitzer y ha obtenido importantes premios por su obra.
Publicaciones:
Poesía
Like a Sack Full of Old Quarrels. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Series, 1976.
A Romance. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.
The Monkey Wars. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.
Song of Napalm. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
What Saves Us. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1992. ISBN 978-0-8101-5013-3.
Sweet Lorain. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1996. ISBN 978-0-8101-5053-9.
Not on the Map. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1996.
Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems. New York: Grove Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-8021-3607-7.
After the Others. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern UP, 1999.
The unraveling strangeness: poems. Grove Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-8021-3938-2.
Declension in the village of Chung Luong. Ausable Press. 2006. ISBN 978-1-931337-31-1.
Traducciones
Thanh T. Nguyen, Bruce Weigl (1994). Poems from Captured Documents. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-0-87023-922-9.
Prosa
The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir. New York: Grove Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-8021-3805-7.
Canto del Napalm.
Después de la tormenta, después de que la lluvia acallara su golpeteo,
nos paramos en la puerta observando a los caballos
cruzar a paso lento y desganadamente la pastura en la colina.
Los miramos a través del mosquitero de la puerta,
nuestra visión alterada por la distancia
entonces pensé que había visto nubecitas de niebla
surgiendo alrededor de sus cascos,
cuando palidecieron
como perfiles recortados en el horizonte
alejándose de nosotros.
Los pastos no fueron nunca tan azules, tan
escarlatas; más allá de la pastura
los árboles mezclaron sus voces raspadas dentro del viento, las ramas
se cruzaron unas a otras en el firmamento como alambre de púas
pero vos dijiste que eran solamente ramas.
Muy bien. La tormenta detuvo sus golpes.
Estoy intentando decir esto de un modo directo: por una vez
yo estaba por completo en mis cabales para hacer una pausa y respirar
más allá de mis planes salvajes y después de la dura lluvia
le di mi espalda a los viejos maleficios. Finalmente
pude creer que se habían alejado de mi…
Sin embargo las ramas todavía son alambres
y los truenos el estruendo de la artillería,
ha pasado el tiempo y cuando cierro mis ojos
aún veo a la niña huyendo a la carrera de su aldea, el napalm
adherido a su vestido como jalea,
sus manos extendidas hacia nadie
que frente a ella aguarda en olas de ardiente calor.
Entonces para seguir viviendo,
para poder permanecer aquí a tu lado,
trato de imaginar que ella corre por el camino
y que en su interior se agitan alas hasta que se eleva
sobre la selva maloliente y su dolor
se alivia, y también el tuyo, y el mío.
Pero, la mentira da media vuelta, regresa.
La mentira funciona solamente durante
/el tiempo en que se demora en hablar
y la niña corre tan lejos
como se lo permite el napalm
hasta que sus tendones en llamas
y los crepitantes músculos se tensan
en esa su posición final.
Quemar cuerpos a la perfección, imagínatelo. Nada
podrá cambiar eso; ella arde detrás de mis ojos
y ni tu buen amor, ni el aire barrido por la lluvia,
ni el selvático verde de la pastura
extendiéndose frente a nosotros, podrán negarlo.
(versión Esteban Moore)
Song of Napalm
for my wife
After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding,
We stood in the doorway watching horses
Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.
We stared through the black screen,
Our vision altered by the distance
So I thought I saw a mist
Kicked up around their hooves when they faded
Like cut-out horses
Away from us.
The grass was never more blue in that light, more
Scarlet; beyond the pasture
Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches
Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire
But you said they were only branches.
Okay. The storm stopped pounding.
I am trying to say this straight: for once
I was sane enough to pause and breathe
Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain
I turned my back on the old curses. I believed
They swung finally away from me ...
But still the branches are wire
And thunder is the pounding mortar,
Still I close my eyes and see the girl
Running from her village, napalm
Stuck to her dress like jelly,
Her hands reaching for the no one
Who waits in waves of heat before her.
So I can keep on living,
So I can stay here beside you,
I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings
Beat inside her until she rises
Above the stinking jungle and her pain
Eases, and your pain, and mine.
But the lie swings back again.
The lie works only as long as it takes to speak
And the girl runs only as far
As the napalm allows
Until her burning tendons and crackling
Muscles draw her up
into that final position
Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing
Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes
And not your good love and not the rain-swept air
And not the jungle green
Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.
Apparition of the Exile
There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended.
From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.
Elegy for Peter
That night we drank warm whiskey
in our parked car
beyond woods now lost to the suburbs,
I fell in love with you.
What waited was the war
like a bloody curtain,
and a righteous moment
when the lovely boy’s
spine was snapped,
then the long falling into hell.
But lately, you’ve been calling me
back through the years of bitter silence
to tell me of another river of blood
and of the highland’s
howl at dusk of human voices
blasted into ecstasy.
That night in sweet Lorain
we drank so long and hard
we raised ourselves
above the broken places,
mill fires burning
red against the sky. Why
is there is no end
to this unraveling.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario