LI-YOUNG LEE [10.411]

Li-Young Lee 

(李立扬, pinyin : Lǐ LIYANG) (nacido el 19 de agosto 1957) Es un poeta americano. Nació en Yakarta, Indonesia, de  padres chinos. Su abuelo materno fue Yuan Shikai, primer presidente republicano de China, que intentó hacerse emperador. El padre de Lee, era médico personal de Mao Zedong, mientras vivió en China, después se trasladó con su familia a Indonesia, donde ayudó a fundar la Universidad de Gamaliel. Su padre fue exiliado y pasó 19 meses en un campo de prisioneros de Indonesia en Macau. En 1959 la familia Lee huyó del país para escapar del sentimiento anti-chino y después de una caminata de cinco años a través de Hong Kong y Japón, que se estableció en los Estados Unidos en 1964. Li-Young Lee asistió a la Universidad de Pittsburgh y a la Universidad de Arizona y la Universidad Estatal de Nueva York en Brockport.

OBRA:

Poesía:

1986: Rose. Rochester: BOA Editions Limited, ISBN 0-918526-53-1

1990: The City In Which I Love You. Rochester: BOA Editions Limited, ISBN 0-918526-83-3

2001: Book of My Nights. Rochester: BOA Editions Limited, ISBN 1-929918-08-9

2008: Behind My Eyes. New York: WW Norton & Co., ISBN 0-393-33481-3

Memorias: 

The Wingéd Seed: A Remembrance. (hardcover) New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. ASIN: B000NGRB2G (paperback) St. Paul: Ruminator, 1999. ISBN 1-886913-28-5

Pequeño Padre

Enterré a mi padre

en el cielo.

Desde entonces, los pájaros

lo limpian y peinan cada mañana

y lo tapan con las sábanas hasta arriba

cada noche.

Enterré a mi padre bajo tierra.

Desde entonces, mis escaleras

sólo van hacia abajo

y toda la tierra se convirtió en una casa

cuyos cuartos son las horas, cuyas puertas

permanecen abiertas a la tarde, recibiendo

a un invitado tras otro.

A veces veo detrás de ellos

las mesas dispuestas para un casamiento.

Enterré a mi padre en mi corazón.

Ahora crece dentro mío mi extraño hijo,

mi pequeña raíz que no bebe leche,

pequeño y pálido pie hundido en la noche,

pequeño reloj que sale recién mojado

del fuego, pequeña uva, padre del futuro

vino, un hijo fruto de su propio hijo,

pequeño padre que rescato con mi vida.

Little Father

I buried my father

in the sky.

Since then, the birds

clean and comb him every morning  

and pull the blanket up to his chin  

every night.

I buried my father underground.  

Since then, my ladders

only climb down,

and all the earth has become a house  

whose rooms are the hours, whose doors  

stand open at evening, receiving  

guest after guest.

Sometimes I see past them

to the tables spread for a wedding feast.

I buried my father in my heart.

Now he grows in me, my strange son,  

my little root who won’t drink milk,  

little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,  

little clock spring newly wet

in the fire, little grape, parent to the future  

wine, a son the fruit of his own son,  

little father I ransom with my life.

A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? Which childhood?

The one that didn’t last?

The one in which you learned to be afraid

of the boarded-up well in the backyard

and the ladder in the attic?

The one presided over by armed men

in ill-fitting uniforms

strolling the streets and alleys,

while loudspeakers declared a new era,

and the house around you grew bigger,

the rooms farther apart, with more and more

people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other

from their frames in the hallway.

The cooking pots said your name

each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister

in games of rescue and abandonment.

You learned to lie still so long

the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled

safety of a wing. Look! In

run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,

turning over the furniture,

smashing your mother’s china.

Don’t fall asleep.

Each act opens with your mother

reading a letter that makes her weep.

Each act closes with your father fallen

into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,

still a child, and slow to grow.

Still talking to God and thinking the snow

falling is the sound of God listening,

and winter is the high-ceilinged house

where God measures with one eye

an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,

and counts on many fingers

all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?

The one from which you’ll never escape? You,

so slow to know

what you know and don’t know.

Still thinking you hear low song

in the wind in the eaves,

story in your breathing,

grief in the heard dove at evening,

and plentitude in the unseen bird

tolling at morning. Still slow to tell

memory from imagination, heaven   

from here and now,

hell from here and now,

death from childhood, and both of them

from dreaming.

Arise, Go Down

It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts   

that brushed my face and I opened my eyes   

to see from a cleft in rock His backside;

it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep   

my eyes closed and stand perfectly still   

in the garden till it leaves me alone,

not to contemplate how this century   

ends and the next begins with no one

I know having seen God, but to wonder

why I get through most days unscathed, though I   

live in a time when it might be otherwise,   

and I grow more fatherless each day.

For years now I have come to conclusions   

without my father’s help, discovering

on my own what I know, what I don’t know,

and seeing how one cancels the other.

I've become a scholar of cancellations.   

Here, I stand among my father’s roses

and see that what punctures outnumbers what

consoles, the cruel and the tender never

make peace, though one climbs, though one descends

petal by petal to the hidden ground   

no one owns. I see that which is taken   

away by violence or persuasion.

The rose announces on earth the kingdom   

of gravity. A bird cancels it.   

My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything

might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.   

My father said, Never take your both eyes   

off of the world, before he rocked me.

All night we waited for the knock

that would have signalled, All clear, come now;   

it would have meant escape; it never came.

I didn’t make the world I leave you with,   

he said, and then, being poor, he left me   

only this world, in which there is always

a family waiting in terror

before they’re rended, this world wherein a man   

might arise, go down, and walk along a path

and pause and bow to roses, roses

his father raised, and admire them, for one moment   

unable, thank God, to see in each and

every flower the world cancelling itself.