Translated from the Asturian by Robin Munby
I too know a country.
A country full of wakeful nights,
where witches sing from horseback
when their children leave home.
A place devoid of dreams.
A country inhabited by birds
with a tendency to flight
who gave me their dramatic tongue,
written down in pencil, towards fear.
You know it too:
a country marked by kindling,
apron, the potatoes
you never once gathered,
the trees whose leaves
your gran crunched underfoot.
A country that taught you
smile and shiver.
A country where it rains white rabbits
from a magic hat,
a world now so very far away from you,
a world with the smell of old age,
but a world you carry with you still.
A country whose name was lost
when she remembered it no more.
Of all my sins,
absolve me of the dying owls
this spring.
Because I too am an owl,
and I have nothing but the feathers to show for it.
Un mundo
Ángeles Santos
So that I could be here, someone had to hold nothing
but a broom, a coffee pot,
a straw basket.
So that I could have clean and empty hands,
someone had to know no more than the passing of clouds,
the shade of the patio.
So that I could know them, I had to know nothing,
always on the verge,
of mother, of man.
So that I could be here, Shahrazad
had to die many deaths,
swallow her tongue, my roar,
all those people, inventing a world.
Today was your birthday,
but you didn’t know it.
You’re a child,
and I’m old Shahrazad looking at you,
calling you my little sweetie,
kissing your wrinkled face,
your little girl’s face.
I hope that in the life to come
nothing’s going to hurt you. You have
all the days in the world, and I have none.
I am preceded by women who work
with the earth itself. Earth,
that thing so frail it will never bring forth gold.
They knead it, stroke its texture.
They invent it.
I’m nothing but a mirror,
a persistence of old imagination.
Raquel F. Menéndez (Vallouta, Salas, 1993) is a poet and academic. She is the ‘Juan de la Cierva’ postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alcalá, Spain, specialising in the relationship between gender and authorship in contemporary Spanish literature. Her Spanish-language poetry collection Libélula was published in 2013, and the Asturian-language collection El llibru póstumu de Sherezade, awarded the Nené Losada Rico prize for Asturian poetry, was published by Impronta in 2017.
Robin Munby (Liverpool, 1991) is a literary translator based in Madrid. His translations from Spanish, Russian and Asturian have appeared in publications including Wasafiri Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, World Literature Today, Poetry Ireland Review and The Glasgow Review of Books. His short story ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’ appeared in the spring 2023 issue of Asymptote and in December 2023 he was the inaugural resident of the Residencia Lliteraria Xixón in Asturias.
World Poetry Review 