excerpts from Breviario [“Apparent Breviary”] (2006)
Translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia
1
Divide the veins
I see is less accessible than
depth
of air
from my place
I've seen
that indeed air has no
velocity.
Then air,
Lord.
2
Every time I see the sun I believe in
an opposite. Necessarily
the true absence that extreme
liberty
my hands, they reply: blood doesn't kill.
It remains the same tiger,
who trembles again
in my hands
3
Why.
Why.
Is there nothing in the inner myth?
I remember the moderation that is not in
blood,
that foreign myth. Man breathes me
the power of birds, birds
do not breathe
the power
of birds.
Blood
Lord
4
Why then a serenity in the
bushes in the cats
every day
midday the night that warns
it meddles its ballast
objects that remain it's true
perfect
(I seek that measure where water
does not remain
forever. That measure of water
that measure where water
pours
with no general
song no prose
With no poem
Poems, Lord
7
It was said: I prefer to watch
screens where you
ordinarily watch the center, the
totality
I
the corners. Dead places where
wonders
happen
Gastón Fernández Carrera (1940-1997) was born in Lima, Peru. He studied literature and law in Peru, which he left in the mid-60s, eventually settling in Belgium, where he took a degree in art history. A professional scholar who published mostly in French, his literary work in Spanish was all but unknown in his own lifetime.
KM Cascia is the translator of Mexican modernist Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems (World Poetry, 2023). Born in Michigan City, Indiana, Cascia left school at the age of 17 and picked up Spanish working in restaurant kitchens in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Calque and Asymptote, they have published two collections of their own poems and their translations of Latin American poetry have appeared in numerous magazines, including Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous.
World Poetry Review 