First Sketch

"There is no possible oblivion
at most, there's courage, and then time passing.
You have filled my days forever,
you are in all the things that I know:
in the air that lets me see the past, which you inhabit
in the sky covering long roads, which we traveled through
in the night that´s no longer hoping for a sunrise.
There is no possible oblivion,
at most, there´s courage
which is way different"
-Juan Carlos Bayona, Soledad llena de humo, (Smoke filled solitude)

Juan Carlos Bayona

Some poets, (our world is miserable) aren´t just unknown within their own country, but rather very unknown across all realms. As this is a blog within broad misery, it is inevitable that we share ignorance with most readers. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce a great artist which, if got his salary out of fame, would  have been dead long time ago.

Actually, he could be dead, since his last whereabouts are subject of controversy. We had a piece of that riddling, thrilling case, but it turned out to be as fake as bankers good intentions. So here we are: commenting on a complex situation that could well be false from start to ending.

However, mainstream media has refused to even begin a research on it, and this behavior is often related to hiding information as a result on powerful interests involving. But what´s more mysterious is that, with such a subtile sense of beauty, he is not part of literary pantheon somewhere, past or present.

Embrace yourselves, mortal filthy creatures, as you´ll gaze upon what our imageless friend Juan Carlos Bayona seemingly hacked from heaven´s kingdom.

In the colombian Andes

"They travel upon mules, but travel for last time.
The women seek along the way to be as blinded.
All day mules carry a big sorrow
leave aside a herd of crosses
where only stone reminds who are no longer.

They form them up as if were children,
and in the red prairie where their souls now aren´t
the form is yet faithful to way it burned.
The faces tarry deep, weary,
before acknowledging chaos.

Night passes spreading silent branches
and fear ignites fires while air smockers
that in this lips will never be again a secret.
Flames gild their byes in still mouths
which learn by now from ice and stone their silence.

The rain won´t know what blood is in them dousing
the rain over the roofs will fable battles,
catastrophies more noble than hate that blind us.

Those who haven´t born will also expire:
it is not dead, it´s crime what shake us,
the gash of anger there, where dream resided.

The lovely and deaf sky will not leave their mourning,
vaguely monstrous, the great temples will endure
even though life would fall by thousands
even if through sordid legions hell controled us.

And if from dust the lark again arouses,
nothing will erase the massive sureness
that price was high for slightest glory,
that this dream was close to fighting heaven.

Slow deceased of gold, you, the waisted money,
under nameless stones, pieces of planet,
your epitaph shall be green and winged life,
you rest under mystery, dremless dreamers,
while stars roll upon the large red mountains,
and that which we don´t grasp
                            make our lips tremble."
William Ospina, El país del viento (The wind country)

Hiroshima Haiku

"Every leaf
of ten long autumns
in an instant"
-William Ospina, ¿Con quién habla Virginia caminando hacia el agua?
 (Who is Virginia talking to walking toward water?)

William Ospina

It is most likely that the name titling this entry is unknow for you. If it is, and many reasons push me to believe so, then you are lucky and have been blessed by whatever deity enjoys the feature of your faith. And if none does, better off: chance is smiling at you.

This world counts with a vast crowd of anonimous, unpopular or unfairly unfamiliar geniuses, and I, as a big number of his readers, strongly hold this to be one. There is no significant data for you to read at Wikipedia, but the fact that he was born in Colombia: that entanglement of drug and war issues that, Wikipedia says, is located at northwestern South America.

That country, where padoxically never snows, has been a challenge for every writer who dared to born on it: Isolated from the world but being jailed on a problem filled world at once. Problems that concerns the entire world, though: to be solved need a major and agile undertanding of human universal history.

This is why I am very much pleased to present, translated, a worth reading work that has a start on a hugely sophisticated view of world and human history within such world. It is the task of this blog to satisfy righteousness by letting you, my reader, acknowledge light that, for merely language reasons, has been denied to you: this is a good sample and here it goes.

Chapter 73, first paragraph.

"Yes, but who will cure us from the muted fire, from the colorless fire that runs at dusk through the rue of the Huchette, going out of the rotten doorways, out of the little hallways, from the fire without image that licks the stones and lurks from the frames of doors, how will we be able to wash out his sweet burning that continues, that settles down to last allied to time and memory, to the sticky substances that hold us from this side, and that will burn us sweetly until let us calcined. So we better make a pact like cats or mosses, immediate befriend the husky voice doorkeepers, the pale and suffering creatures that stalk upon the windows playing with a dry branch. Burning like this relentlessly, bearing the central burn like the slow maturity of a fruit, be the fuel of a bonfire in this endless entanglement of stone, walk through the nights of our life with the obedience of blood throughout its blind circuit."

-Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch. 

Chapter 104

"Life, as a comment on something else we don´t reach, and which is there within reach of the jump that we don’t do.

Life, a ballet on a historic theme, a story on an experienced event, an experienced event on a real event.

Life, picture of the number, possession within darkness (woman, monster?), life, procurer of the death, splendid deck, tarot of forgotten keys that some gouty hands lower to a sad solitaire."
-Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch.

Rayuela´s (Hopscotch) 50th anniversary.

I can´t imagine a better start for this blog, given the fact that superstition is a major and prosper system of beliefs to which we are added to, than an entry on Rayuela (Hopscotch), withoccasion of the anniversary of its publication on 1963, since this will bring some very necessary luck to us and our associates.

It is a novel written by a frenchified Argentinian author called Julio Cortázar. As far as recently unclassified documents reveal, he had no treatment with John F. Kennedy or any U.S. Pentagon high commander, such as Allen Dulles. No doubt, however, that if those people would have been more interested in literature and less on invading Cuba, there would be no Rayuela.

Luckily for us, they were not, so it was free to be the epithet of experimental literature and the greatest effort in a style Revolution: It can be read in many ways, but mostly in two, the classic consecutive way or, happily, in an impish order that does not respond to logic but randomness and mystery.

Such is Cortazar´s specialty and intention: to destroy day-to-day life notion of tamed and well known reality by unveiling the Great Lie and Madness behind it; the fantasy that inhabits what seems almost necessary, given, taken: perfectly constructed custom.

Hopscotch has many dispensable chapters, as a serious revolution in style required. To his and its honor, and while my hands shiver on ecstasy, I shall translate two of those unnecessary yet essential chapters. Let´s wish him peaceful rest while we go sleepless reading his novel.

I

"And then God said, "let there be light"; and there was light"

-Genesis, first chapter.

Here you will find an English version of spanish written literature (also vice versa); mostly poetry, that, apparently, CIA doesn´t want you to read.

 Our main location is Ecuador, land of international refugees and jail for local journalists, and general manager's last name evokes winter. If there is some work you would like us to translate, I invite you to beg for it through a comment. 

No more to say, let there be poetry…