Translated from Spanish by Orlando Ricardo Menes

 

 

My bedroom shut, and I traveling
in dreamful beaches where I fish
for ancient myths, and a coral reef raises
its future soul that will write books.

(The man, his head disproportionate,
leaps on lightning rods but yearns
for his soft mud where the snug soul
allowed the animal to be made first.)

The narrow peephole channels
a miniscule hand of the burning sun,
which shakes off the dream.

Aflame, my dark bedroom has grown
immense with light, and knocking outside
its window of fire is the New World.

|||

 

Alfonsina Storni (May 29th 1892 – October 25th 1938) was an Argentine poet and playwright born in Switzerland to Italian and Swiss parents. She is the author of major works such as The Disquietude of the Rosebush, Irremediably, Ocre, and World of Seven Wells. She was known as a Modern Feminist of the Modernist period and was widely celebrated and considered controversial in Argentina.

Orlando Ricardo Menes is a Peruvian-born Cuban poet, editor, and translator. He earned a BA and an MA at the University of Florida and a PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The author of several poetry collections, including Memoria (2019), Heresies (2015), Prairie Schooner Book Prize-winner Fetish (2013), Furia (2005), and Rumba Atop the Stones (2001), he is also the editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (2003). Menes has translated the work of Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni and Cuban poet José Kozer. 

 

“América’s Sun” was first published in TLR, Winter 2008, Vol. 51 No. 2.