Mario Melendez [Chile]

 

Poetic Art
 
A cow grazes in our memory
blood escapes from the teats
the landscape is killed by a shot
 
The cow insists on its routine
its tail scares away the boredom
the landscape revives in slow motion
 
The cow abandons the landscape
we continue hearing the lowing
our memory grazes now
in that immense loneliness
 
The landscape leaves our memory
the words change name
we are left weeping
on the blank page
 
The cow grazes now in the emptiness
the words are mounted on her
the language makes fun of us

 
(Translated by Ron Hudson)
 

 
The Messenger
 
She took the words out for a walk
and the words bit the children
and the children told their parents
and the parents loaded their guns
and opened fire upon the words
and the words whimpered, yelped
slowly licking their blind wounds
until at last they fell face down
on the bloody ground
And then came death
dressed in her best garment
and stopped at the poet’s house
to call him with desperate cries
and the poet opened the door
without suspecting what it was about
and saw death suspended by her shadow
sobbing
“Accompany me,” death said to him
“because today we are in mourning.”
“And who has died?” asked the poet
“Well, you have,” responded death
and extended her arms
to give him her sympathy 

 
(Translated by Ron Hudson)

 

Last Minute Precautions
 
I must be careful of the worms
when they bury me
most certainly
they will speak badly of me
they will spit on my poems
and urinate on the fresh flowers
that will adorn my tomb
It may well be the case
that they even devour my bones
tear out my intestines
or at the height of injustice
rob my gold tooth
And all this because in life
never did I write about them

 
(Translated by Ron Hudson)
 
 
 
Scars of War
 
At times
when I get drunk
words take me home
on an old wooden tricycle
And far from removing my shoes
and putting me to bed
as would normally happen in these cases
they leave me sprawled in the garden
covered with ants
and with my face stuck to
the garden lamp
“That’s what you get for writing bad poems”
they tell me
and go off singing and laughing
hugging
my last beer 
 
(Translated by Ron Hudson)
 

 

Author’s Bionote:

 *Mario Meléndez is a Chilean poet born in Linares (1971),  but he has lived in Mexico and now in Italy. Among his books: “Underground Flight”, “The Paper Circus”, “Death’s Days Are Numbered”, “Waiting for Perec”, “Garden of Rubble” and “The Loneliness Wizard.” Some of his poems have been translated to various languages. In 2012 he moved to Italy and the following year he received the Presidential Medal of the Italian Republic, awarded by the Fondazione Internazionale Don Luigi di Liegro. In 2015 he was included in the anthology “The Open Canon. Recent Spanish Language Poetry” (Madrid, Visor). In 2017 some of poems were translated to English and published in the renowned “Poetry Magazine” from Chicago. In 2022, RIL editores published his collected work under the title “Notes for a Legend” and in the anthology “Requiem for Suicidal Fruit”. He is considered to be one of the more important and original voices of the new Latin American poetry. He has the last name of a neoclassical poet and, nevertheless, the quiver of his poetry contains very modern arrows that point to the heart of the 21st century. The beauty that inhabits his verses is different, perhaps unique. It is made of surprises, of more or less sophisticated language games (depending on the objective that is posed in each verse). His poetry is a very Pan-American poetry, very telluric, but at the same time very delicately surreal. His poems are like a painting by Magritte that would have been painted up there in the Andean mountain range, in a nest of condors.” (Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Spanish poet and essayist).
 

(Photo by the Pulitzer Prize winner Marco Ugarte)