Federico Diaz-Granados [Colombia]

 

 The Rush of an Instant

Time was right in its eagerness in settling in at its convenience
and in having its rituals and hostilities.
 
Now I understand its lateness and stammers and its promptness for wise choices,
that obstinance for fixing a few words in one extreme of infancy
and some others in a corner of this hoarse street
that so strongly resembles life, full of surprises and silences.
 
So forgive me for so many late hours.
for summoning you during nights of resentment and omens for heaping together ruins and everyday problems in the
same drawer
between the exhaustion of the day and the stubborn music of silence.
 
Time was right in its rhythm and life in having its enthusiasm to stay here
with all the rush of an instant.
 
So forgive me for my haste
for not knowing the grammar and the words of a forgotten language
for having lost notebooks, keys and the old song’s tune and ashes as if in time’s eagerness
each day, no matter the hour, dreams became lost.
 
(Translation by Caroline Withcomb and Alexa Jeffress)
 
 
       Goodbye Lenin
 
As a child I sometimes pretended to be Cossack.
Other times frolicked about like a Komsomol or cosmonaut.
 
And my childhood happened like this:
the Tsar’s wars
in a courtyard without snow or birch trees, steppes or burning villages.
Sometimes I was Kasparov or Misha the bear
and I recreated love stories on the Trans-Siberian railway.
 
My father’s voice gave accounts of Matryoshkas and samovars
and of Lenin’s mausoleum under an ultraviolet light. of the monuments to Pushkin and Maxim Gorky
and of the white nights of Leningrad.
 
It was the summer of 1985
and through shortwaves they talked about perestroika. They exchanged the anthem of the Red Army for U2 songs tales of pioneers for a fire in Chernobyl.
 
And neither the Cossacks, Komsomols, nor the cosmonauts returned to my room
on that night when my mother said goodnight
in a soft voice so she didn’t awake the whole house while the last light of my childhood
turned off forever.
 
(Translation by Caroline Withcomb and Alexa Jeffress)
 
 
 
              Emergency Exit
 
                                                                  We emerge from love like from a plane crash.
                                                             CRISTINA PERI ROSSI
 
We emerge from love like from a movie sometimes quickly
or ready to replay memorable images or soundtracks or prepared to take the bus or drink a coffee
that erases that last scene etched in our retinas. Sometimes we emerge before the end, unsettled or bothered
always with our tickets ripped.
 
Sometimes we emerge from love like from a train or plane, eagerly and silently, full of packages and useless gifts on our way to wait for similarly colored suitcases
and look for a taxi or a familiar face to pick us up or a driver that searches for us in the crowd
with a sign that bears our name in rushed strokes.
 
I emerge from a poem in the same way without words and with a dry heart
full of secret anniversaries and lost treasures
drafts of losses, hoarse voices and inconclusive moments.
 
That’s why love is like the world, the movies, the train, a plane or a poem:
it emerges in the same way and through the same door: with ripped tickets
tripping on suitcases and clumsy travelers and looking back between haste and urgency.
 
(Translation by Caroline Withcomb and Alexa Jeffress)
 

 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Federico Diaz Granados (Bogota, Colombia, 1974). Poet, essayist, and one of the most important disseminators of culture in Colombia. He is the director of the Biblioteca de los Fundadores del Gimnasio Moderno and of its cultural events. He organizes and directs the Festival Internacional de Literatura: Las líneas de su mano. He has published the fol-lowing books of poetry: “Las voces del fuego” (1995), “La casa del viento” (2000), “Hospedaje de paso” (2003) and “Las prisas del instante” (2015). His poetry has appeared in the anthologies: “Álbum de los adioses” (2006), “La última noche del mundo” (2007), “Las horas olvidadas” (2010) and “Adiós a Lenin” (2017). He has prepared the following anthologies of new Colombian poetry: “Oscuro es el canto de la lluvia” (1997), “Inventario a contraluz” (2001), “Doce poetas jóvenes de Colombia” (1970-1981) and “Antología de poesía contemporánea de México y Colombia” (2011). In 2012 and 2016 he published two books of essays: “La poesía como talismán”, and “El oficio de recordar (Escritos sobre poesía y otras prosas reunidas)”. In 2014 Ocean Sur published “Resistencia en la tierra” (an an-thology of social and political poetry by new poets in Spain and Latin America). His poetry has been translated into various languages, with the particularly outstanding Italian editions of “Le ore dimenticate” (Raffaelli, translation by Emilio Coco, 2015), “Le urgenze dell’istante” (Edizioni Fili d’Aquilone, translation by Alessio Brandolini, 2017) and “La soglia dei sog-ni” (Raffaelli editore, translation by Gianni Darconza, 2017), in addition to “Sortie de secours” (Ladrones del tiempo, transla-tion by Stéphane Chaumet, 2017) and “Roadhouse” (Valparaíso USA, translation by Jason Ehrenzeller, 2017).