Kelsi made reference to Spit Temple,
which was published in 2012.
And those are transcriptions of performances of Cecilia Vicuña,
which are ephemeral, as many performances are.
But there are also just performance notes.
So the only way to really capture
them besides making them available online--
and some of them are now--
was to transcribe them.
And I wanted to read part of a transcription.
So this performance was in English.
So it's not that it's translated from Spanish to English.
But it's transcribed.
And in some cases, notes are given when there
are multilingual elements.
So I'm going to start midway in the performance
when she says, "you know"--
so this is 2001, September 29, 2001.
"You know, the towers disappeared,
and they became this white light going up.
And I didn't realize, of course, any of this.
But poetry has this bad--
abit-- how do you pronounce, habit, hmm--
of saying things before they happen.
You know, it's a scary thing.
And you try not to.
But in any case, it's not up to you.
It's up to something else.
And so I want to read you some poems that
were written, here it says '97, so that I hope it must be true.
And one of them is a very sad story.
And at a few blocks from my place-- actually,
only a block and a half, this story actually happened.
An Ecuadorian migrant worker was digging
a hole for Con Edison, hmm, and apparently he felt very tired.
And he took a little nap at the end of the hole.
And one of his coworkers came with this huge machine
with tons of rubble.
And nobody took notice of the little migrant
worker sleeping under and threw all the rubble on top of him.
Nobody noticed.
And he had been gone.
Nobody-- none of his work, none of his coworkers-- missed him.
They closed the hole, put cement on it.
Night came, and he was missed at home by his brother.
And his brother came to the workplace and said,
'where is my brother Luis?'
'Your brother Luis?'
Nobody even remembered him.
And this is very telling.
Because this is like our position,
the position of the little dark ones.
Nobody even notices whether we are or we are not there.
And this man, the brother insisted,
'here, he was here in this hole.'
And they fought him and said, 'no, he's not.
He probably disappeared.
He went somewhere else.
If he was here, we don't remember,' denying the whole
thing until he pressed, he pressed, he pressed.
And finally, they opened the hole
and there he was, Luis, crushed like this.
Of course, he was dead."
So this poem is in memory of Luis Gomez.
"Escombro y olvido, sueño malderido--
perdón-- el enterrado vivo, el hombre deshecho, sin cuerpo,
ni abrigo.
Viajando en el ruido, el hombre deshecho,
viajando en el ruido."
"Forgotten rubble, wounded dream, you are discarded alive.
Man undone, no body, no warmth.
Noise in transit, discarded man, undone you are."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So the end part of that transcription is a translation
of a poem of Vicuña's that I translated.
And then she wove it into the performance, which is something
that she often did.