>> I'm very glad to be here and I thank all of you for being with me.
I want to thank the people sponsoring this event.
I want to thank Gail Browne from the Poetry Center for the invitation
and for the hospitality that she's shown -- She's shown Álvaro and I, all these days.
Sorry. My voice is very lowsome, is that better?
Yeah? And I want to thank Lisa Bowden and I especially want to thank Wendy Burk,
who I've been working with on the translation of these poems for the last few years.
I've decided to read one poem from the collection that's published in Kore Press
and then the rest of the poems come from the selected poems that Wendy has been working on.
I'm going to read seven poems of -- If it becomes too long, I'll exclude one of the poems.
The first one I'm going to start with is called Snow, Nieve,
and it comes from the book published by Kore Press.
This poem is a poem about snow but, in a larger sense,
it's a poem about imagining an experience and then living the experience.
And the experience here is about snow and literary snow.
There's a Cuban poet called José Lezama Lima who is the poet that I mention in this poem
and this Cuban poet never left Cuba, never traveled and of course he never saw snow.
And, as you know, in Cuba, it never snows.
And his poetry is filled with images of snow.
So this book is about that kind of life where you live, where you live in metaphor
and you don't necessarily live in life and it's called Nieve.
Sorry. I'm going to put on my glasses which I just bought.
Nieve. Lo más extraño de la nieve es no haberla visto,
pero convocarla como un hábito del asombro o una condición de ciertas palabras.
La nieve solícita de Lezama, por ejemplo.
Su nieve perpleja en el trigo, su festón enhebrado de nieve, su pulpa cortesana,
sus insectos ciegos a pique por el flanco frío, sus nieves declamadas, sus nieves invitadas,
sus nieves que escrutan gamos en el bosque y follajes cubiertos por la red de una luz,
tan tenue como la falacia del invierno fijo en las palmeras que se deshace con el primer golpe
de sol, su rastro de arena y la brisa canicular pintada de verde.
¿Qué es esa nieve retenida por sus paradojas?
La nieve de alguien íntima e intransmisible o la nieve del mundo?
Una analogía redundante.
Si el mármol es parásito de la nieve, no a la inversa,
la cercanía blanca es tan absoluta que entonces se cancela y no hay conocimiento,
pero con otras formas, con otros hechos, el símil puede tener la consistencia de un acto.
Nunca he visto el muérdago, su amarilla natividad,
sus bayas pálidas en el roble, su contorno suelto y sin corona.
Sé que hay umbrales precisos donde impone la costumbre de un beso o épocas en medio del
verano próximas a la sequía en que arde en una fogata por sacrificio o por memoria.
Según los druidas, que para mi son como la nieve,
el muérdago lo cura todo, es sabio e inmortal.
Lo mismo puede decirse de cualquier cosa que se desconoce.
El tojo en el medio día de un monte quemado,
el baobab en la tórrida planicie o los tisanuros en un hoyo distante del viento.
La nieve, a veces, no tiene linderos, redime castas, fechas,
hace ritos en la tierra que invierten la simetría de lo que buscan los ojos.
Entonces las quimeras ya no se miran tras la reja como antes.
Y así ocurre de repente.
Cuando descubrí la nieve de verdad, la nieve sola, ya no importaba.
>> Can you hear me?
Snow. The strangest thing about snow is not having seen it, to summon it as a habit
of astonishment or a condition of certain words.
Lezama's solicitous snow, for example, his snow perplexed on the wheat.
His braided festoon of snow, its courtesan flesh.
His flying insects sinking into the cold flank.
His recited snow, his invited snow.
His snow that scrutinizes bucks in the forest and the foliage covered by a network of light,
as tenuous as the fallacy of winter fixed among the palms which dissolves
with the sun's first shock, its trail of sand and the sultry breeze painted green.
What is that snow held together by its paradox.
Is it someone's snow, intimate and intransmissible?
Or is it the snow of the world?
A redundant analogy, if marble is snow's parasite and not the other way around,
the white proximity is so absolute, it negates itself and there is no knowledge.
But with other forms, with other facts, the simile may have the consistency of an act.
I have never seen mistletoe, its yellow nativity,
its berries pale on the oak, its loose, groundless form.
I know there are certain thresholds where it seals the tradition of a kiss, where at times,
at midsummer, close to drought when it blazes out of sacrifice or memory.
The Druids believed--for me, they too are like snow--
that mistletoe cures everything is wise and immortal.
You could say the same for anything unknown.
Gorse bush at noon, on the burned mountain, baobab of torrid plains
or silverfish in a distant hole of wind.
Sometimes snow has no borders.
It redeems castes, dates, creates rites on Earth
to invert the symmetry of what our eyes seek.
Then the chimeras are not seen from behind the fence as they were.
And that's how suddenly it happens, when I discovered the true snow,
the snow itself, it didn't matter anymore.
>> I've already seen mistletoe.
Thanks for coming to Tucson.
Some years ago.
So that poem's life.
But I -- And just a few days ago, Álvaro and I went to the Grand Canyon and we were snowed in.
It was really grounded by snow.
So that's why I read this poem because it's a poem that makes sense and doesn't make sense,
in a way, because my own experience has made it, has made it more of a metaphor of its own.
So it's a metaphor of a metaphor now.