Por José Luís Justes Amador
Calm was the day and through the trembling air, /Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. (En calma estaba el día y por el tembloroso aire / Café y naranjas sobre la soleada silla.), así comienza “To a Waterfowl” de John Ashbery. El primer verso es de Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599), el segundo de Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).
Un cento, ejercicio que consiste, única y exclusivamente, en componer un poema con líneas que salen de otros poemas, sin embargo, no está tan cultivado en la poesía actual. En latín cento significa una manta hecha de retazos y en italiano cien. Normalmente, como su nombre indica, es, era, especialmente durante la época latina y el Barroco, un poema de cien versos de otro poeta, o poetas, seleccionados y unidos como homenaje.
David Lehman (Nueva York, 1948) es poeta (entre sus libros, When a Woman Loves a Man, 2005, The Evening Sun, 2002, The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry, 2000, y An Alternative to Speech,1986) y crítico (The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, 1998, estudio de la “escuela de Nueva York”).
Además, es el editor de The Best American Poetry, que él mismo inició en 1988 y editor general de la serie “Poets on Poetry” de la Universidad de Michigan.
Para el lector curioso, cada una de las líneas de The Oxford Cento pertenece, respectivamente, a los siguientes poetas y poemas:
Laura Riding, ''The World and I.'', Robert Frost, ''Two Tramps in Mud Time.'', Edward Taylor, ''The Preface'' to ''God's Determinations Touching His Elect.'', W. H. Auden, ''In Memory of Sigmund Freud.'', James Merrill, ''Self-Portrait in TyvekTM Windbreaker.'', Edgar Allan Poe, ''Annabel Lee.'', John Ashbery, ''Decoy.'', Hart Crane, ''The Broken Tower.'', Langston Hughes, ''Good Morning,'' from ''Montage of a Dream Deferred.'', Sylvia Plath, ''Daddy'.', Robert Frost, '' 'Out, Out --' '', Elinor Wylie, ''The Puritan's Ballad.'', Gertrude Stein, ''If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.'', Richard Wilbur, ''Lying.'', Elizabeth Bishop, ''Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.'', H. Phelps Putnam, ''Bill Gets Burned.'', Ralph Waldo Emerson, ''Give All to Love.'', Hart Crane, ''The Tunnel.'', John Berryman, ''Dream Song No. 23, T. S. Eliot, ''The Waste Land.'', Stephen Crane, ''In the Desert.'', Conrad Aiken, from ''Preludes.'', Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ''The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.'', Jean Garrigue, ''Song in Sligo.'', Herman Melville, ''After the Pleasure Party.', Emily Dickinson, ''I Cannot Live With You.'', Emily Dickinson, ''I Cannot Live With You.'', Robert Lowell, ''For the Union Dead.'', Anthony Hecht, ''The Dover Bitch.'', Jean Toomer, ''Georgia Dusk.'', Robert Frost, ''Directive.'', Walt Whitman, ''Song of Myself.'', Edna St. Vincent Millay, ''Rendezvous.'', Anne Bradstreet, ''The Author to Her Book.'', A. R. Ammons, ''Still.'', Theodore Roethke, ''Dolor.'', Marianne Moore, ''What Are Years?'', Wallace Stevens, ''Sunday Morning.'', Ralph Waldo Emerson, ''Concord Hymn.'', Edwin Arlington Robinson, ''Mr. Flood's Party.'', Wallace Stevens, ''The Idea of Order at Key West.'', Kenneth Fearing, ''Green Light.'', Walt Whitman, ''As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life.'', John Ashbery, ''The Instruction Manual.'', Kenneth Koch, ''The Circus (1975).'', Billy Collins, ''Workshop.'', Galway Kinnell, ''Hitchhiker.'', Robert Pinsky, ''From the Childhood of Jesus.'', Charles Simic, ''Country Fair.''
The Oxford
David Lehman
If the sun shines but approximately
Only where love and need are one,
Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Younger than their kids -- jeans, ski-pants, sneakers.
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them.
And so it was I entered the broken world.
Good morning, Daddy!
Every woman adores a Fascist,
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart.
When I am slitting a fish's head,
Would he like it if I told him?
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened,
Everything only connected by ''and'' and ''and”.
There are no flowers in Hell.
Give all to love,
A burnt match skating in a urinal
That never lost a vote (O Adlai mine).
What you get married for if you don't want children?
And because it is my heart,
Above, below, around, and in my heart,
Blessed be God! For he created Death!
And rock-grained, rack-ruined battlements.
One's sex asserts itself. Desire
And that White Sustenance --
Despair-- in aSahara of snow,
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort.
Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.
And I wish I did not feel like your mother.
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
There is nothing lowly in the universe.
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
The sea in a chasm, struggling to be
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
Where strangers would have shut the many doors,
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen by the light of day,
What is yours is mine my father.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.
And this is not as good a poem as The Circus
Especially the lines that are spoken in the voice of the mouse.
He opened the car door and looked back
And clapped his hands and shouted to the birds.And that was the whole show.
Only where love and need are one,
Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Younger than their kids -- jeans, ski-pants, sneakers.
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them.
And so it was I entered the broken world.
Good morning, Daddy!
Every woman adores a Fascist,
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart.
When I am slitting a fish's head,
Would he like it if I told him?
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened,
Everything only connected by ''and'' and ''and”.
There are no flowers in Hell.
Give all to love,
A burnt match skating in a urinal
That never lost a vote (O Adlai mine).
What you get married for if you don't want children?
And because it is my heart,
Above, below, around, and in my heart,
Blessed be God! For he created Death!
And rock-grained, rack-ruined battlements.
One's sex asserts itself. Desire
And that White Sustenance --
Despair-- in a
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort.
Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.
And I wish I did not feel like your mother.
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
There is nothing lowly in the universe.
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
The sea in a chasm, struggling to be
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
Where strangers would have shut the many doors,
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen by the light of day,
What is yours is mine my father.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.
And this is not as good a poem as The Circus
Especially the lines that are spoken in the voice of the mouse.
He opened the car door and looked back
And clapped his hands and shouted to the birds.And that was the whole show.
El Cento de Oxford
Traducción: José Luis Justes Amador
Si el sol no brilla sino aproximadamente
Sólo donde amor y necesidad son uno,
¿Quién en esta bolera jugó con el sol?
¿De quién hablaremos? Pues mueren cada día
Más jóvenes que sus hijos: mezclilla, pantalones de esquiar, tenis.
Y no se alzan las estrellas aunque vea sus ojos brillantes
Apartándose, ambos, de la cama.
Y así fue que entré a este mundo roto.
¡Buenos días, padre!
Toda mujer adora un fascista
Que trabaje como hombre aunque de corazón sea un niño.
Cuando descabezo el pescado,
¿Le gustará si se lo digo?
Resulta extraño que algo sea más sí mismo cuando nos gusta.
Todo se conecta solamente con "y" y "y".
No hay flores en el infierno.
Dale todo al amor,
Una cerilla que nada patinando en el orinal,
Que nunca pierde un voto (oh Adlai mío).
¿Para qué te casaste si no quieres tener hijos?
Y porque este es mi corazón,
Arriba, abajo, alrededor y en mi corazón,
Bendito sea Dios que creó la muerte
Y los lugares rocosos repletos de ruinas.
El sexo propio se afirma solo. Deseo
Y este Blanco Sostén --
Desesperación -- en un Sahara de nieve,
Una especie de último recurso, lastimero y cómico.
Mientras los hombres, con vestigios de pompa,
Se lamentan por aquellas nimiedades que podrían enorgullecerlos.
Nos herimos como se hieren novio y novia
Y desearía no sentirme como si fuera tu madre.
Tú, deforme descendencia de mi débil mente,
No hay nada bajo en el universo.
He conocido la inexorable tristeza de los lápices,
El amor en una grieta, luchando por ser
Inmutable aunque tan semejante a nuestra agónica tierra,
En este banco verde, junto a este dulce arroyo,
Donde los extraños hubieran cerrado las muchas puertas
Excepto aquella que ella canta y, cantando, construye.
Oído en la calle, en un sueño visto, oído en el parque, visto a la luz del día.
Lo que es tuyo es mío, padre mío.
¿Qué queda por hacer salvo quedarse? Y no podemos.
Y este no es tan buen poema como “El Circo”
Especialmente los versos que se declaman con voz ratonil.
Abrió la puerta del carro y miró hacia atrás
Y dio una palmada y les gritó a los pájaros.
Y eso fue todo.
José Luís Justes Amador. (Zaragoza, España, 1969) Estudió filología inglesa en las universidades de Zaragoza y Cambridge. Actualmente reside en Aguascalientes (la verdadera "tierra adentro" de López Velarde) y combina la docencia con la traducción. Tiene publicados dos libros de cuento y dos de poesía.
