Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

from First [I] Dream

     Sleep, in sum, took over,
silence, then, subsumed everything:
even the thief slept on,
even the lover did not linger wakeful into dawn.
     Night’s still hour nearly done,
halved by shadow, when
daily tasks all but spent
not just worn by working body’s weight,
but exhausted also by delight (which also peters out
the object of intense attention
the senses still delight:
how Nature turns over
now one, now another ledger,
doling out her chores,
whether for leisure or worthy tasks
the faithful faithlessness with which she rules
the world’s flamboyant machinery) —;
and then, out of the sweet, deep sleep of
busy limbs, the senses remained
which exertion turned plain
— work, after all, but beloved work
if work can be beloved —,
if not all sense deprived, then at least suspended,
and giving in to the opposite image
of life, that — casually armed —
cowardly assaults and lazily defeats
with drowsy weapons,
from shepherd’s crook to haughty sceptre
without marker
twixt peasant’s coarse cloth and king’s azure:
and, in its awesome power, no-one is exempt,
from Pope with sovereign king’s coronet,
to lowly sire in his straw-coloured shack;
from ruler gilded by the Danube,
to humble labourer under a thatch of reeds;
(as, with death’s
supreme image) Morpheus
equates the humble cloth with fine brocade.

 

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?–1695) was a nun, poet, playwright, musician, philosopher and scientist born in New Spain (present day Mexico) and renowned as a defender of women. Introduced early to matters of the intellect and reason by her grandfather, all her work — considerable in extent and depth — is noted for its baroque argumentation, by turns witty and deeply conscious of the presence of death in life. Marvelled at when she spoke eloquently at the age of 16 before a royal colonial audience, Sor Juana de la Cruz was seen by the men of her time as a monster: woman was not held to be capable of reason. In a theocratic male-dominated society, she was both courted and held in suspicion. Passionate about the rights of women to an education and to their realization as ‘full beings’, she was nevertheless subject to condemnation. Risking further persecution by the Church for her controversial views, she decided to stop writing. In the context where the Inquisition had been brought by Spanish-born and their descendants to the Americas, she sold off her books and her scientific instruments. In the following years many of her writings were allegedly burnt by members of the Inquisition and what survives of her writing today is only part of what she wrote, composed and imagined. This translated fragment is from her long poem

Jaime Saenz

Your skull

—To Silvia Natalia Rivera

These rains,
why would they make me cherish a dream
I once had, years ago
a dream you too dreamt
— your skull suddenly appeared to me:
its high spellbound loveliness;
looking at you — not me.
Your skull drew close to mine
and I looked at you.
And as you were looking at me, my own skull
appeared before you;
looking, not at you
but at me.
Late in the night,
someone looked on;
and I dreamt your dream
— under the hush of rain,
you hid yourself in your skull,
and I hid in you.

 

Jaime Saenz (1921–1986) was a Bolivian poet and short story writer who lived and wrote from his country’s capital, La Paz. His often dark poems reference the city’s space, and draw on surrealism. Among his book length works are Visitante profundo (1964), Imágenes paceñas (1979), La noche (1984), Los cuartos (1985) and La piedra imán (1989). ‘Your skull’ is from Visitante profundo.

Federico García Lorca

Dreamless City
(Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)

Out in the sky no-one sleeps. No-one. No-one.
No-one sleeps.
The moon’s creatures sniff out and encircle their digs.
Live iguanas will come bite the sleepless
and whoever flees with a broken heart will find in the street corners
the astounding still crocodile lying beneath the tender protest of the stars.

Out in the world no-one sleeps. No-one. No-one.
No-one sleeps.
There’s a dead man in the furthermost graveyard
complaining ten good years
of the dry landscape of his knee;
and the child they buried this morning cried so much
they had to call the dogs to shut him up.

Life’s no dream. Lookout! Lookout! Lookout!
We fall down the stairs to cop a mouthful of dank dirt
or go up the sharp edge of the snow with a chorus of dead dahlias.

But there’s no escape or dream:
live flesh. Kisses bind mouths
in a tangle of new veins
and whoever aches, aches without rest
and whoever fears death will carry it on their shoulders.

One day
horses shall live in the taverns
and furious ants
will attack the yellow skies that hide out in the eyes of cows.
Another day
we shall see dried butterflies come back to life
and still moving through a field of grey sponges and silent boats
we shall see our ring shine and roses flow from our tongues.

Lookout! Lookout! Lookout!
Those still marked by the claw and downpour
that boy crying because he doesn’t yet know about the invention of bridges
or that dead man with only head or shoe,
take them to the wall where the iguanas and snakes await them
where the bear’s teeth and the child’s mummified hand awaits them
and the skin of the camel stands on end with a violent blue chill.

Out in the sky no-one sleeps. No-one. No-one.
No-one sleeps.
But if anyone shuts their eyes,
whip them, my children, whip them!
So that there may be a field of open eyes
and bitter burning sores.
Out in the world no-one sleeps. No-one. No-one.
No-one sleeps.
I’ve said it before.
No-one sleeps.
But if anyone at night has too much moss on their temples,
open the hatchway so they might see the moon
the false cups, the poison and the skull of the theatres.

 

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and prose writer whose popularity and influence in 20th century Spanish literature ranks him among the most significant writers of his generation, dubbed the generation of ‘27. Poeta en Nueva York (1930), from which ‘Ciudad sin sueño’/’Dreamless City’ is taken, is one of the most read books of modernist poetry, marked by a mordant vision of the industrial city. Lorca was not simply a writer; he was also a cultural and political revolutionary who died at the hands of the Fascists in Spain’s Civil War.