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Poetry From the July 2011 issue: The Arab Spring, Part I
with March’s moon the photo
arrived and we
were all alive;
rapid
words
from that essence
that is fast
and that turns and detaches itself;
slow, the moon,
returns month by month
Translation of “[con la luna de marzo llegó],” by Olvido García Valdés, from Y todos estábamos vivos (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 200. Copyright Olvido García Valdés. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright by Catherine Hammond. All rights reserved.
con la luna de marzo llegó
la foto y todos
estábamos vivos;
palabras
de velocidad,
de esa sustancia
que es veloz
y gira y se desprende;
lenta, la luna,
vuelve mes a mes
Olvido García ValdésOlvido García Valdés
Olvido García Valdés was born in Asturias, in northern Spain, during the era of Francisco Franco. She uses the white space on the page to intensify the sense of a world where language is dangerous, meaning signaled. In 2007 García Valdés won Spain’s highest award in poetry, the Premio Nacional, or National Poetry Prize, for her book Y todos estábamos vivos/And We Are All Alive. García Valdés published seven books of poetry prior to this volume. Several of these also won important prizes in Spain.
Translated from SpanishSpanish by Catherine HammondCatherine Hammond
Catherine Hammond holds BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA from Arizona State University in Creative Writing. My own poems have been anthologized in Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry from University of Arizona Press and in Yellow Silk from Warner Books. Poetry publications include the Chicago Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, Mississippi Review, North American Review, and many others. She has received three Pushcart nominations and was a runner-up for “Discovery”/The Nation four times.This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution by contacting us at info@wordswithoutborders.org.
