Eduardo Espina (Uruguay)

Por: Eduardo Espina
Traductor: Aaron J. Ilika

Minimum of Invisible Nymph
(One beginning is always another)

«of those things that cannot be spoken,
it must be said at least that they cannot be spoken.»
Sor Juana

Nothing was being seen, rather nothing was being seen.
Sor Juana's right in whatever she's found
and that at the end of an eponym, and apropos,
when will the bear glimpse his female in the honey?
From this Luxor, alone, rocks, boulder, sea
to die less than a wave in what's so far away,
but not as much as the moon taller than these.
Sea of all tides when dying one's own way
level with the current where it will tell all the rest.
And it splashes the South, scrapes the chimeras- kiss
it would be a while back for being so sudden
or so, good a blind man for the Sor, God too a goshawk.
Look what force it's lost, or look how much
of this would let itself be looked at in an hour, now already.
Nothing was being seen, but now it's seen less, years
of not being seen, of bathing blindly in figures.
Then it would be the same as the look even in the face
of reading when one opens the number and sees the first
word: that's seeing, that's the subsequent sense.
Sentence, proverbs and don't leave the soul for tomorrow
even less point out its absence added to the piranha
love that in youth remorsefully ate myrrh.
Whose ruse will be for another, for it the improper age.
It hunts the peaks if light lent it as much as to arrive,
for it's arrived: begin with appearance, in
the same person surprise changes plans.
Minimum of visible world, what Berkeley saw
and not this, now, that still belongs to no one,
world to lift the bataclane to the sandal.
It's cold, insisting on something less in the groin.
World, it's all the same since in Spanish it's mundo.
When it starts to be smaller, someone will know.

Eduardo Espina was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1954. Poet and college professor in several universities of the continent. He obtained his doctorate in Philosophy from The Washington University of St. louis, U.S.A. He has published the poetry books: Valores personales, 1982; La Caza Nupcial, 1993; El oro y la liviandad del brillo, 1994; Coto de casa, 1995; Lee un poco más despacio, 1999; Mínimo de mundo visible, 2003; El cutis patrio, 2004. He also published the essay books: El disfraz de la modernidad, 1992; Las ruinas de la modernidad, 1995, Premio Nacional de Ensayo de Uruguay, 1996; and Un plan de indicios, Premio Nacional de Ensayo de Uruguay, 2000. In 1998 he obtained the Municipal Poetry Prize for the book Deslengue. His poems have been translated partially into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Croatian. Included in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and more than 20 anthologies of Latinamerican poetry, among them Medusario of The Fondo de Cultura Económica. In 1980, he was the first Uruguaian writer to attend The International Writing program from The University of Iowa. Since then he lives in the U.S. where he publishes the Hispanic Poetry Review, magazine devoted exclusively to the literary critics and to review the poetry written in Spanish. In 2003 the book Configuración sintáctica: poesía del deslenguaje was published in Chile, it is a comprehensive study about the poetic work of Espina written by tha Spanish linguist Enrique Mallén.