Odi Gonzáles (Peru, Quechua people)
Por: Odi Gonzáles
Umantuu
(Brooklyn, NY 11211)
wherever it is you go,
my rainbow siren,
with your tenacious tambourine
call my soul that wanders frightened
wild, silent
since first its hair was cut
lure it, diva of the depths
with your wiles and your caresses
revealing, perverse,
your fertile breasts
of turbid milk
wherever it is that you encounter, invisible
flower of the mist
harness my spirit that flees
with its asthma and its imaginary armies
guide it now, sleepless siren whistling
by the narrow street of goldfinches by the path
of the cliffs
wherever it is that you arrive, wanderer
nymph of the stormy gales lead mi stray soul
companion of pristine air
drag it, if it does not want to come
to this my deathbed
Odi Gonzales was born in Cusco, Peru, in 1962. He learned simultaneously Quechua and Spanish. In Arequipa, he made his secondary studies. In the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa, he studied Industrial Engimeering and Literature. Between the years of 1990-2000, he was college professor. Moreover, later on he won a scholarship with The University of Maryland, College Park where he made his postgraduate studies in Latinamerican Literature and he taught Quechua Language and Culture. In USA he also worked as a translator from Quechua and as an investigator for National Geographic Televison, The Smithonian, National Museum of American Indian, and National Foreign Language Center of Washington D.C. He currently lives in Cajamarca, Peru devoted to his doctoral thesis in Oral Quechua Tradition. He has published the poetry books: Juego de niños, 1988; Valle Sagrado, 1993; Almas en pena, 1998; Tunupa/El libro de las sirenas, 2002; and La escuela de Cusco, 2005. In 1996, he published the book of essays The Condemned or the anguished soul in the oral Andean tradition. In 1992, he received The National Poetry Prize "César Vallejo" from The Diario del Comercio of Lima and in the same year, he was awarded with the National poetry prize of The Major National University of San Marcos in Lima. Bilingual and an expert in the Quechua oral tradition, he works a very attractive issue: the Andean fabulation, the indigenous cosmogony and its traditional routines. And he does it with a clean and dry stroke whose effectiveness he proves thanks to the precise dosification of the narrators and charactere voices. His biggest contribution has been to incorporate voices coming from the Quechua oral language into the poetic speech, reaching a coral poetry, polyphonic with different levels of language, a mixture of voices that converge in each one of his poems.
