Osvaldo Sauma (Costa Rica)

Por: Osvaldo Sauma
Traductor: Ricardo Ulloa Garay

A Woman Dances

hidden in the night
a woman dances
like saying wings
she spreads her arms
from the air's core
to the air's rim
tilting between walls of shadow
to the voids of light

a woman whirls
like a star
          turns
on herself
          graphs
the paths of chance
and its declensions dances
          turns
like lifting a bird
from the earth's grasp
raises a magnetic time
draws with a blazing coal
the red speech of the caves

spins
          shakes
the childish fears
that call to us
from our innerness

a woman dances
by herself
against adversity
at the wood's heart
to quicken
the blind beat of life
dances on my wounds
to goad me
on the route of remorse

a woman dances
alone against adversity
on the tumbling planet
against a snag in memory
flees on that flight of music
turns on herself
and bares to us a desire
that was driven from Paradise

Oswaldo Sauma was born in Costa Rica in 1949. Poet and poetry anthologist, he has published in this same genre, the books: Las huellas del desencanto, 1983; Retrato en familia, Premio Latinoamericano EDUCA, 1985; ASABIS, 1993; Madre nuestra fértil tierra, 1997; Bitácora del iluso, 2000; in process of publishing is Farewell. He has also made the anthologies: Poesía infantil del Conservatorio Castella, 1986; Antología del Conservatorio Castella, 1990; Los signos vigilantes, antología de poesía ecológica, 1992; Tierra de nadie, antología de nueve poetas latinoamericanos, 1994; La sangre iluminada, antología de seis poetas latinoamericanos, 1998; and Martes de poesía en el Cuartel de la Boca del Monte, 1998. As Raúl Zurita says: "The moving playful and devastated tone that glitters through all his verses where "Homer and Ulises burn the ships again" as he says to us in the impressive verse that ends the book Bitácora del iluso, it shows the sadness of a world that hasn't come to be as it has happened before so many times. Therefore, his poem "Recuento", for example, that reminds the shocking voice of an Ungaretti writing from the trenches of the First World War, upheaves as a true manifesto of an extended defeat. From a calamity that appears engraved in the heart of this ending and beginning of the millennium and that presents itself, in an increasing way amidst the shrilling fanfare of the market, under the forms of emptiness and disencounter. The poetry of Oswaldo Sauma approaches this disencounter, as I have very rarely perceived it before. The implacable sadness, demolishing of its poems, as that of Ungaretti, Cioran or Kavafis, is in summary the same for us, and if it finally upheaves as a radical critic to the world, to the existence, to reality such as we have been experiencing it, it is because the poems that reflect it, direct, concrete, tangible reach mastery" In that sense, his poem "Recuento", for example, that remembers.