Jorge Eliécer Ordóñez (Colombia)

Por: Jorge Eliécer Ordóñez
Traductor: Nicolás Suescún

PROMETEO
Latinoamerican Poetry Magazine
No 81-82. July 2008.

TIME TO REAP

In Senegal country of goats
and invisible women
winding the moon,
when a poet dies
they bury him
in the old stump
of a tree In the Summer
water and food are scarce
Then
migrating birds
come to peck
the singing wood.

JORGE ELIÉCER ORDÓÑEZ was born in Cali, Colombia, April 16th 1951. Bachelor of Philology and Languages, UPTC, Tunja. Studies of Linguistics. University of the Valley. Cali. Masters degree in Hispano-American Literature. Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Bogotá. Professor of Literature and Arts of the Language in the UPTC, of Tunja, from 1991 to date. He has published poetry books such as: Ciudad Menguante, 1991; Vuelta de Campana, Awarded by the Fine Arts and Culture Institute of Boyacá, 1994; Brújula Insomne, 1997; Farallones, 2000; El Puente de la Luna, 2004; Desde el Umbral, poesía colombiana en transición, antología y estudio introductorio, 2005. With his essay La Fábula poética en Giovanni Quessep, he was awarded the Jorge Isaacs prize for Literary Criticism, 1998. He directs the institutional magazine of his university, UPTC, de Tunja, “Pensamiento y Acción”. (“Thought and Action”). He has published articles in magazines such as La Palabra (UPTC), Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica, Universidad del Atlántico, Itaca, Universidad Popular del Cesar, Logos, Universidad de La Salle, Espéculo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (virtual), Casa de Asterión (virtual). According to Carlos Fajardo, “Ordóñez´s poetry catapults our imagination until it builds our childhood with it´s lustful and naughty games, the music of marimbas and drums, those neighborhoods of the periphery with strange and forgotten characters, the December lights lit by the father. This is how he invites us to go out to the roads so that, with the eyes of memory, we can see the big and small cosmologies with amazement,  and so that we may learn to feel the murmur and silences of his loving imagery.”