Francisco Ruiz Udiel (Nicaragua)

Por: Francisco Ruiz Udiel
Traductor: Raoul Shade and Zingonia Zingone

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

A SUICIDAL POET IS BORN
EVERY FOUR YEARS

To Sexton, Plath and Pizarnik
Born in 1928, 1932 and 1936

Every four years death
opens a kitchen's gas valve,
smokes a cigarette on the sofa and waits.

At other times it turns on a car engine inside a garage
and sings Chair in the Sky,
thinks that some jazz will not awake
dolls recently made up.

Every four years death swallows
amphetamines to lose weight,
but it gets out of hand
and she no longer awakes.

No, she neither gets sad, nor happy nor neurotic.
But every four years death
awakes lugubrious
and watches, from a window,
the crimson afternoon.
Someone, she says, tries to invoke me,
and bitterly closes her eyes.

Much to my sorrow, I don't know,
it is as if she wanted to narrate
or tell us something from her white thin face,
as if tired of strangulating women.
I don´ t know her very well,
but I do know that she loathes
her funereal undertaking.
She has been seen recently breathing
certain suicidal air.
Every four years death
suffers from sore eyes,
we know that she cried, we know it,
but we keep quiet,
we also know that she looks for some wombs
and since she doesn't have the privilege
          of the maternal flesh
then she clutches her cold thin fingers
on the first navel she finds.

This is why some girls are born dead every four years.

FRANCISCO RUIZ UDIEL was born in Estelí, Nicaragua in 1977. In 2005 he was awarded the First Internacional Ernesto Cardenal Prize for Young Poetry with his work “Alguien me ve llorar en un sueño" (Someone sees me cry in a dream). In 2005 he also published "Retrato de poeta con joven errante", poetry sample written by youths of the generation 2000-2005 or generation of uneasiness, as it was called by Gioconda Belli in the prologue of the event. Founder of the National Encounter for World-wide Poetry Day in Nicaragua. Founding member of the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua. In June 2995 he was invited to Casa de América de Madrid, España, to participate in the V Festival "La poesía tiene la palabra". In 2006 he "Poetas, pequeños Dioses" (Poets, Small gods). At the moment he collaborates as a reporter for El Nuevo Diario and his is an editor in chief for “CARATULA”, Central American cultural magazine. Claribel Alegría said the poems in Alguien me ve llorar en un sueño, were “provocative, transparent and deep, they speak to us of loneliness, dreams, violence and death”. We find in his poems an influence such as Cesare Pavese, because of his anecdotal recurrence to transmit the real pain of his main character. We find before poetry with pavesian characteristics, but also surreal characteristics or as Jorge Boccanera says, a poetry "between an expansive orality that brushes the story with abundant nexuses of connection and descriptions, and the self-confidence of a lyricism that throws unusual visions there and here..."