Poems by Eloísa Avoletta, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin


 
 

Earthquake

 
I lie down
in the face of what I’ll never be able to say
entranced by salt still existing in this battered body
I bet we weren’t able to name that rock a hundred thousand years ago
and she was rock in each stony fiber
she called herself rock until someone listened and said “rock”
until the silent sea wore away her firmness and made her sand
like her, I break up into pieces
I lie down
on earth
so still
so emergent
so everyone’s
the colors
that I feel
and am
a landscape, beating
submerged in its own echoes
in all our echoes
 
 

Sismo

 
Me tumbo
Ante lo que nunca podré decir
Absorta de que aún exista sal en este cuerpo maltratado
¿A que no sabíamos nombrar aquella roca hace cien mil años?
Y ella era roca en cada fibra pétrea
Se dijo roca hasta que alguien la escuchó y le dijo “roca”
Hasta que el mar silencioso fue desmoronando su entereza y la volvió arena
Como ella me desarmo
Me tumbo
En la tierra
Tan quieta
Tan emergente
Tan de todos
los colores
Que me siento
Y soy
Paisaje latiendo
Sumergido en sus ecos propios
en todos los ecos nuestros
 
 

Mud

 
The soapy rhythm of a grandmother’s fists scrubbing against the sink. Wringing and smoothing out wet cloths, airing them, smearing them again, opening and closing the faucet of the porch that leads to the courtyard. The grandmother wets her hands, strikes the spoiled, filling the air with a bubbling and cyclical paste. My grandmother gets wrinkled under the sun, in the midst of the afternoon of alarmed cicadas. She lets water and time run a little.
 
 

Barro

 
El ritmo jabonoso de los puños de una abuela resfregándose contra la pileta. Estrujando y estirando telas mojadas, aireándolas, volviéndolas a embadurnar, abriendo y cerrando la canilla del porche que da al patio. La abuela se moja las manos, percute contra lo percudido, llenando el aire de una pasta burbujeante y cíclica. Mi abuela se arruga al sol, en medio de la tarde de las chicharras alarmadas. Deja correr un poco el agua y el tiempo.
 
 
Eloísa Avoletta (Montevideo, 1995). Her work appears in the online anthology of very young Uruguayan poets, En el camino de los perros: antología virtual de poesía ultrajoven. She received the 2016 Pablo Neruda prize for young Uruguayan poetry organized by the Pablo Neruda Foundation and the Department of San José. She studies Social Education and works at a bookstore.

Laura Cesarco Eglin is the author of Llamar al agua por su nombre (Mouthfeel Press, 2010), Sastrería (Yaugurú, 2011), Los brazos del saguaro (Yaugurú, 2015), Tailor Shop: Threads (Finishing Line Press, 2013) co-translated with Teresa Williams, and Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (Lunamopolis, 2015). Cesarco Eglin has translated works of Colombian, Mexican, Uruguayan, and Brazilian authors into English. She is a co-founding editor of Veliz Books.