"How many times…" by Marjorie Agosín
Here again is Alicia Partnoy, this time reading from the work of the Chilean poet Marjorie Agosin, who escaped General Pinochet’s regime. Agosin has written poetry about the mothers of Argentina’s disappeared; and about the human anguish in the city of Juarez in Mexico, where Mercedes Doretti has worked on some of the unsolved disappearances and murders of over 400 young women. Here you can listen to Alicia Partnoy read Marjorie Agosín's poem "How many times…" and follow along in both English and Spanish.
How many times do I talk with my dead? And their hands are rough and wrinkled, and I ask them things and their faces are a memory of sorrows, and the night threatens us in its tempestuous fall, but I talk with my dead which perhaps are yours, and I cover them, saturate them with my silent sorrow and with my tear-drenched eyes. I always bid farewell to that body, to those eyes that seem like a river of silence. And this is how I learn to tell them things, to promise them a blossoming, flowery garden, a history, a beginning, a promise, and it is so incredible how I love this dead one, who is not mine, who is not a cadaver either, but a waterfall, a dialogue, a shore to be crossed.
¿Cuantás veces yo converso con mis muertos y sus manos, son una textura hundida, y les pregunto cosas y sus rostros son una memoria de llagas, y la noche amenazándonos en su caída intempestuosa, pero yo converso con mis muertos que a lo mejor son tuyos, y los cubro, los empapo de mi sentir callado y de mis ojos parecidos a los alambres de la sombra. Siempre me despido de ese cuerpo, de esos ojos que me parecen un río de silencio. Y así aprendo a decirles cosas, a prometerles un jardín floreciente, florido, una historia, un nacimiento, una promesa, y es tan increíble como yo amo a este muetro, que no es mi muerto, que tampoco es un cadáver. Es un salto de agua, un diálogo, una costa para cruzar.
(Copyright 1998 by Marjorie Agosín. Reprinted from "An Absence of Shadows," published by White Pine Press, with permission from Marjorie Agosín. Translated by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman.)
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