Born in 1944, Francesc Parcerisas, the author of fourteen volumes of poetry, including Still Life with Children, Triumph of the Present,and The Golden Age, is considered the premier Catalan poet of his generation—a “miracle generation” of poets who came of age as Franco’s public banning of the Catalan language came to an end. He is also a masterly, award-winning translator of an impressive array of significant international writers, including T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Cesare Pavese, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Among his numerous translations from French, Italian, and English into Catalan, he is most famous in Catalonia for his translation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His own poems have been translated into Basque, English, French, Gallego, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, and Welsh, among others.
Among his awards are the 1966 Carles Riba Prize, the 1983 Critics’ Prize for Catalan Poetry, the 1983 Catalan Government Prize for Catalan Literature, the 1992 Lletre d’Or Prize for his volume Triumph of the Present, the 1992 Serra D’Or Critic’s Prize for his Catalan version of Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern, and the 2001 Cavall Verd-Rafael Jaume Prize for his translation of Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos. In 2018 the Writers Association awarded him the Premi Jaume Fuster for his contribution to Catalan letters.
THE EGYPTIAN ROOM
Sitting in the museum’s Egyptian room,
I’m an audience for
a honey-rich buzzing of bees.
The past’s fully alive:
yellow and blue,
akin to the laborer’s threshed wheat,
or that stork sipping
from a turquoise river
captured on papyrus.
In a flash, everything’s scrambled:
the stonemason with his sieve
in the pitiless sun
and the slave meekly
fanning the pharaoh
wait for me in a taxicab
down the street.
A flock of in-a-hurry ducks
crosses the overcast sky;
an ibis snivels at the next table,
soused and barbarous.
Folks claim passions
can’t be painted any longer,
but this fresco’s
a four-thousand-year-old mirror.
Like the mural’s black mongrel,
death will arrive,
and we’ll imagine ourselves
unripe, unready,
or we’ll lament having
to surrender in sleep
so many scant, fleeting
moments of joy,
well aware the Nile barge glides
endlessly under the blazing sun.
*
SHAVE
Observe yourself in the mirror,
unchanged yet strange,
still shaggy with sleep, startled
at seeing your likeness.
These wrinkles, these graying temples
that you’ve already accepted gracefully
—affable guests who showed up
so suddenly, that you can’t quite recall
their initial appearance,
are emblems of the shameless price required
for this fictitious intimacy with the body.
And now, begin to shave.
The blade, once quick and cold, no longer
glides taut across your skin like the pleasant
lickety-split friction of youthful skis:
you’re forced to stretch your flabby cheek
with your fingers. Don’t despair.
Perhaps if you’re shrewd and willfully avoid
the shameful mark of a knick,
you’ll forget your alliance with your body
has already begun to dissolve.
*
DECEMBER ORANGE
I listen to the sweet December orange:
it tells me No,
then Nevermore,
then Maybe still.
Only in wintertime
do plummeting raindrops on the patio
splatter with such intensity.
The tempest and the dead
jar me awake.
Look at the ferry passengers, the ones
too long at the beach:
welcome or lost, dauntless,
and still at large.
Sleep when it comes to us
is blessed;
I prize and depend on all this:
as if time’s wheel wouldn’t dare
savage such a young body
alive with pleasure,
I reach for your back.
The orange is also sweet,
and through it, I acquire
December’s light,
and the face the Venetian blinds
blur, once more,
with their aura of a discreet,
betraying life
that burgeons and finally
abandons us.
Slowly, slowly, the ferry departs.
The pulp is the ruddy juice
of the entire dawn.
*
AFTER ANNE SEXTON
The well-bottom’s shadowy and fearless,
because it’s finite.
Like the depth of your body and mine,
also luminous and firm,
because it’s finite.
But the skin we can’t part with
is the other’s skin,
a desert fashioned of words.
My first, fresh image of you,
or your ever-elusive eyes
are, for me,
the very essence of limits.
The voice uttering my name
becomes distance
and issilence.
And the plaintive fingernails
which scrape and scratch
are the time periods separating
all those pencil-marked dates:
it’s been eighteen whole days
without you.
*
SEVERED HAND
Cut off my hand,
it’s all yours,
and transform my fingertips and flesh
into this old but unfading memory:
a solitary girl at her breakfast,
perched in front of the TV.
Now that the hostile night
is a glass, fashioned of fear
and unease, close my lids,
so I can’t witness
this extravagant loneliness,
and slowly, slowly, let me know
when dawn blooms and composes again
the window panes and the hands
we once utilized
to bind each other
so desperately,
in the tepid, softened light
of every word.
*
CALYPSO
For seven years—or was it five?—
the divine nymph plied him with
forgetfulness, delicacies, shared passion.
Near Calypso’s grotto,
cypresses and alders grew, a grapevine
for fashioning luxuriant wine
—all that tantalizes men.
A truism lost on the nymph:
not even on an island
adorned with caves,
in the arms of a supernal lover
can a mere mortal endure
a wearying eternity
of youth and beauty,
devoid of what men prize most:
elusive memory,
unattainable desire.
*
VIRGIL’S HAND
The battle’s slow and sinuous,
a stormy fire on the hilltops.
The enemy’s spears and darts
have decimated,
at such a snail’s pace,
our once-protecting parents,
that, almost unawares, we’re caught,
wordless, shield-less, in the blazing
tumult of the frontline.
Up till now, Virgil’s hand.
From this day forward,
the world will be utterly different:
we’ll combat the fire
totally on our own.
Guideless, spurred by a secret
quest for common sense,
perhaps, in the long run, we’ll realize
the ramparts,
the enemy, the war itself,
are trumped-up shadows
of a fire that’s merely
light and ash;
we’ll realize: purgatory
and paradise reside
entirely within us.
— Translated by Cyrus Cassells
* * *
Editor’s Note:
Several of these poems have previously appeared in the following publications:
“Shave” appeared in the anthology Being Human(Bloodaxe Books: 2015)
“December Orange” appeared in Two Lines: A Journal of Contemporary Translation
“Calypso” appeared in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art
“Virgil’s Hand” appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day