Not Buying Any, Mister
There I Was,
Stung In The Face By A Slight Arrow.
Dazzled An Instant,
But Soon Plodding Forward Like A Murderous Elephant
Across The Room
Against The Fleeing Frightened Archer
In Order To Exact My Retribution.
I Beat Him Into A Pulp;
He Looked Now Like Some Kind Of Molting Arthropod
Full Of Slime.
I Went Directly To The Floor Boss
And Said I Had Had Enough With The Damned Racket
At The Never-Ending Elevator
With The Grotesque Anthropoid Toys
Which Accelerated Upwards
Only To Stop A Bit Before The Top
Only In Order To Then Collapse,
Fall Down, Tumbling, Higgledy-Piggledy, To The Bottom,
Seemingly In A Dejected Manner, Only In Order
To Pick Themselves Up And Rev It Upwards
Again And Again,
Clumsy Doomed Puppetry, Disgusting;
A Nightmare.
The Machines Were Obligingly Stopped; The Cogs
And Ratchets Shirring, Whizzing, Whirring, And, Lo,
In The Awe Of The Following Silence,
Under The Elevator
There Were Two Big Chunks Of Rotting Meat.
“Wondrous! Here Are The Bodies!”
Thus The Bulk Of The Clients, Gloating,
Glowing, Proud Of Their Righteous Compatriot,
“What Do You Know! The Corpses Were Indeed
Under The Dumb Toys,
The Always-Striving Noisy Sedulous Mealy-mouthed Anthropoid
Toys. Who Would Have Thought! The Guy’s A Genius!
He Must Be A Great Inspector,
Or Something...
Hey, Where’s He Gone...?”
I Had Scrammed;
Couldn’t Abide The Reeking.
Sickening Overstocked Malls, The Nauseating Luxury,
Barf.
Phony Inspector, Always In The Throes Of Fakery!
Cutesy Wraith With Heroic Fancies, Told Him The Multiplied
Mirrors, You Don’t Belong!
Spare Me The Glories!
Spare Me The Hurrahs.
Impecunious, Diffidently Above The Melee,
Docking His Celiac Tongue
With Chattering Teeth,
He Beat It, His Knees Slightly Jerking, His Jaw
A-Flutter, His Cheek By The Tiny Arrow From
The Childish Archer So Slimly Scathed:
A Devilish Tiny Grin, Displaced.
– – – – –
Here an example of his writings in the English tongue. (From the
volume of poems he strove to publish, but couldn’t for lack of funds –
the marriage to the baroness coming a bit to late, the literary priorities
by then having shifted elsewhere.)
This is not a translation – unless it is.
Let me explain. Perfectly bilingual, one of the techniques he employed
in order to “refine the product,” especially in the creation of poems and
small prose pieces, was to write the work in one language, translate it
into the other, destroy the original, and let the translation stand as the
finished artifact.
One example pretty obvious I found early on in a poem he later
published in Washington (where our acquaintance – broken and
renewed over the years – initially took place during the late seventies, I
believe.)
A few diaphanous instances. “Que hom no es faria” (translated from
“than one would imagine.”) “En feia quaranta” (clearly from the
common saw “I was taking forty winks”, much better than
“I was hanging ten” as I had thought at first blush.) “En dues
sacsades de la cua d’un be” (evidently, from the American proverbial
saying: “In two shakes of a sheep’s tail.”) Anyhow...
The poem is Visitats Debades (We are visited to no
avail.) It appeared in the little magazine Butlletí de l’Associació
dels Catalans de Washington, number 13, September 1992, signed
by Eduard Moliner, one of Carles Reig’s pennames
(Moliner was already the “prologist” in Remei Jonqueres
d’Oriola’s Llimac Rural, published in Catalonia in
January, 1981.)
[Two Catalonian males meet. The trim Oriolan travels to California,
where his fat aloof friend lives in a dale of orange groves. Lithe traveler
talks. Home-steader comes to take him to a show. They attend an
open-air event (maybe of a pornographic nature?) (Shakespearian? Is
theater an eternal return of line repetition?) Worthless déjà-vu? Tedium
of the known.) The nimble traveler comes down to earth, and now either
wants to bugger the home-steader or tries to convince him to come back
to the fatherland, in order to be a (modest) hero. At any rate, the
home-steader perceives as a rape the patriotic exhortation. He gruffly
rejects the offers. Too much familiarity repels him. Reading farther,
actually, the repulsion is against himself. A fellow who hasn’t budged
from home, in front of the mirror, watching the tawdry movie of his
chromosomes, trying on the sly to seduce himself.]
[Is that it? Did I get it right? Who knows. True that the man could be of
two minds in connection with certain tricky questions,
self-contradictory and ambiguous in others. Also, my interpretation of
the meaning of the poem might be somewhat affected by the poor
grasping I have of the language. It could easily be that the meaning goes
much deeper, something to do with the genetic fatality, irrevocability, of
forces extraneous to the fiction of one’s conscience.
Meanwhile, I’ll plead not guilty by reason of amateurism.]
– – – – –
Visitats debades
El trajecte Oriola-Alacant-València és més llong que hom
No es faria.
Oriola a València (Califòrnia) me n’ha costats milers
(Quilòmetres). Entre els béns semovents de mon amic,
Greixums rai.
La casa rau enmig d’una vall; feraç, jatsia que
El pagès hi magenca de ferm. Símptomes de l’heretge:
A les parets, quadres de triomfs qualificats:
En Jofre a Washington; en Casanova a Barcelona.
En Nin a Moscou, n’Orwell a Lleida…
Finestra avall, pel passeig (exacte: entre trarongers),
Es passeja, d’incògnit, en Proteu. Li vénen darrere
Guanina, Citosina, Timina i Adenina, les quatre eugues;
Gara-garagen, anques eròtiques, oronells al vent.
Mon amic truca a la porta;
-En feia quaranta (guerxines), li dic.
-En dues sacsades més de la cua d’un be (em respon), hi
serem.
Lletanies mnemòniques; m’hi haig resignat letàrgicament.
Espasmòdicament, tothom s’aixecava; nèctars promiscus
Al vellut dels seients; abandonàvem el teatre amb basca
I lleganyes. Subtil vernís; heroic, l’anava a llaurar
Amb la teranyina inharmònica d’un altre sangfluix dogmàtic.
-Abstèn-te’n, em mana.
I doncs, me’n desdiguí. La seua ganyota
D’ultimàtum no rem dingú;
El seu vult altrament hermètic és ubic.
No em puc guaitar al mirall. El flagell de l’eclipsi
Ens embossava cadascuna de les òrbites. Col·lapses
Paral·lels. Ens vam interrogar alhora: Mitocondris?
Els mitocondris, hò, els mitocondris i llurs monòlegs.
Homogenis, tot ho vèiem per enèsim camí.
