Roberto Juarroz
translated by
Wally Swist
3 Translations
Vertical Poetry, I.22, 1958
No debería ser posible
dormirse sin tener cerca
una voz para poderse despertar.
No debería ser posible
dormirse sin tener cerca
la propia voz para poderse despertar.
No debería ser posible
dormirse sin despertar
en el momento justo en que el sueno se encuentra
con esos ojos abiertos
que ya no necesitan dormir mas.
It shouldn't be possible
to fall asleep without being nearby you
a voice to awaken to.
It shouldn't be possible
falling asleep without being nearby
one’s own voice to awaken.
It shouldn't be possible
to fall asleep without waking
at the right moment in which the dream is found
with those eyes open
that don't need to sleep anymore.
Vertical Poetry, I.4, 1958
El fondo de las cosas no es la vida o la muerte.
Me lo prueban
el aire que se descalza en los parjaros,
un tejado de ausencias que acomoda el silencio,
y esta mirada mia que se da vuelta en el fondo,
como todas las cosas se dan vuelta cuando acaban.
Y también me lo prueba
mi niñez que era pan anterior a la harina,
mi niñez que sabía
que hay humos que descienden,
voces con las que nadie habla,
papeles donde el hombre esta inmóvil.
El fondo de las cosas no es la muerte o la vida.
El fondo es otra cosa
que alguna vez sale a la orilla.
The bottom of things in not life or death.
It is proven to me
that the air is barefoot in the birds,
the roof of absences that accommodates silence,
and this look of mine that turns in the background,
like all things turn around when they end.
And I also tried it
on my childhood that was bread before flour,
my childhood that I knew
that there is smoke that descends,
voices with which no one speaks,
parts where a man is motionless.
The bottom of things in not life or death.
The background is something else
that ever comes to the shore.
Vertical Poetry, VI.4, 1974
La campana está llena de viento,
aunque no suene.
El pájaro esta lleno de vuelo,
aunque este quieto.
El cielo esta lleno nubes,
aunque este solo.
La palabra esta llena de voz,
aunque nadie la diga.
Toda cosa esta llena de fugas,
aunque no hay caminos.
Todas las cosas huyen
hacia su presencia.
The bell is full of wind,
although it doesn't sound.
The bird is full of flight,
although it is still.
The sky is full of clouds,
although it is alone.
The word is full of voice,
although no one says it.
Everything is full of flights,
although there are no roads.
All things flee
towards its presence.
Bio
Roberto Juarroz was born in 1925 in Coronel Dorrego, near Buenos Aires, in Argentina. He died in his seventieth year in the early spring of 1995. He developed a passion for poetry early on and published his first iteration of Vertical Poesies in 1958, of which not unlike Antonio Porchia with his Voces, would continue to publish poems without titles in volumes that would be issued by the same name, Vertical Poetry, only differing by their successive numbers identifying each book’s new work.
Octavio Paz wrote of the poetry of Juarroz that he saw it as “surprising verbal crystallisation; language reduced to a bead of light.”
In returning to the notion of a philosophical arc informing his poetry, Andreas Dorschel praises Juarroz for writing “philosophical poetry,” which he concludes is “transparent and dark at the same time, marked by “its lightness and metaphysical wit.
Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize.