After Fernando Pizarro

Valladolid: tower of the Iglesia del Salvador

[Image source: https://www.flixbus.it/orari-fermate-autobus/valladolid]




About Fernando Pizarro:


https://poetassigloveintiuno.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/fernando-pizarro-garcia-17302.html


Fernando Pizarro García: A poet and prose writer - also a judge - b. 1951, from the Valladolid area. And it was during a rushed hour in Valladolid last September that I bought his book Cuando la noche (1999)*. Here are some very free translations.  (Some of the Spanish texts are in the link above.)






Of confused genesis,
of indefinite limits,
you are the enemy.  You arrive
devious and demand treacherous
an unequal, bloody struggle.
But you are not, you do not exist,
because the tenacious attempt to annihilate you
is the cruel struggle to give you life.
And in the end you appear. And you are another,
innocent dispossession of a pledge
obsessive, exhausting, useless



Guilt.
             Fear.
                         Hate.
                                     Revenge.


Guilt gave birth to fear,
fear to hate,
and hate to revenge.


On the back of dark silence,
like four horsemen, they ride,
erasing the horizons.



How hidden the dagger,
how deep the wound.


Exposed, trusting,
the noble breast to the blow.
And it arrived unerringly.


And how dark now,
how slow the agony.



Divided body and heart into two halves,
I look from the nothing to the nothing and see
just a dense blanket of ash on everything.
Time and laziness. More laziness and more time.
And the rain insistent on the window-pane.
Lights, shadows, reflections. And in the street,
matter streaming towards nothing.

YEARBOOK

T hat my voice be not just a cry
what you hear not only an echo
silence will be 
                               nothing changes.



jan


City  frosted  by  the fog



feb




How sky so blue.
How blue  so cold.
How cold in the blue
of so sky



mar




On a wind that polishes the corners
fast clouds ride pillion



apr




Other expectation, though vain, lovely



may




So blue in the blue.
So green in the green.
In the blue and in the green,
how much light.



jun




Bled by the light the hours,
all in the sky just horizon.



jul


What destroyer the sun of the outskirts.
How luminous its light. And  how evident.



aug


In that sea,
                               all was shipwreck.
And in its demolished coast,
                                         all shadow.



sep


On the ruffled track of the water
indecisive      glare        iridescent



oct


A    dense   stormy   sky,
frontier of the countryside silent & flat



nov


Yet something green in the already yellow



dec


After the expectation
this renunciation
resignation    to accepting the defeat

* The title Cuando la noche  refers to some lines in a well-known poem ("A mano amada..")  by Ángel González Muñiz:

Cuando la noche impone su costumbre de insomnio

y convierte

cada minuto en el aniversario

de todos los sucesos de una vida.

When the night imposes its habit of insomnia

and turns each minute into the anniversary

of all the events of a life