By Luis Alberto Ambroggio
Translated by Egla Blouin
Aphrodite, her left arm missing
in the British Museum
irradiates dusty dreams
and accompanies him.
Spirits, muses, deeds of unknown address,
damp idols,
shadows with tattoos,
shadows gazing needles of oblivion
never leave the party.
A world of Conquered heroes
entertain his solitude and defeat.
The poet is not alone.
He prays with Anne Frank’s Diary
and the dead are brought back to life.
A place, at the other end of the world
takes his sleep away.
Silence leaves him exhausted.
He shouts deliberate deaths, or pearhaps,
in love, two in one are falling to the grave
during boundless nights.
With the community he creates,
the poet listen Tesalia sweet flutes.
Beauty tortures him in the bench of judgement.
Taking the wise topography of the raven
with symbols, he launches a transparent dance.
The poet havest other lovers in timeless waves,
around the moon,
dying before death reaches him
in the ambivalent cemetery of memory.
Desolate in his impossible flight,
the poet is never alone.
He is possessed by unattainable and piercing voices
consumed by intimate relations with his fatal lover:
the word, wild divinity
copulating with indissoluble mirrors.
(Elena Smidts’ translation was published in Argentina in verse,
Washington, DC. Federal Reserve Board: 1996)
THE ALTAR OF MIRRORS
By Luis Alberto Ambroggio
Translated by Yvette Neisser
The pirates knew
how to guard their captives;
among mirrors and mirrors
they kept them...
Here alone I read your body;
the treasures of the other island
were the possession of this banquet
among the wines of a vineyard in spring.
On this rock, pain
distinguishes us from the gods;
the waves rob us
again and again of closeness.
Heat hides itself in sands
and burning silence uncovers it;
we captain a protected species
among the tastes of timeless flames.
The pirates knew
how to guard their captives;
among mirrors and mirrors
they kept them...
Sanibel Island, Florida
December 1995
DIALOGUE
for Moraima Semprún de Donahue
By Luis Alberto Ambroggio
Translated by Yvette Neisser
I know how it hurts to be tortured by words,
to use them, to live insufficiently in their weak outlines,
to want to eat them again, convinced they will taste of needles.
I could organize a congress of happy verses in some useless paradise
to create another madness
or the perfect torment.
I would feel fulfilled if I could write silence,
fill the furrow of sentences with a bloody river,
grow a tree of letters
that keep changing colors until they die,
or capture love in a paragraph
with only periods and commas, between unbroken parentheses,
with capital letters,
without substituting the page for the bodies.
If words were actually eyes,
or anatomies in search of orgasm,
I would not be afflicted by the Machiavellian lie.
Words with their humble, contagious dance
breed terrifying virtues.
Crucifixion is one of their punishments.
I cannot be the word nor cease being it.
We embody a shared misery.
