Three Poems by Luis Muñoz

Everything is always moving in Luis Muñoz’s poems. Reading them you might feel they slip through your fingers, but they change something as they pass. As the title of the collection from which these poems are taken, Un Momento / One Moment, suggests, they tackle one of poetry’s oldest tasks, calling for a hiatus, a relief from transience; but they seize hold of time only to let it go again, somehow transformed. The translation has been an unusually intimate collaboration. It began in Iowa City, in long, experimental conversations about the choices and compromises of carrying into English the sense of Luis’s canny, wry, slippery Spanish. Once a handful of very provisional drafts were ready, Idra Novey (a poet, novelist, and translator) and Garth Greenwell (a novelist with a previous life as a poet) began a second collaboration to make poems with independent English-language lives. These new versions then circled back to Luis for more conversation and experimentation. Recreating the uncanny apertures in Luis’s poems was a priority; each draft evolved with that openness in mind, how his lines send the reader tumbling into somewhere unexpected.

-Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

NO HACE

No hace falta que diga
lo diminuto que soy
sino por constatar
la alegría redonda
de sol,
peces,
pájaros
y montes
que va junto con eso
cuando va.

NO NEED

No need to say
how tiny I am
unless it’s to find
the rounded joy
of sun,
fishes,
birds
and doors
that goes with it
when it goes.

SU ALCANCE

Un pezón
más marcado
que otro
en el mundo de rutas
de los pezones
supone un poder
extratmosférico que todo
y nada tiene
que ver con los pasos
rasantes,
acometidos
de cada cosa.

HIS RANGE

One nipple
more pronounced
than the other
in the world of nipple
passages
supposes an extra-atmospheric
power that has
everything and nothing
to do with the skimming
embarking
steps
of each thing.

APUNTE EN UNA BIOGRAFIA

Bueno, si se deja la piel en el intento, si combate sus límites, si cae y se levanta, si el tiempo lo succiona, pero él resiste ahí, una vez y otra vez, punteando lo oscuro con luz que encienden solo las palabras, su compañia viene, como una pieza entera, al cuidado furioso de nuestro nuevo día, esa porcíon de venga, de quizá, llena de estambres vivos y de cielos cruzados, mirando a ver por dónde.

NOTE IN A BIOGRAPHY

Well, if he gets skinned in the attempt, if he battles his limits, if he falls and stands up, if time sucks him up, but he resists, again and again, piercing the dark with light that only words can ignite, company comes to him, steadfast and whole, to provide furious care of our new day, that portion of c’mon, of perhaps, full of live stamens and tangled skies, looking to see where to, which way.