Still: The Journal

 Translations 

 Poems by Juan Carlos Mestre translated from Spanish by Jeremy Dae Paden

Juan Carlos Mestre was born in 1957 in Villafranca del Bierzo in the province of Leon in Castilla y Leon, Spain. His homeland is part of the mountain country of northern Spain. It is also one of the historic mining centers of Spain (gold, coal, tungsten). Mestre is a poet, essayist, and graphic artist. He has published twenty-five books of poems. Five of his collections have won major Spanish prizes: Antífona del otoño en el Valle del Bierzo, the 1985 Premio Adonáis; La poesía ha caído en desgracia, the 1992 Premio Jaime Gil de Biedma; La tumba de Keats, the 1999 Premio Jaén de poesía; La casa roja, the 2009 Premio Nacional de poesía; and La bicicleta del panadero, the 2012 Premio de la Crítica de poesía castellana. 

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Dawn's Valley 

To dawn, to the pure poppy of the dream's geometer, the coalmen & those that carry jars descended
            into the streets from the forest hamlets, they delivered substances like heat & milk, & I would
            listen to them, I would listen to them move on through until they were lost in the distance, until
            that forgetting that lies beyond myself, beyond the smoke of trains & snowcapped mountains.

Birds of daybreak, colts of dawn. Townfolk on whose doors pilgrim staff & caravan mists ring out
            springtime's youth. Those who tame horses, men whose trade is the small hours, men who
            fish for frogs in dawn's dark pools, & those who cure the white skin of goats under the baying
            pack of stars.

Multiplicity of valleys planted with coriander, blue multiplicity of sadness, you cabin girls who collect
            spices, hands softened by panpipes & birds. You whose silence knows not the length of oblivion,
            ringers of cymbals, carpenters of gates for animals in heat, far-off women of small hamlets where
            you feed geese on rainy afternoons.

This is the hour of the old ones around a fountain, flagstone of musing & the antiquity of nightfall.
            City of those who play knucklebones beneath trees, spoiled sycophants of meteorology &
            botany, wild, rustic musicians.

My heart has heard you, my heart has expansively listened to the whistle of the stars & the wood
            grouse. Voices of diversity & cunning beside the atrium again green with May's basil. Voice
            of the grammarians & voice of the widows before the wicker cages, silence's shout in the
            atria of serenity & howl of beasts below bridges as they meet the sharpened tools.

Day troubled by a thought whose shadow does not exist. Day named for the prudence of one who
            deciphers the telegraph, of one who whitens a refuge or coats with quicksilver the loneliness
            of death in the humidity of taverns.

Rural spectators that gather in my soul, people of the hills, people from the outskirts of town who
            barter & trade in the plaza, the one that pounds rosemary on a quartz stone & the one who
            establishes hives among the heather. Land of the basket weavers, land of harmonica players
            & sellers of fodder in the expanse of fog.

Foreigners guided by death's breath, builders of statues & master shearers below the curve of the
            colonnades.

Village boys, boys whose memory is fast as lightening & fades & gives no light. Young men from
            one side of a river, bodies in the poplar grove with a sickle & a hoe under the howl of the
            stars. Adolescents drunk in their fervor & in the water, the lonely ones under the shadow of
            old wooden bridges & those you contemplate when evening comes with delight, the wet jade
            of melancholy & dreams.

Speak of this day, tell from what opalescent snowy eve you reach my mouth, day of fertile women
            beside vineyards, day of the meek, of those that carve walking sticks & those that dye cloth.

River people, cleaners of fish, those who tie the lively feather of the lure & those of you who are
            transparent as a glass float in the divination of winds, people of estuaries & fords, water
            carriers of dawn who sing in the meadow the quiet, rustic song of lark poachers.

You, earth, that sings below the earth. Land chosen by wine drinkers who traced out horizon's line
            & drew maps. Those that lit bonfires, the shepherd of lightening & the gatherer of berries,
            nightfall's tribe, splendor of the gods over the grassy knolls. Dawn's earth frontier of the
            zither strummers, people whose solitude is sweet in the sound of my heart.

Country of seeds, country of riverbanks where roe deer bleat. Inhabitants of the valley, peoples of
            the west traversing through fog. This is the place where life, this is the place where death,
            ironmongers & tailors, composers of songs whose mirth is borrowed for celebrations, the
            one that builds dovecotes & the one that kneels before the fire.

Virtue of the scales in Thursday shops, virtue of kneading troughs with salt, smell of paint shops.
            People who pass by in the plaza, dawn's chosen, the bell ringer, the bakers of loaves, & the
            linotype operator for broadsheets.

Smoke & silence of the mountain dialects. That woman who is alone. Worsted wool & the vine that
            wraps around the well. The thought of that woman who was young & dreamed of the ocean
            & has grown old. The woman inhabited by shadows, the dark one who lies there like cut
            wood, like the deep water while the norias suffer, while the birds fly over toward autumn's
            burning isles, birds purpled with forgetting, the cypress birds, the dead myrtles, night's
            Egyptian birds, the sacred birds of incest.

It has been a long time since the forests burned, a long time since loneliness in the hay barns
            winnowed out the thistle's flower head.

Unmerciful valley, all that has paled in the leaves of the eternal oak wood & the cold voices of the
            druids.

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Invocación


Oh tú que pronuncias en mí el árbol de la lentitud, el árbol cuyas raíces se extienden como un 
idioma desconocido a través de los pueblos, a través de las piedras y las bocas que amargamente 
lloraron los desaparecidos, aquellos cuyo silencio da razón a la muerte, aquellos cuya huella es 
impronunciable en la dulzura, aquellos cuya desnudez es el alimento de las generaciones.

Invocation


O you who speaks in me the tree of slowness, the tree whose roots spread out like an unknown 
language through the towns, through the stones and the mouths that won’t name the place of the 
wound, this place in whose pain the disappeared bitterly wept, those whose silence provides
meaning to death, those whose trace is unspeakable in their sweetness, those whose nakedness is the 
nourishment of generations.

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"Lo que sé de mí" ("What I Know Of Myself") and "Valle del alba" ("Dawn's Valley") were first published in Antífona del otoño en el Valle del Bierzo (Autumn´s Countersong in Bierzo Valley), which won the Premio Adonáis. "Invocación" ("Invocation") was published in La poesía ha caído en desgracia (Poetry Has Fallen into Disgrace), which won the Premio Jaime Gil de Biedma. 

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