Poemas al hombre que se fue de la Tierra

TRADUCIDOS AL INGLÉS POR DAVE OLIPHANT Y OLIVER WELDEN

The Tailor Shop
Carlos Amador Marchant<

To my father, Amador Marchant Montenegro

I
Behind that dark house is the tailor shop.
There are no sounds no voice, only the smell of soaked cloth.
The place seems wholly winter.
The hanging threads are silent rods.
In the back in the very back the tailor meditates.
Over his skeleton an afternoon is lost.
That shop seems a deserted square.
It looks like a hidden loaf of bread.
To find it one must follow unlit signs,
signs that never call to anyone.

II
The tailor is hidden.
I remember him sitting on a wooden chair.
There he´s surrounded by fabric, flatirons,
suits that hang like men lynched.
The tailor sits in the middle of the room.
I can´t see him clearly.
I´m behind him not yet born.

III
That shop was small.
But at the back the patio sheltered animals.
Hens all mixed in with ducks,
rabbits burrowing in the corners.
For years I entertained myself looking at that spectacle.
I counted eggs, figured out the breeding.
The shop was in front.
Out front on the other hand everything was silence.
The tailor at his post like a statue of ice.
His voice came from behind the counters.
I always squatted facing him,
always causing trouble,
always talking under my breath.

IV
The tailor´s suit of armor was his brow.
Whereas I drifted like a log in a river.
I said life and the cave-ins lay in waiting.
I said flight and my wings were sopping wet.
V
The tailor´s trade wore him out one night.
Left him dead at the head of a bed.
Because that shop was as damp as the edge of the ocean.
Now and again I appeared playing in that photograph,
looking sad among the weeds of those days.
That´s why I lower my head when I speak.
That´s why this gray moon´s displaced by my shoulders.

Translated by Dave Oliphant and Oliver Welden