Mantis 21 (Summer 2023)
Translations
Ezequiel Naya
translated from Spanish by Sam Simon
A current of dread courses through the poems selected from Ezequiel Naya’s Villages to Escape from Justice. Its characters resist relaxation, refusing to give themselves over to the notion of safety, connecting an unnamed past with an unknowable future, highlighting the uneasiness of those trading instability for unfamiliarity. What are these characters running from? Where are they going? While Naya makes a few references, the specifics aren’t important. They could be about any one of Latin America’s countries, cities, neighborhoods, homes, and families.
The collection explores the double-pronged mythology of nationbuilding and the desecration of those same countries, of the folklore and stories that both drive us towards war and help us survive it. They remind us of how those mythologies leave lasting impressions. With the colloquial intimacy of a close friend and sharp disaffected humor, Villages to Escape from Justice examines the human cost of the decisions of those in power.
That fallout ripples years or generations later during quotidian moments like drinking maté, lying in bed, or watering the plants, scrutinizing the fortitude it takes to live and love.
Sam Simon
from Pueblos para escapar a la justicia
Guardan partes de su cuerpo
en casas de piedra.
No las venden ni las muestran.
Dos familias tienen sus ojos,
otros las piernas
unos pocos son felices
de tener un codo.
El amor, me dijo
cuando estaba entera,
es una planta que hay que regar
from Villages to Escape from Justice
They keep parts of their body
in stone houses.
They neither sell nor display them.
Two families have their eyes,
others their legs
a few are happy
to have an elbow.
Love, she told me
when she was whole,
is a plant that must be watered
Pasábamos por la puerta sin decir nada. Baldosas rotas por hombres que nacieron en casas donde disparan. Algunos se animan a tomar la música del techo para después llevársela. La escuchan en los bosques, a orillas del río, y de a poco se sumergen hasta salir del otro lado. Se quedan perdidos y, por lo general, no vuelven. Aprenden un idioma nuevo, cambian de voz, de gestos, se cambian el color de ojos entre ellos. Regresan siempre y cuando haya sol. Sus padres los esperan con agua de luvia entre las manos.
Al principio, se la pasan hablando del reflejo de la luz en las vías de alguna estación, y de cómo los trenes van y vienen sin gente. Después se ríen sin parar durante nueve horas porque quieren ser felices. Al final, se cansan y lloran. Cuando sienten que el mecanismo imperfecto de la máquina hará que todo empiece otra vez, toman las armas que guardan en la mesa de luz y disparan al techo para que la música suene.
We used to cross the threshold without saying anything. Tiles broken by men born in houses where they shoot. Some dare to take the music from the ceiling to carry away with them. They listen to it in the forests, on the banks of the river, and little by little they submerge themselves before reemerging on the other side. They get lost and, in general, don’t return. They learn a new language, change their voice, their mannerisms, they swap the color of their eyes among themselves. They return always and as long as there’s sun. Their parents await them with rainwater cupped between their hands.
At first, they spend their time talking about the reflection of the light on the tracks of some station, and how the trains come and go without people. Later, they laugh non-stop for nine hours because they want to be happy. In the end, they get tired and cry. When they feel that the imperfect mechanism of the machine makes it so that everything begins again, they grab the guns they keep in the nightstand and shoot at the ceiling to make the music play.
Fue cosa de irse a dormir sin viento. Tachado por lápices en documentos viejos que ya no se usan porque este país se hizo de nuevo y nadie quiere acordarse. Soñé que ya era abuelo y sacaba una silla a la vereda para sentarme junto a la puerta en una noche linda de primavera. Esas noches se van y así metemos las sillas adentro y nos refugiamos en ángulos de nuestras casas o departamentos. Vemos lentas las horas y el minuto de sol que se desmaya en el patio de atrás. Y el verano llega de nuevo. Los gordos muy gordos lo sufren pero en algún lugar del alma están contentos porque piensan que es mejor que esa gota en la cara sea sudor y no una lágrima por aquel país que deshicieron.
It was a matter of going to sleep without wind. Crossed out by pencils on old documents that they don’t use anymore because this country was made anew and nobody wants to remember. I dreamed that I was already a grandfather and I took a chair out to the sidewalk to sit beside the door on a pleasant spring night. Those nights end so we put the chairs inside and take refuge in the corners of our houses or apartments. We slowly watch the hours and the minute the sun fades across the backyard. And summer comes once more. The very fat ones suffer but in some part of their soul they’re happy because they think it’s better that the droplet on their face is sweat and not a tear shed for that country that was dismantled.
EZEQUIEL NAYA, Buenos Aires, trained as a writer in the workshops of Diego Paszkowski and Fabián Casas before graduating from the Literary Creation masters from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is the author of Fantasmas de Animales (2012), published by Corregidor. He is a co-founder of Lata Peinada in Barcelona and Madrid.
SAM SIMON is a writer and translator from Oakland, CA. He is an associate editor for the Barcelona Review and teaches creative writing at the Institute for American Universities in Barcelona. He is a co-founder and managing editor of Infrasonica.org, a digital platform dedicated to non-Western sonic art and cultures. His translation of Naya’s Sueños del Atlántico was published as Ship of Dreams in Mayday Magazine in 2021.