Antonio Gamoneda

Antonio Gamoneda, from Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022)
translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

You smell the wet linens, your acids. It is what’s left of you, a living thickness.
You see the mirror with no quicksilver. It is only glass immersed in shadow and within it your face. Like this
you are within yourself.

*

The weeping animal licks your skin, you see great infectious numbers, and at the far end of indifference you spin sleepless, musical, facing the last sorrow.
Coming, spreading out
cold sheets over your heart.

*

It is the corporal howl, it is the breathing in the concave roomSo much sweetness still weighing on your lips, dying one!

*

Love weighs heavy on the physical wood, the past boils in your heart.
Still mercy (mortal rose) slips down to the sacred dampness.

*

Is the light this substance that birds move through?
In the silica tremor quartz and thorns settle smoothed by the vertigo. You sense
the seahowl. Later,

cold of limits.

Antonio Gamoneda
from Libro del frío

Hueles los lienzos húmedos, tus ácidos. Eso queda de ti, un espesor viviente.
Ves el espejo sin mercurio. Es sólo vidrio sumergido en sombra y dentro de él está tu rostro. Así
estás tú dentro de ti mismo.

*

Lame tu piel el animal del llanto, ves grandes números infecciosos y, en el extremo de la indiferencia, giras insomne, musical, delante del último dolor.
Vienen, extienden
sobre tu corazón sábanas frías.

*
 

Es su gemido corporal, es su respiración en las habitaciones cóncavas.
¡Cuánta dulzura pesa en tus labios aún, agonizante!

*

Pesa el amor en la madera física, hierve el pasado en tu corazón.
Aún desciende la misericordia (rosa mortal) a la humedad sagrada.

*
 

¿Es la luz esta sustancia que atraviesan los pájaros?
En el temblor del sílice se depositan cuarzo y espinas pulimentadas por el vértigo. Sientes
el gemido del mar. Después,
frío de límites.

Author: Antonio Gamoneda

Antonio Gamoneda was born in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain in 1931. One year later, his father died suddenly and Gamoneda moved to León with his mother. He left school before he could finish, taking a job as a messenger boy at a bank to help the family, and continued to work there in different capacities over the next 24 years. His first book was published in 1960 (shortlisted for the Adonais Prize) and then there was silence for the next 17 years. Self-taught and prolific, Gamoneda was also fiercely opposed to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in power from 1939 to 1975, and deeply involved in the resistance movement. His work only began to receive the attention it deserved after 1985, when he was awarded two prominent prizes (the Castilla y León Poetry Prize in 1985 and the National Poetry Prize in 1987). An extraordinarily unique voice in post-Civil War Spanish poetry, in 2006, Gamoneda received, in the same year, the two highest honors a writer can receive in the Spanish-speaking world, the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize and the Cervantes Prize. He continues to be a vital and powerful poetic presence in Spain and throughout the world.

Translation: Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Katherine M. Hedeen

Plume: Issue #129 May 2022