Dan Eltringham tr. Leire Barrera Medrano
Updated: May 26
Dan Eltringham is a poet, researcher and translator based in Bristol. His academic monograph, Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure, is out with Liverpool University Press (2022). Recent poetry and (co)translations have appeared in Firmament, Ludd Gang, Revista Kokoro, Protean and Cambridge Literary Review, as well as in two anthologies of poetry in translation: Poetry’s Geographies (Eulalia/Shearsman, 2022) and Temporary Archives (Arc, 2022). A chapbook of his translation of Alonso Quesada’s Scattered Ways was published by Free Poetry (Boise, 2019) and his poetry collection Cairn Almanac was published by Hesterglock Press (Bristol, 2017). He co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher that explores handmade poetics and experimental translation.
Leire Barrera Medrano is a lecturer, writer and translator raised in the Basque Country and based in Bristol. She teaches Spanish Studies at the University of Bath and co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher of experimental translation. She wrote a PhD thesis on Decadence and the Anglo-Spanish cultural encounter at Birkbeck College, University of London. In her previous life as a journalist, she wrote and translated for The Wall Street Journal Europe, Dow Jones Newswires and EFE news agency. Since then, she has continued translating for several non-profit organisations. She has published literary translations in Jukub (Girasol Press, 2022), Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies (2019) and in Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press, 2018).
The Emptying (from Off/Set)
Dan Eltringham
For Encarna & Juan
The river the same verse recited
over & over with water distinct,
Mijares cutting down through karst
mountain goats & morisco caves
carved in caliche, yes,
but only really feeling out the edges of erosion
shepherds making space for habitation or flight
or refuge, really, from the transhistorical revanche
securing the endless perimeter
sod it, getting the reconquista done
those guardia fuckers driving about in their little cars
under this endless quota of sky, they don’t even see the brilliance
or doubled deaths at sea this year,
2021, year of death by drowning
until next
while at another level
the old reservoir & the new arguments
the edges of the ravine thick with rosemary
the open land around the ruined tower & ancient holm oak
sea of kermes oak
waistprickle
no way in even
for hounds
but below the same old speculations:
truffle fields (€500/kg)
water, Roundup®, 14yr foreyield
times for watering & times for gathering
inscribed in the almanac according to Monsanto
even shrooms subscribed or renewed
as direct to debit fungibility’s finest, like all fields
stretching out their soil so thinly into translucence,
that’s time, but sums might not
booms & bubbles burst in time or they swing around
and knock you in the head, but
these are the old farmers
but made new as little capitalists of the old ways
winter’s burning sun brings in the contradictions
but still Los Mases might still time
time as the shadow of the memory of autonomy:
the way it’s always been done
up until the emptying of the uplands
before water or light starve em into the cities
all through the long forties, fifties “urbanization”
cutting supply-lines & social bases
los guerrilleros del levante
Florencio Pla Meseguer, “La Pastora”
between his legs
social categories
& sex fade out
en las sierras de Gúdar, Javalambre
(s/he knew the lie of the land
they didn’t catch her till ’60…
masoveros between maquis & guardia
(remember the CNT transmitter in Los Baltasares…
the little left
subsistence terraces growing back into self
same low-sown,
boar paths over the no-grow clay
globe galls pend this long winterval
ways with energy & estovers rotation
take the dead & only
only fell when sap wanes to soil
only the absolute relativity of relations in time
here is an imprint for passing through market & state
to something, the spider’s structure
arbitrary points give the sensation of order or
in time,
or stasis within movement,
a new image that can’t be descried
just not yet:
no new art unless new forms of living
easy to find, but very hard to do
or vice versa,
the only experimental procedure left in art today
is to see whether it’s to the planet’s liking
or not,
then you’ll know, or not, placing
bets on the nearest future of all
my next hand is killer
órdago, I’m calling it
they’ll never snout them truffles up.
El vaciamiento (parte de Com/Pensación)
Traducido por Leire Barrera Medrano
Para Encarna y Juan
El río canta siempre el mismo verso
pero con distinta agua,
el Mijares se abre un paso cárstico
entre cabras montesas y cuevas moriscas
talladas en caliza, claro,
tanteando tan solo los cantos de la erosión
pastores que abren espacios para vivir o escapar
o refugiarse, en realidad, de esa revancha transhistórica
asegurando ese perímetro infinito,
a la mierda, cerrando la reconquista
esos cabrones de la guardia