Translated from Galician by Jacob Rogers
Oriana Méndez is a Galician-language poet living in Vigo, an industrial, peripheral, dynamic terrain at the foot of the Atlantic Ocean. Her poetics unfolds in this urban context run through with nature: the mountains surrounding the city, the horses, the unfurling sea. She has published several poetry books and her poems have been published in different magazines. chairas sucesións(plains succesions), published in 2023, is her last book. If poetry is to be found in the leap from a vision (the mental image, the dream) into the chasm of language, plains successions, is a double leap. It’s a text about love that seeks to flee known boundaries, about love and its darknesses, its interstices, its fever.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. He has co-edited features on Galician literature for Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and The Riveter. His translation of Manuel Rivas' The Last Days of Terranova was published by Archipelago Books in 2022, and of Berta Dávila's The Dear Ones by 3TimesRebel Press in 2023. His translation of Orange Dreams, and Other Stories, by Xavier Queipo, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.
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Chairas sucesións / Plains Successions
Eyelid like tongue flutters sparse and
intakes that which transits its ridged vastness
two bodies sustain their beauty abandoned to
a movement that splays them
that belongs to them
they shudder like a somnambulant ocean
they walk, and open the universe
I scrub your footsteps from the water
I see you keeling towards the waves
Against successive buffets of sand
I distinguish the texture of the water
alongside its color, it is only
profoundly dark.
Her plait is internal
It intertwines against itself
internally selects organs for a mesh
and clamps its own tongue and no one can
witness it like a tree
which collides with itself which erects itself
which rises from within
a tree rooted unrooted
one which plunges
that trips over itself not
to say that she leaves mournful gale
the ash settles as soon as she can
proclaim that
movement is painful for
a mare that gallops the sound
that resounds into the territory of the echo
the world reverberates in its plexus
loses its footing with its eyes orienting itself to
visible, folded noise
sound waves the color of the abdomen
noise like a symphony in the mariner’s lung
at the hour of shipwreck
face ascendant
that ascension awaited by the forest
it’s the forest
to which she ascends
to which she descends
who is saying her name now?
*
Eyelid like tongue folding over itself
otherwise how when a mare is unable
to take to earth after a leap
it curls up, opens its elliptical eyes, observes:
The city was disseminated, lost
traces remain hanging in a spiral like a word upheld
by its own embers
consuming itself
but the flower born in the animal
is the flower that fires off the race
Against the mare’s haunches
crowds hatch
the possibility of an immortal gaze
nocturnal scrying and dividing
a mare in flight
observe her as if plucked from that
charge of red cavalry
Malevich’s unthinkable figuration
surges: it lifts its hands blindly
stretches its ligaments, seeks soothing
terrified like a child in the night
it wants to cover itself
in some pit of lukewarm juice it goes
towards the fire towards the flames it goes
it cannot uphold the wound
it cannot uphold the fatigue in its belly
it was defeated
it did not defeat itself
it trots but already
it trots but already it is
another mare in another dream.
*
Eyelid like a tongue inflamed with horizon
How to interrogate this mare that flees
like a horrified shade?
Where is she going?
To whom does she entrust herself?
How does she bend and leap
in her muteness in her time
forgotten like he was forgotten?
They coalesce in a musculature upheld
by a single nerve
tree mare inner braid
Musculature drawn taut, they coalesce
into a solar braid
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