Farewells
translated from the Galician by Erín Moure
I devise farewells that topple
that abruptly plunge
there’s a dark womb
and exhausted hands
I ideate a farewell that brings us
to know the body like this
a dune too that unravels
in the wave of breath
with that sigh of women who’ve come
with screens of mourning
in their larynx
The flower-tip, that node of life
from which emerges
a yolk of colour and petals
Nerve of life, it spreads open
wants to spread open and thrive
It’s what speaks to us
stutters babbles attempts to get up:
a raw wince of light
Despedidas
Concibo despedidas que caen
que se precipitan
hai unha matriz moura
unhas mans esgotadas
ideo unha despedida que se nos
desprende do corpo así
tamén a duna que se desfai
na onda do alento
con este sopro das que viñeron
con pantallas de loito
na larinxe
A punta da flor, ese nó de vida
sobre o que se produce
unha xema de cor e pétalos
Nervio de vida ábrese
quere abrirse e sosterse
ela é quen nos fala
tatexa farfalla tenta erguerse:
unha chaga de luz
Copyright © 2024 by Oriana Méndez and Erín Moure. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 4, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The poem, from Oriana Méndez’s 2020 collection Interna, evokes the process of taking leave of someone, of a way of life, or a place, and growing as a person in the process. The trickiest bit to translate was its last line. A chaga—a weeping sore, an ulcerated abrasion—startles in Galician when set against luz, [or] light. But it’s wordy to translate chaga, and wound is too general. I didn’t want to lose the line’s concision, so I went for the feeling of having a chaga. How, though there is light, its rawness hurts us: we wince.”
—Erín Moure
Oriana Méndez
Oriana Méndez is a Galician poet and translator. She is the author of six poetry collections, including chairas sucesións (Chan da Pólvora, 2023) and Interna (FisicalBook, 2020), which was awarded the XVIII Afundación Poetry Prize in 2020. She lives in Vigo, Spain.