Jorge Santiago Perednik: "The Great Skidder" (from Shock of the Lenders)

Translation from Spanish by Molly Weigel

Three little birds up on a wire

were singing "tu amor, tu amor"
or maybe "tu est mort"
the one on the left holding some grass in its beak
the one in the middle saying this is the real wire
the one on the right asking what happens when the wire
      ends
I thought they were the three stooges
and also the holy trinity
the crackbrained father and son and the crackbrained
      ghost

in the nest the mother is the only absolute
therefore the son doesn't exist,
or the son is the only absolute
therefore the mother dissolves into
unreachable certainty
the bark, the mud, the twigs
dissolve beyond the temporal the storm
the poem incompletes itself
if death is feminine and life neutral, nothing is…?
Eve, the poem, had no mother; do I erase her?
either the nest is not a nest,
or I never saw the eyes of a mother,
I always shut the windows on this comedy of errors

I skid
I skid
I skid
kid

nest unmessed

there's nobody in the place
the cars brake and look
bewildered
death
the naked woman who draws attention
crashing
drives the penultimate word
gets distracted and lost

flags flutter by rote in the decorated wind         

flap flap flap
whatever its colors be
they're the sure summer:              
they wear as the last word
in the upper left corner
the molesting item
a sickle and a roulette wheel
the diabolical definition declaims
to skid is to escape the kid            
to skip the id
the bourgeois delirium over the rotten apples of the great
      skidder
the inferno is the contrary of the ferno and the ferno is
the dream of all flags with the eternity of
      waking
the desert is the negation of the sert and the sert is
this lumpen mammal that never manages to exist
outside of dreams and deliriums

when the evidence that there's no death dies

wham!  the prison sentence to the instant is reborn
the handsome brother was wounded by my hand
the hand that I severed and that is now hers
politely I persevere:  it's the world not us
that's landed belly up
could it be otherwise?
my son abandoned me to look at me
lying belly up
from far, far away
he abandoned me because he was scared
does that mean I abandoned him?
I read
why did I abandon him
or
why have you forsaken me, why have you forsaken me

I skid

I skid
I remember the anecdote:
why did you abandon me
I put a bandoneon on the bar
so as not to play it
an amulet
so as not to mull it
so mulish
I listened to the murmurs and shouted, no, no, no!

Saint Peter's question:

how do you tell it to a little pore
and to an even smaller one?
is there anything smaller than the smallest pore?
and I said there wasn't, no,
and smiling
I had to cover my mouth:
I had contracted doubt
I had negated infamous infinity

charged
 

I drive back

answering the trinitary question:
I've been dead for quite a while

I leave

the three birds on a wire:

gone:  they flew:
there is no eternity:
there's accident:
a prayer and an order:
if nothing comes to pass everything comes to pass
right? 
I said no, that had not, that
coincidence
is to say, that no
and I said no, no, no
I said:  no
I said:  no

[note.  The Shock of the Lenders (Action Books, 2012), from which this poem is taken, is the first major attempt to bring Jorge Perednik’s poetry into English.  Before his death in 2011 he was known to many of us as an active & powerful presence in Latin American & world poetry, both through his always surprising & eruptive poetry & through his direction of two key experimental journals, Xul and Deriva, both published from his writing base in Buenos Aires.  My own chance to be with him came during a visit to South America in 2004, when he dazzled me both with his own poetry & with a translation of “Cokboy,” a poem of mine with features like pseudo-dialect & related word play that make it difficult to translate into most other languages.  For the record, then, the following is the opening of Cokboy along with Jorge’s attempt at a transcreation of my partially yiddishized English into a similarly yiddishized Spanish:

     saddlesore I came

     a jew among

     the indians

     vot em I doink in dis strange place

     mit deez pipple mit strange eyes

     could be it's trouble

     could be       could be

     (he says) a shadow

     ariseth from his buckwheat

     has tomahawk in hand

     shadow of an axe inside his right eye

     of a fountain pen inside his left
 

llegué lastimado por la montura

un judío entre los indios

quié hague yo en este lugar extrañe

mit este gente mi ojes extrañes

poide ser sea problema

poide ser    poide ser

una sombra surge de su trigo sarraceno

tiene en la mano un tomahawk

en su ojo derecho la sombra de un hacha

en el izquierdo la de una pluma fuente 

My admiration & pleasure in what he’s done here & elsewhere are as great as I can make them.  (J.R.)]