Pratik's Current Issue Highlight: Legendary Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal's "What a shitty trip"

ERNESTO CARDENAL 

What a shitty trip

Translated  from the Spanish by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt

That unexpected telephone call from Managua

to the last Antilles island—

“Ernesto, Laureano’s dead.”

On the flight — Trinidad-Barbados-Jamaica-Havana-Managua —

looking at sea and more sea, I could think of nothing else.

Since we’re born to die

the best way is for the Revolution

like you did.

Of course it would have been better if you’d never died

so long as your wife and your kids and your friends and

everyone in the world

never died.

When I baptized him, 20 years old, in Solentiname

because he wanted to leave his insular

protestantism for our revolutionary christianity

he didn’t want a godfather or a godmother —

the entire campesino youth club were his godfather and godmother.

Above all his obsession with the Revolution.

Fascinated by marxism but never wanted to read Marx.

Very intelligent but never wanted to form an intellect.

The most foul-mouthed person I ever knew,

but the one who said “bad words” most purely.

One time, commenting on the Gospel at mass:

“Those wise men sure fucked it up, going to Herod’s first.”

Or, on the Holy Trinity (summing it all up):

“Those three assholes are just one asshole!”

The night he confessed to me facing the calm waters of the lake,

“I don’t believe in God or any of that shit —

Well I do believe in God only for me God is people.”

But he always wanted to be my altar boy.

No one could take that office away from him.

His most frequent expression: kiss my ass.

Laureano my son and my brother

son sweet and headstrong

like every son with his father —

and what’s more since I was not your real father

you were more my brother than anything,

my brother much younger in years,

but above all my compañero —

you like that word better, don’t you?

— the one you loved most after Revolución.

Compañero sub-comandante Laureano,

Chief of the Frontier Guards,

I say it with you: death can kiss our ass.

I did not want to write this poem.

But you would say to me in the poetic language you spoke in those masses,

— translated later into so many languages, even Japanese

(that must have cost them!) —

“Poet bastard, tell those fucked-over compañeros of mine in Solentiname

the counterrevolutionary sons of great bitches killed me

but death can kiss my ass.”

Like that “tell your mother to surrender” of Leonel’s.

You were always telling me you couldn’t wait to be a guerilla. And I:

 “With your lack of discipline, up there they’ll execute you.”

Until your dream came true in the assault on San Carlos.

“Now we’re gonna fuck those motherfuckers.”

The bullets the Guardias shot at you. And you telling it later: “Thwat! 

Thwat! Thwat! — that time, I thought I was dead!”

Brawler. Party-lover. Womanizer.

Bursting with life but never fearing death.

Not long before he died he told me quietly in Managua,

“Up there it’s crazy. I could be killed any day in an ambush.”

You have not stopped being:

You have always been

and ever shall be

(not only in this

but in all universes.)

But sure

you only lived

thought

loved

once.

And now you’re dead.

Shall we say existence is like earth, or like stone,

which is the same, “stone endures because it feels nothing.”

But no, nothing stone endures, if you’re alive to feeling there

beyond the speed of light

beyond the space which is time

completely conscious,

within the most vital

consciousness

of all existence.

LAUREANO MAIRENA, PRESENTE!

Fucking airplane, delayed at every stop.

Deepest night already, over the ocean. I could not stop thinking...

I would like to die like you, brother Laureano.

And send word from what we call heaven,

“Fucked-over brothers of mine in Solentiname, death can kiss my ass.”

Yuyutsu Sharma with Ernesto Cardenal at Nicaragua International Poetry Festival, Managua

Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020) was a Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art and religious community in the Solentiname Islands of Lake Nicaragua, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). He was Nicaragua’s minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. He was prohibited from administering the sacraments in 1984 by Pope John Paul II, but rehabilitated by Pope Francis in 2019. He published a score of volumes of poetry, was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2005, and was honored with many awards, including the Ibero-American Poetry Prize Pablo Neruda (2009), the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class (2010), the Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry (2012), and the Mario Benedetti International Award (2018).  New York based, 

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt is a writer and political activist.  Also a translator, theatre worker, carpenter, furniture designer. He teaches poetry and Peace and Justice at Fordham University. His translations of Latin American poetry and fiction have been published by The New Yorker, Seven Stories Press, U California Berkeley, and several US journals.
 

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt  

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