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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