Poem for the Father
By: Alejandra Pizarnik
And it was then that with a tongue dead and cold in the mouth he sang the song others allowed him to sing in this world of obscene gardens and shadows coming at unseemly hours to remind him of songs of his youth in which he could not sing the song he wanted the song they allowed him to sing yet through his absent blue eyes through his absent mouth through his absent voice. Then from absence’s tallest tower his song resonated in the opacity of what is hidden in the silenced extension full of moving hollowness like the words I write.
Translator’s Note
Translation is home. Whenever I travel, I seek it either by reading translations, or by translating as a grounding exercise. Lately I have been translating into English poems from Jewish Latin American poets, specifically works by conversos or those written in Yiddish and Ladino by immigrants and their offspring. And—in a room of her own—Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life makes me think of Emily Dickinson. I recreated these two poems while visiting my mother, who has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Pizarnik distills the fibers of existence so as to reveal the madness that palpitates underneath. Her poetry is contagious. The toughest part is to convey her silences. I wish I had met her.
—Ilan Stavans
My first comment was meant for @ Sloan Bashinsky but to the author of this post @Poetic Outlaws I can say that that poem touched me deeply. In fact it wet my eyes as I remembered my father whom I lost to cancer two Decembers ago. An intense man with the military bearing drilled into him, my mother a light hearted and often jovial woman brought out his funny side. Their love was like none I have ever come across. They’d rather have sheets each other’s company than anyone else. You mentioned Alzheimer’s which can make familiar people unfamiliar and create a distance between them. My Mom had Parkinson’s with dementia which did that and my Father was her target. But despite that he did his best to talk to and act like that didn’t matter and he cared for her til the last days. I respect him for that and for all who are faced with disease that cripple people mentally and physically and emotionally challenge their loved ones. My heart goes out to you and to them. I look forward to reading more of your posts.
Sometimes, knowing something about a poet helps with context: where a poet might be coming from, how a poet lives or copes personally with what he/she expresses. Suicide has to raise questions. Yet, only a poet lives in the poets skin.
I was 50 years old when the first poem came out of me. I had been in a dark night the soul for about a year, The dark night had arrived very soon after I was told in my sleep by a familiar voice, “With respect to St. John of the Cross, you haven’t seen anything yet.” Then, in the dream, I was awash in pure, raw, black Evil, which caused me to gasp and gag and try to escape its grasp, and I woke up and it was still there for a few moments and I was terrified.
At the suggestion of a friend the year before, I had found a book in a local bookstore written by a Spaniard poet, Antonio T. de Nicholas, St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul. But for that book, I would have had no clue about the dark night of the soul. Nor, that some people experience a second dark night, which is much worse than the first dark night, which is awful. I often thought of killing myself during the first dark night, which lasted 4 years. But It was only thoughts. The black night arrived in early 1997 and lasted 16 months and I was suicidal every day, but something stayed my hand.
I was raised in Christendom, but I had not attended church for a long time when the first dark night came, and it did not cause me to start attending church, for I was in daily communion with not of this world phenomena. Except for a few brief scattered moments, all of that stopped during the black night. About a year into it, I started going to my mother’s church every afternoon and sitting in the nave until the maintenance staff nudged me awake because the church was closing. Nothing changed until I left the woman i was with, for whom church was very important, and then the black night began to lift, After the black night lifted, the phenomena returned full-bore and have been with me ever since, although the presentation changed many times.
Before, during and after the dark night and the black night, I was turned very which a way but loose, upside down and inside out. I was stood before endless mirrors looking at me. I was carried, nudged, pushed, shoved, yanked, spanked, criticized, rebuked, encouraged, terrorized and picked back up, and it’s still happening.
If you can access Google, here’s a link to an epic poem of sorts, which leaped of me in early September 2005 as fast as I could type it on a public library computer about my father and me. When I typed the last word and period, my father’s lawyer called me to say my father had died. https://afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-hit-and-miss-club-was-written-by.html