Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Juan Martínez (1933–2007)
Six Poems from 'Angel of Fire,' translated by Sergio Sarano
[The following commentary is taken from the gathering of North and South American poetry (“from origins to present”) that Javier Taboada and I are now preparing and that includes a different poem of Martínez’s, but Sarano’s attempt, as shown here, is the first at a broader range of translation. (J.R.)]
II