Verde que te quiero verde
There are two poems in my heart today. One I found in an extraordinary book, Mujeres Poetas de Costa Rica 1980-2020, the other was taught to me as a way of learning Spanish.
First, Romance Sonámbulo by Federico García Lorca. It begins, truly whispers if it is a sleepy romantic reading, painting vividly connected landscapes:
Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
The full version is available on Poets.org >> and a pretty 1-minute audio reading en español is available here >>. My morning language regimen includes a “Coffee Break Spanish” lesson, and this one is a small history about Lorca and his work, as well as a useful (for me) clarification on how to refer, pleasantly rather than slangily, to Costa Ricans. It is free— disfruta! I listened to the poem and the poet’s life, as I sat in the car to sew an old piece of upholstery back together. The bright rich blue of the morpho and the mot-mot contrast with the green here in Bajo del Tigre, which is dimmed in its vibrance by the low light of our clouded forest. I wondered about Joni Mitchell’s song Little Green (1967), about a child she wants to call Green, “like the nights when the Northern Lights perform.” Not just the green of growth and forests but of wild phemonema in the sky.
The other poem is found in a book I picked up in a Santa Elena bookstore— first, I must say that this bookstore is a little second-story job with a jumble of books on a few shelves in a loft inside a coffee shop in a strip mall. It is a proud place though, called Infinity Bookstore (Libreria Infinito). This one caught my eye at the very end, not just a second-hand Spanish translation of Jules Verne but a real Costa Rican (costarequeño!) libro, written here en Costa Rica.
At its very start, this book presents a twist to the first Lorca poem above.
In the opening prologue, “Of Poems and Cypresses,” the essayist, filóloga (no easy English word for this, philologist) and professor emerita (!) of the University of Costa Rica, Yadira Calvo Fajardo, challenges us with this question:
Es verdad un poema excelso es el que tiene “más cojones” como creian Garcia Lorca y Miguel Hernandez?
Más cojones literally means, more testicles. I have noticed that idioms reflect male physiques (think, “pissing in the wind”). I wonder what a female-specific corollary would be for either of these concepts?
Here in English, this phrase is translated to “more macho.” She then goes on to describe the connection between restorative justice for women poets and a cypress tree:
El ciprés al que dio origen otro ciprés, nos recuerda la necesidad de establecer genealogias femeninas, espejos en que se miren las poetas del futuro; huellas que otras puedan seguir, modelos que emular, nombres rastreables y obras localizables.
“The cypress brought into being by another cypress reminds us of the need to establish women’s genealogies, mirrors for women poets of the future, footprints that other may follow, models to emulate, traceable names, and available works.”
Que lleno, rico, esto mensaje.
Thanks to this very sentiment and the whim of the Infinity Bookstore, I possess this remarkable book!
Directly below is a little gem, by Floria Jiménez Díaz. My hope is that by placing her words in this nearly-and hardly-anonymous-in-the-internet-age format, I am honoring her writing and sharing her with more minds, rather than co-opting or failing to credit her enough. I have placed my own translation far below, because the one offered by the book distorted the language to keep the rhyme, and I prefer the words to the rhyming effect.
Floria Jiménez Díaz
Vuelan, vuelan
Vuela el ave
vuela el viento
vuela el globo,
el sentimiento.
Vuelan niños
y corceles,
toboganes,
carruseles.
Vuela un hada
encantadora,
buenas brujas
en su escoba.
Vuelan risas,
de cumpleaños,
vuela el tiempo
con sus años.
Vuelan, vuelan
mis mañanas
por la brisa
cual campanas.
Vuelan versos
hasta el cielo
de ida y vuelta
va su vuelo.
With extraordinary respect to the original obra and the poet Floria Jiménez Díaz, here is my translation from the heart rather than the head:
Flying, they are flying
The bird flies
the wind flies
the balloon flies,
oh the feeling.
The children fly
on their ponies and slides,
on carousels.
A fairy flies
enchanting,
good witches
on her broom.
Laughter flies,
from birthdays,
time flies
with their years.
Flying, they are flying
my mornings
by the breeze
ringing bells.
The verses fly
to heaven
back and forth
in flight.
