Hands
- Hands
Are you blind to the fact that God gave you those hands?
I'm asking you again.—Vicente Huidobro
I would like to cut off your hands with a golden saw. Or perhaps it would be best to leave them alone And enclose your body in a wall of cement, With only two exact holes For you to stick out your hands and flap them Like a dove's wings or like prisoners of an implacable king. Your hands would be delicious, cooked with tender asparagus, Turning a golden brown in an oven of devotion and homage; Your hands served up by maidens with their hair in green nets, Carved by Trimalchion, with sapphire forks. Because, after all, one needs to expect destruction, Destroying all we love as we see fit: And if your hands are the most beautiful parts of your body, Why should we allow them to grow old and perish, Vine-like, horrifying hands of ancient generals or magistrates? Let us proceed in a timely way and with caution: a fine dusting of saffron, Some teaspoons of perfumed Arabian oil, And the fire, fire that sanctifies, fire perpetuating beauty. And then your lovely hands, recovered for the ages, Basted and flavored with sherry. Let us eat and save them from death! Let us eat and sing! Are you blind to the fact that God gave you those hands? You must be. That is why I implore you to visit the executioner, tomorrow, at exactly six o'clock, And allow him to lop off your prodigious hands: for they shall be saved. There will be an altar for them, and a chorus of our laughter will rise. We will laugh at the gods and their useless mirth.
Gastón Baquero (1916-1997) was born in Banes, which is now part of the province of Holguin in Cuba. In spite of the rural poverty in which he was born and reared, he was educated as an agronomist before becoming a journalist and poet. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution began, he left the island nation for Spain, where he lived until his death in Madrid in 1997, having published several collections of essays, as well as eight volumes of poems. The Angel of Rain, a selection of his poetry in English translation by Greg Simon and Steven F. White, will be published this summer by Eastern Washington University Press.
Greg Simon, a native of Minnesota, has published translations of poetry from the work of Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian writers. He is the co-translator, with Steven F. White and Christopher Maurer, of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York (FSG, 1988). Simon is currently an associate editor with Trask House Books and The Salt River Review. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Steven F. White, a professor of modern languages and literature at St. Lawrence University, has edited and translated anthologies of contemporary poetry from Nicaragua, Chile, and Brazil. He is author of Modern Nicaraguan Poetry: Dialogues with France and the United States (1993) and five books of poems, including Landscape with One Candle and Assyrian Bees (1995), published in a bilingual edition in Brazil, and Fire that Engenders Fire (2000), published in bilingual edition in Madrid. He is a corresponding member of the Nicaraguan Academy of the Language and an advisory and contributing editor of Callaloo.
