César Dávila Andrade
Translated by Jonathan Simkins
Feral Loci
And I descended to realms enriched
by quivering conquests,
by the craven plunder of the eyes,
by the larvae of lust
and of idolatry.
And I found them void.
No covenant compelled the atmosphere
to abide aloft that pallid ground.
They were now no longer:
neither my hair of the soil’s silt,
nor my nails screwed to the wolf.
Via piercing grafts, you could hear
the pruritus of the magnetic field on the visage
of the Holy of Holies, and at intervals,
the sonic faculty of the multitudes
disintegrating into forlorn tools.
The Waiting Room forged the dreadful
alteration of humans to come, and
every universe
slurped our egos with the stem of a carnation.
Pallid ground of wretchedness and camphor!
O Objects,
O Empirical Monarch,
only the infinite dissolution
returns in billions of years to be manifested
but divested of beings.
The dust and its incarnate hollows
traffic in the Resurrection.
Lugares Salvajes
Y descendí a lugares enriquecidos
por trémulas conquistas,
por el cobarde pillaje de los ojos,
por las larvas de la concupiscencia
y de la idolatría.
Y encontré que estaban vacíos.
Ningún pacto obligaba a la atmósfera
a permanecer sobre aquel pálido suelo.
Ya no estaban nunca más:
ni mi pelo de limo de la tierra,
ni mis uñas atornilladas en lobo.
A través de punzantes injertos, oíanse
los pruritos del campo magnético
en el rostro del Santo de los Santos, y a veces,
la facultad sonora de los pueblos
disgregándose en tristes herramientas.
La Sala de Espera hacía el tremendo
cambio de persona por futuro, y
cada universo
sorbía nuestros egos con una paja de clavel.
¡Pálido suelo de miseria y alcanfor!
Oh Cosas,
oh Empírico Monarca,
sólo la infinita disolución
vuelve en billones a cumplirse,
mas ya sin criaturas.
El polvo y sus agujeros físicos
trafican con la Resurrección.
César Dávila Andrade (Cuenca, 1918—Caracas, 1967) was an Ecuadorian poet, short fiction writer, and essayist. He was known as El Fakir for both his physical appearance and the mystical and esoteric concerns of his work. His chronicle of atrocities and forced labor under Spanish rule, “Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas,” is widely acclaimed, both critically and popularly, as a key text of 20th century Ecuadorian poetry.
Jonathan Simkins is the translator of El Creacionismo by Vicente Huidobro (The Lune). His translations of César Dávila Andrade have appeared most recently in Interim, Lana Turner, Los Angeles Review, and Vastarien. His fiction has appeared in Close To The Bone.