From the Archives: Two Poems from Erroneous Song, by Antonio Gamoneda

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Katherine M. Hedeen! Celebrate by reading “Two Poems from Erroneous Song,” by Antonio Gamoneda, which she translated with Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and which we published in 2025!

I have seen hearts settled by ants, and carnal masks, and a snake stroked by an indecisive executioner,

and imprisoned larks in rectangles, and choleric lapwings,
and mothers
kissing chains.

What a difficult trade to love reluctantly, to knot the steel, to heed the animal beauty weeping and surviving in private entrails of hope,

to see an old man walking unsure of where and his sphincter slowly dripping blood onto the snow.

This wintertime brother, is he me fleeing from my youth?
I heed
cautious oils and weariness and thorns; intense needle leaves
over my eyes.
Descend,
guided by corbels. I do not know. I go, descend
the deep rungs of old age.
What is seen:
falseness is our church.
Now
I am arriving,
now
I will arrive.
Now,
I do not know why, I must sing surrounded by mirrors.

Ready your cluck, the successive vertebrae
of the dorsal ire, the driving
anatomy of fear.
So
says my voice in its imposture,
says:

To live is strangeness, to rest in the fury. Illustrious larvae
sip at our veins.
To live

is strangeness. It is not right to be saved.
From what, for what?
Not
right to be saved.
No

salvation in the sandalwood or in the tortured roots. Definitively
no salvation in the wood.
So, I recommend
the most sublime indifference.
What matters is just
to agonize with a certain
sweetness.
Agony

is a strangeness too.
Even so,
some animals copulate fleetingly. Even I copulate
with dark flowers, with abstract figures, and, more often,

with blue fossils
and with ancient yellow women.
If there were

a final rope and the third shadows
were penetrable.
But no; we do not have

a final rope.
Just,

wood gone mad, yes, wood alone.

I love my body; its vertebrae split
by living steels, its cartilages
charred, my heart lightly damp,
and my hair gone mad
in your hands.
I love, too,
my blood moved through by the moaning.

I love the calcification and the arterial
melancholy and the liver passion
boiling in the past and the scales
of my cold eyelids.

I love the cellular stamen, the white
dregs in the end, the orifice
of unhappiness, the sadness
marrows, the rings
of old age and the influence
of the intestinal dark.
I love the fatty
circles of pain and the roots
of the livid tumors.

I love this old body and the substance
of its clinical misery.
The oblivion
dissolves the pensive matter
before the great windows
of the lie.

Now
everything is void.

There is no cause in me. In me there is
nothing more than weariness
and an ancient straying:
to go
from inexistence
to inexistence.
It is
a dream.
A hollow dream.

Still it happens.
I love
everything I have thought
alive in me.
I loved the large
hands of my mother
and the ancient metal
of her eyes and such
weariness full of light
and cold.

I despise
eternity.
I have lived
and I do not know why.
Now
I must love my own death
and I do not know how to die.

What confusion.

(Image: Micrograph of a malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor)

Antonio Gamoneda is a Spanish poet, winner of the Cervantes Prize (the highest honor in Spanish literature) in 2006. Gamoneda’s poetry collections include Descripción de la Mentira (Description of the Lie), Libro del frío (Book of the Cold) and Arden las pérdidas (Losses are Burning). There have been fifteen anthologies of his work. His writing has also been translated into French, English, Italian, Arabic, Swedish, Portuguese and Dutch. In addition to the genre-defying Libro de los venenos (Book of Poisonings), Gamoneda has published the prose books Relación y fábula (Relation and Fables) and Un armario lleno de sombra (A Cabinet Full of Shadows). His essays have been collected in El cuerpo de los símbolos (The Body of Symbols). Alongside literary works, Gamoneda is also the author of five books of art and architecture criticism.

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Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and an essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated over thirty books of some of the most respected voices from the region into English. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation Grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor of Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

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Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over one hundred editions of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region. His selected poems have been translated into seventeen languages. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

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