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Yelidá

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Format: Chapbook

Size: 5 ½ x 8 ½

Pages: 24

Yelidá

Tomás Hernández Franco

Translated by Jim Cardenas and Anthony Seidman 

Tomás Hernández Franco (1904-1952) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, journalist and diplomat from the Dominican Republic . Born into a wealthy family, he originally studied law, but, after a year at the Sorbonne, decided on a literary career. Working first as a journalist, he became the editor of the newspaper El Progreso. He launched an intense press campaign, through the newspaper La Información, against the government of Horació Vásquez and vigorously supported Rafael Trujillo.

Franco published his first volume of poetry, Bohemian Prayers in 1921, establishing himself as a promising new poetic voice. He was influenced by the Generation of 27, a Spanish group that advanced avant-garde forms, but his work always retained the rhythms and flavors of the Caribbean.

Franco held various official posts under the Trujillo dictatorship and served as a diplomat to Belgium, Haiti, Cuba and El Salvador.

 

Jim Cardenas is a Bolivian-American poet and short fiction author, translator, and film-maker. He has published work in journals like Entropy and Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, and is currently working on a documentary about poetry and poets from Mexico’s northern border region.

Anthony Seidman is a poet translator from Los Angeles. His most recent full-length translation is Caribbean Ants by Homero Pumarol, and he has just published a chapbook with Trainwreck Press entitled The Defining Crisis of Your Lifetime is Utopia. 

 

              A before

 

Erick, the Norwegian lad, possessed a heart of fog

buried under a cold narrow inlet of a soul

during his vagrant long rambling from horizon to horizon

he scarcely suspected that the boreal, long winter bloodline that pounded in his temples

was a wanderer’s song.

 

During the longest month of the year he was born

in the fishing hut of tar and nets drenched by waves

born between the sea’s miracle and the midnight sun,

to an absent shipwrecked father

now a swimmer among deep algae and sands startled

by scales gills and fins.

 

He was the fifth child born for the sea

Erick grew in its language of fishhook and current

force of the oar and simplicity of foam

just like all the boys of the beach

half Triton half Angel.

 

But Erick didn’t know a thing about it—

pulse of wind and stubbornness of the prow—

he could barrel through the names of fish from headland to cape

and through the prayers of the channel and of the bay

at the age of fifteen he could rattle off a thousand gulfs

and not counting the already remote and brackish breast of motherland

yet not a single thought of Norway had set foot between his blond eyebrows.

 

During the annual caulking of boats

flames filler-ropes and tar

Erick was twenty years of age and a virgin inside

his oilskin boots

 

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