The Land of Mild Light
Cover art by Sheila Gallagher
The legendary Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas has been admired and acclaimed by Latin American audiences for over half a century while remaining virtually unknown to US and Europe. In The Land of Mild Light, Mercurius editor Nidia Hernandez has assembled Cadenas’ most important poems in vivid translations by some fine English-language poets associated with the US-based Arrowsmith Press.
Mercurius is delighted to share three poems from the collection, and even invite readers to participate in The Land of Mild Light online book launch (June 6) and pre-order a copy from Arrowsmith (follow links). It is rare for such a jewel of a book to be published at the best of times, and particularly poignant at this current moment, as Cadenas’ “homeland” struggles through so many crises.
In the words of Nidia Hernandez, herself a Venezuelan exile who has found a new home in the US, the 90-year-old poet’s tenderly written poems are “a warm refuge, a loving refuge that leads us to embrace the intemperate wilderness as a sister”.
May you also find such joy in this extraordinary volume.
You (translated by Sophie Cabot Black)
You appear,
you undress,
you enter the light,
you wake the colours,
you crown the waters,
you begin moving through time like a liqueur,
you finish off the most blinding of shores,
you predict if the world will continue or fall,
you conjure the earth to keep pace with your molten slowness,
you reign in the centre of this conflagration
and from the first
to the seventh day
your body an arrogant
palace
where lives
the tremor.
I visited the land of mild light (translated by Rowena Hill)
I visited the land of mild light.
I walked among melons and sea grasses, I ate fruits brought by
adolescent priestesses, I touched trees with sap as red as
bricks that stood beside the tomb of a prince, I saw old
governors’ catafalques guarded by slow palms. Round about
were roots in the shape of bowls where monkeys quenched
their thirst.
I spent a day near the place where the hanged men sleep.
It was the season when the shamans had left for the rice fields,
destroying all the talismans.
In the streets colourful dark-skinned girls were dancing.
Then captains descended from their watch to explore the city.
From that journey beyond the supposed limits I retain only a starfish
or two, several pictures - she and I - and a wandering chest
I found on the boat during the crossing.
Of that strange language and of my movements in that land no
image is extinguished today.
The sailing boats call at the gates in air where I persist. The light
brings me dead dolphins.
Your scent wins back tumult.
I’m hoping for a different song (translated by Rowena Hill)
I’m hoping for a different song.
A song that will set me right,
A song as light as a bluebird.
A song that will lift me up like wine.
A song so loving it can never vanish.
A song that will receive me washed, with no shadows.
Robust, clear and pliable as I wish to be.
A song that will always be definitive.
With it I will walk like the morning.
Full of the moisture that travels from far.
The morning that makes things clean.
That pushes all trouble away from me,
That lets no sorrow last.
That leads me by the hand over all wrongs.
To purchase a copy of The Land of Mild Light, click here.
To read more excerpt-articles from Project Jupiter, Mercurius’s ever-growing anthology of indie press titles, click here.