Fogarty & Garrido: A Bilingual Conversation between 4 Poems

By and | 1 November 2012
Pages: 1 2 3 4
¿Cómo creerle a la muerte? – Juan Garrido-Salgado


A Gaddafi y su revolución verde


Si el odio es una guerra planificada

Repartos de ganancias y poder.

Nada más que ganancias en crisis.

Pero la muerte de la ocupación

Tiene nombre de mi patria

Tiene hogares destruidos

Tiene llanto de ríos mudos de la agonía,

Tiene ojos abiertos al olor del desierto.

Muros caídos en los platos de niños palestinos

Cuchareando lágrimas y huesos de tantos muertos


¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si el odio es un documento legalizado

En la Asamblea General de naciones unidas

¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si el poder fabrica dictadores y desaparecidos.

Planifica masacres y exilio

Planifica hambrunas y saqueos.


¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si hubo un tiempo que viví en mi país feliz,

Fui ciudadano de calles y estudiante de la esperanza.

¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si, Henry Kisserger tiene el premio Nobel de la Paz.

Fue él quien sentencio a Salvador Allende.


¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si, Barack Obama tiene el premio Nobel de la Paz.

En su paraíso hecho mierda,

Pero invade Libia y expulsa a Gaddafi

De la tierra prometida para el West.


¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si no nos dicen que quieren nuestro Cobre.

Que quieren nuestro Petróleo

Nuestra Sal y nuestros ríos

Que quieren nuestro suelo y nuestras montanas

Que quieren nuestro corazón, cuerpos y mente.


¿Cómo creerle a la vida?

Si nos quieren esclavos en su mundo libre.

¿Cómo creerle a la muerte?

Si la revolución está preñada de verde, indígena y guevarista, Carajo!!!




How to Believe in Death?


How to believe in death

If hatred is a war planned

It’s a distribution of profit and power.

It is nothing else than financial system in crisis.

NATO-US destroyed homes

With the occupation army of death.

NATO-US made tears like rivers of agony.

NATO-US eyes were open only to desert…


How to believe in death?

Walls  fell onto the plates of Palestinian children

Spooned so many tears and bones of the dead

How to believe in death?

If hatred is a legalized document

Of the United Nations General Assembly

How to believe in death?

If power makes dictatorships and disappearances.

If power plans massacres and exile.

If power plans famine and looting 


How to believe in death?

If there was a time I lived in my country happy,

I was a citizen of the streets and students of hope.

How to believe in death?

When Henry Kissinger had the Nobel peace prize

In his paradise like shit where he celebrates death.


How to believe in death?

When Gaddafi’s land was invaded savagely

As the Promised Land for the west 


How to believe in death?

If you do not tell us you want our copper

You want our oil,

You want our salt and our rivers

You want our land and our mountains

You want our hearts, our bodies, and our minds.

How to believe in life?

If you want us slaves in your ‘free world’.

How to believe in death?

When I believe the revolution is pregnant

With indigenous ancestors’ dreams

and Guevara’s spirit on earth, carajo!!!
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Lionel Fogarty was born in 1958 at Barambah, now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland. Since the 1970s he has been active in many of the political struggles of the Aboriginal people, from the Land Rights movement, to setting up Aboriginal health and legal services, to the issue of black deaths in custody. His first collection of poetry, Kargun, was published in 1980, and he has gone on to publish eight further collections, as well as a children’s book, Booyooburra, a traditional Wakka Wakka story. Fogarty has also travelled widely in the United States and Europe, reading from his work and participating in conferences of Indigenous peoples. An unabashedly political poet, Fogarty’s poetry employs Aboriginal English in innovative ways, challenging readers to reconfigure cultural assumptions.

More by Lionel Fogarty on Cordite Poetry Review →
Juan Garrido Salgado was born in Chile and was a political prisoner under the Pinochet regime. He now lives in Adelaide. He has published three books of poetry, and his poems have been published in Chile, Colombia, Spain, El Salvador, Brazil, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. He has also translated into Spanish works from John Kinsella, Mike Ladd, Judith Beveridge, Dorothy Porter and MTC Cronin, including Talking to Neruda’s Questions. He has translated five Aboriginal poets for Espejo de Tierra/Earth Mirror Poetry Anthology. With Steve Brock and Sergio Holas, Garrido-Salgado also translated into English the trilingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology, and has translated many of Lionel Fogorty’s poems into Spanish. He is currently working on the Spanish translation of a selection of Jumoke Verissimo’s poems, to be read at the Granada International Poetry Festival in Nicaragua.

More by Juan Garrido Salgado on Cordite Poetry Review →

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