Fogarty & Garrido: A Bilingual Conversation between 4 Poems

By and | 1 November 2012
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Urban Black – Lionel Fogarty


Today a lot actions and words

Are about aboriginal land rights

Let’s work about the urban land rights…

Where is the land?

We don’t want the sewered bad rubbish air in cities

so can’t find the land, no land.

Urban aboriginal, go back in time

You will find you are a tribal person

You’ll find the tribe

That roamed the land

That is now dumps.

You’ll find your customs are to carry on.

Once done, you know you don’t want the city core.

GO BACK

To find you are related to Aboriginal or faraway green,

Go out, help them fight now for land rights.

It’s your land too.

No matter where you from

You got land rights.

Urban blacks

Don’t die in wine

Soon this city will spread out over your lands.

Move, move .

Go, go

Urban black the time is

NOW





Aborígenes Urbanos (translated by Juan Garrido-Salgado)


Hoy en día hay muchos acciones y palabras

Sobre los derechos a la tierra de los aborígenes urbanos.

Vamos a trabajar sobre los derechos

A la tierra de los urbanos.

¿Dónde está esa tierra?.

Como ellos dicen

no queremos la cloaca en el aire

basural de las ciudades.

Así no podremos encontrar la tierra, así no hay tierra.


Aborígenes urbanos regresen al tiempo

Encontraran a la persona de la tribu que perdieron.

Encontraran la tribu

Que ruje en la tierra y que hoy es basural.


Encontraran su usanza tan alta

Que una vez hecha, tú sabes lo que no deseas;

El meollo de la ciudad.

Regresen ya!

Para revivir la relación ancestral,

El verde que se vuelve pasado.


Vamos anda, ayúdanos

A luchar por el derecho a la tierra.

Vamos anda, ayúdanos

A luchar por el derecho a la tierra,

Esa que también es tuya;

Sin importar de dónde vienes

Tienes derecho a ella.

Aborígenes urbanos

No mueras en el alcohol

Pronto la ciudad te borrará de ella.


Muévete, muévete

Cambia, camina

Ahora es el momento.
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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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