The peddler of small wooden angels
As it does every blessed day
the night has laid a golden egg and escaped
this time clucking lightning
It wakes the fire inside the stone
wakes the birds
the sleeping babies wake
the mothers wake with the milk in their breasts
the morning flowers wake
and the drowsing loves
and the dead who dwell in memory
the sunflower seed merchants
the paralysed
the train and bus drivers wake
the good people with jobs wake
and so do
their killers
Every day they wake
clenching life between their teeth
he too
the peddler of small wooden angels
wakes
with a feeling of embarrassment, because he is a man
but he wakes in vain
Carrying his full bag from house to house
every blessed day
but not a single person opens the door
El vendedor de pequeños ángeles de madera
Como cada día bendito
la noche puso un huevo de oro y escapó
esta vez cacareando relámpagos
Despierta el fuego dentro de la piedra
despiertan los pájaros
los bebés durmientes se despiertan
las madres y la leche de sus pechos se despiertan
las flores de la mañana se despiertan
los amores adormecidos
los muertos en la memoria
comerciantes de semillas de girasol
despiertan los que no pueden moverse
los conductores de transporte público se despiertan
las buenas personas que van a trabajar se despiertan
también despiertan
sus asesinos
Se despierta todos los días
con la vida apretada entre los dientes
él también
el vendedor de pequeños ángeles de madera
con la sensación de vergüenza de ser hombre
despierta
pero él se despierta en vano
Con la bolsa llena yendo de casa en casa
todos los benditos días
pero nadie le abre la puerta
Alice Whitemore is a writer, editor and literary translator living on Eastern Maar country. She is the translations editor at Cordite Poetry Review and an associate editor at Giramondo. Her translation work from Spanish and Italian includes novels by Mariana Dimópulos (Argentina), Guillermo Fadanelli (Mexico) and Jonathan Bazzi (Italy), and poetry collections by Xhevdet Bajraj (Kosovo/Mexico) and Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (Mexico/Peru). Her translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Australian Book Review, The Sydney Review of Books, Overland, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper and The Conversation, among others. She has coordinated and chaired a number of events at Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, including 2019’s The Art of Translation panel and 2018’s Collaborative Translation and Poetry Workshop. She was a founding member of community arts organisation TransCollaborate: Collaborative Translation for Inclusion, and serves on the committee of the Australian Association for Literary Translation. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Monash University. Her translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.
Xhevdet Bajraj is an ethnic Albanian Kosovar poet, dramatist and translator living in Mexico. He was deported from Kosovo in 1999, and through the International Parliament of Writers he was granted asylum at the Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl in Mexico City. Bajraj has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, in both Albanian and Spanish, and his work has been translated into nine languages. He is a two-time winner of the Kosovo Writers’ Society’s award for best book of poetry (1993 and 2000) and has also been awarded the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry (2004) and the Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian (2010). The poems translated here were first published in the anthologies Copa ime e qiellit / Mi cachito de cielo [My Own Shred of Sky] (2015) and Cuatro patrias [Rosewater] (2017). The translations were first published in the chapbook We Fall Like Children (Egret, 2018).
