Image courtesy of Diputación de Málaga
If My Father Tells Me
If my father tells me: Be a man,
I shrivel like a grub,
stick my belly on the fishhook.
Soft, like some mollusk without its shell,
I feel dismantled, keep my cool.
I then ask myself
what use was learning four languages
if words can’t be heard beneath the water,
if I only know how to write poems.
Si mi padre me dice
Si mi padre me dice: Sé un hombre
yo me encojo como una larva,
clavo el abdomen bajo el anzuelo.
Blando, como un molusco sin concha,
me siento desmantelado, aguanto el tipo.
Me pregunto entonces
de qué sirve haber aprendido cuatro idiomas
si las palabras no se oyen bajo el agua,
si solo sé escribir poemas.
Lawrence Schimel is is a bilingual author and translator living in Madrid. Writing in both Spanish and English, he has published over one hundred books as an author or anthologist, in a number of genres. He is also a prolific literary translator, including over 20 poetry collections, the most recent of which are Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems by Jordi Doce (Shearsman 2017), Tonalpohuali by Jeannette L. Clariond (Vaso Roto 2017), and Hamartia by Carmen Boullosa (White Pine Press 2018). His translations of poems appear regularly in journals such as Modern Poetry in Translation, Words without Borders and Pleiades.
Ángelo Néstore was born in Italy and now lives in his adopted city of Málaga, Spain. He is a poet, actor, and professor of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Málaga, in addition to teaching Mandarin Chinese. He co-directs the Irreconciliables International Poetry Festival in Málaga and feminist poetry press La Señora Dalloway. His first book of poems, Adán o nada (Bandaàparte Editores) was published in 2017, the same year in which he won the Premio de Poesía Hiperión for Actos impuros (Ediciones Hiperión). In addition to his work as a poet, he is a translator into Italian of works such as the poetry of María Eloy-García and the graphic novels of Isabel Franc, Andreu Martín and Enrique Sánchez Abulí, among others.
