International devotees of Chilean poetry are likely familiar with Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, whose reputations spanned oceans and whose work remains canonically beloved. Lesser known are the poets from the fifteen other regions outside of Santiago, poets like Rolando Cárdenas, whose work is presented here.

Cárdenas, born in Punta Arenas (the southernmost city in the world, closer to Antarctica than Santiago) was well known nationally as a writer of la soledad magallánica, which refers to the specific solitude of this region’s far-flung locale. His poems demonstrate breathtaking renditions of Chilean landscapes: bucolic, metropolitan, and political. Most of his poetry, situated promptly before the 1973 coup d’état in Santiago, is enmeshed in the inter-workings of a county divided by class struggle, existential/cultural crisis, and regionalism. However, because of Cárdenas’s political work, he was considered a dissenter following the military uprising that instated Augusto Pinochet into dictatorship on September 11, 1973. He was incarcerated in El Estadio Chile, the soccer stadium at the University of Chile, which was converted into one of two Santiago-based concentration camps following the coup.

Cárdenas’s complete works will soon be available in English for the first time in Rolando Cárdenas: The Life and Work of a Chilean Master forthcoming in 2026 from the Unsung Masters Series. (Available to buy through Asterism.) Alongside ephemera, photographs, and commentary from those who knew him, this book will contain English translations of all five collections in his Obra Completa. This collection was published in 1994, four years after Cárdenas’s death, by Ediciones La Gota Pura, at the hand of novelist Ramón Díaz Eterovic, a friend and enthusiast of his work. 

We are excited to offer the twelve poems below, including accompanying translators’ notes, as a small sampling from this forthcoming book. These poems represent work from each of Cárdenas’s five collections. 

—July Westhale, Felipe Acevedo Riquelme, and Mathew Weitman, co-editors of Rolando Cárdenas: On the Life and Work of a Chilean Master

from Brief Transits

        Interior

“Tell me you love me greatly,”
you say, lounging in the afternoon
but with a clear, morning smile.
It falls from your hands, makes love in your voice.
It rebounds off all around you.
It is as if you elevate all touched by your soul—
As if love’s protest spent far too long locked up.
You shake in the words.

You say you love me greatly
and I like how you say it.
It is like the green underside of a leaf
that goes running in Autumn
towards the country where flight does not exist,
towards the ecstatic mouth
which awaits the return of night’s blossom.

You say it as such:
you love me greatly
your voice plays kissingly as you speak.
I take your words between my arms,
quaking, maybe, though I cannot be certain.
The bittersweet salves future absence. Maybe.

You made a habit of arriving in tense hope,
soaked in adios,
in a new dress for a new party,
ready with calm palms, a calm caress,
like clusters of ready fruit,
flapping wings, new also, at your throat.
They spill like water over my thick silence.

This is where your love lives—
saved in my book like a dried leaf.
When you speak it like you speak it,
time unmakes all lived hours.

I’ve never archived your many sayings,
which have at times brought me to laughter.
Your ease impacts all.
I only know they were true,
so true, as true as the present,
until the hour becomes overtaken with oblivion.

When your voice is the wind
and tells me of great love
I should have saved it all, and its echo,
in time’s book, with my dried leaves.

O, voice of the past, beloved, which abandons me in this future—
you are unmade by farewell.

      translated by July Westhale

               Epilogue

I wanted to die one blue afternoon,
languishing in my books alone.
It could be far from my familiar house
in an unknown city.
It could also be the mountains,
close to the sea, or whichever place pleases,
but if nothing else, I am told I once was loved,
even if just the tenacious love of my mother.
I am certain I was alive
when I screamed my first scream,
when the light was mine.

Maybe they will say and think many things
after I have retired to the destroyed hour,
perhaps, but it will be late then.
Someone will speak to my virtues.
Others, my defects.
Then they will think I lacked the valor to face the world—
but they will be mistaken,
and for that I will remain
profoundly mute,
without defending an unfathomable minute of it.

In this, everything matters, including the outpouring of sorrow.
After, everything will continue as before.
This is the way of things.

I will go slowly, my last night,
always as quiet and alone as my books, how I was in life.
Perhaps a little pain,
because I lived to be loved,
and its scent left without ever touching me.

Of course I would not have had the things I had—
For example, my first kite,
in which my childhood dreams sung,
or the contented weeping
of crushing fruit between my fingers.

Not even if I had the escape
of the sun, the perforated night,
nor the song of my feet on paths
about the crystalized ground of my village,
nor the mosaic of countrysides
that made up my joy—
in my dreamy state, horizontal and eternal,
I will look to the marvelous life of your mouth,
which you gave willingly to me,
and which smelled of new wood.

I will have nothing. And all will be the same.

No one can say if death will make me quieter. Or more joyful.
At times, the tenor of sorry
reaches the height of the sob.
In any case, I imagine peace,
wandering twilight,
think of and love you from other latitudes,
remembering the first pain,
the first joy,
the first words I slid into your ear’s shell.

I will miss the free things:
our bodies together in arabesques
in the blue smell of cigarettes,
while our friends speak of far-off homelands
with their voices and souls humid
like the fog that slips to the backs of vases,
the parties, the songs,
the verses said in the dead of the afternoon,
the chain of familiars,
until the furtive kiss, given by the mouth to the soul.

      translated by July Westhale

from Characters of My City 

               The Organ Grinder

I remember the organ grinder. Everyone does. I remember him as if he were outside my own house, my own street in the snowy province. Like an overly obsessive musical note. Like returning to childhood that is much too far away, contemplating the innately familiar as through the window, an old melody running through it all like a breeze of good fortune.

Like rescuing a kite trapped in a live wire.

The ancient melody disappears now, in the muddy next street over, with the organ grinder and his drum man. The ragged, boisterous children follow them.

There it is again, in the distance. A return to childhood. Rescuing the kite. Emerging from the earth.

      translated by July Westhale

Translator’s Note by July Westhale

As with the most impactful poetic works, the true artistry of Rolando Cárdenas is the ability to bring the sharpness and duality of a country under siege to light with stunning alacrity. His work is infused with generosity (and emotional complication), especially as it intersects with the natural world and the landscape of his own Punta Arenas. While each of Cárdenas’s collections is markedly different, they are each recognizably his work. The poems are rich with blue humidity, snow, and moisture; they seem to grow lichen with each reading.

Those who loved the poems called him “the rain traveler,” and it is easy to understand why: in these poems are the deep acoustics of winter, the ghosts and ghost ships and dreams of those here and no longer here. It is difficult sometimes to discern which and whom are what and where, and this is by design. The prose-like paragraphs that make up the poems in Characters of My City, while full of the characteristic nature and observation of all his work, offer a more concrete study than we typically see from the poet: archetypes of people, presented solidly, even more solid-seeming against the specter-like backdrop of place. By contrast, the poems in Brief Transits grapple with the themes that seemed to haunt Cárdenas his entire post-coup life: “No one can say if death will make me quieter. Or more joyful.”

A note on my own translation and process: I heavily consulted with friends, archives, and the footnotes in the Chilean National Library for context outside of my sphere of cultural knowledge. These included the names of birds from Punta Arenas, a few instances of bygone slang, and when navigating the extremely varied—and often unwritten—folklore of Chiloé.

from In the Winter of the Province 

               Message for Magallanes (From the Stone)



The South—I remember. I remember you,
the wild look of you and your stars,
your complete silence, a circle
growing like moss, that rigorous, that slow.
That’s how I remember you,
made exactly what you are by so much hard water,
perfectly textured by these secret roots
crisscrossing, a terrestrial sky.
Something to do with you:
the hard wood of your forests,
the fiber, the fragrance
lingering in your big heart whose lonelinesses
ships and cities come from.
And the wind, only the wind
could care less and gallops on
carrying ghost stories, chilling, how full of blood and gore.
The persistence of rain, never not present rain-
water dancing, alone, at first, then flooding the air.
South of winter the snow there always
repeats itself, inexhaustible and alone.
In my retinas, I reconstruct
the contours of your light, and your snowstorms,
and for people who’ve only known sun,
I give them your geography, piece by piece.
With a fistful of snow in my hands
and this wild wind in my hair,
I tell them that I come from your rough edges.
That plows are distressed by your cold hard ground.
That the sky is an immense belltower
where birds and hail gather.
That there are reefs made by seafoam
where the sea spits, the sea howls
and pirates who couldn’t fathom
your waters are made to lie on the moon.
That sometimes your most remote fields tremble
at the sound of a sheepdog, when a herd of sheep passes by,
where planets dream along with the dawn
listening to the tunes rain and memory play on.
That where I come close to your wide-open window
to see the birds, the landscape fills the frame to brimming.

That’s how I remember you:
a damp sail,
adding even deeper silence to the stone
so it seems more intact somehow among the algae and the ice-cold meridians.
Ever since the day millions of water-drops rose up to form the sea,
everything here’s been ready for oblivion.

Nothing’s been left out, not the runaway sun or season;
not the rocks or the channels, the complicated pattern they form;
not even your jutting architecture, made from horizons alone;
not the sky you’ll leave behind;
not the fog, enemy of light.

There you’ll stay, falling off the map,
molding the rough clay of my childhood,
maintaining your distance, as if it were an air,
an attitude, one of always waiting for the swallows.

That’s how I remember you,
this unnecessary gift from the sun.


      translated by Julia Guez

               Birds

No trace of them, or their feet.
The landscape’s not motionless anymore.

Invisible hills appear mid-air
like faraway cities reappear, after the fog clears.
Beyond their wings there’s a dream
we can’t shake
because it’s a window to the night and it’s open.

Not much has changed since then,
but at the house, on the patio,
the birds perch in a heaven-sent tree.
And the children we are
Have lost something,
even though the sweet-sounding sea
still surrounds the city like a wall.

The air has filled with circles.

On that path—the one from the other day—
the light is lost when the birds don’t sing.

They’ll stay hidden, until the instinct to tear into
into some other sky’s lagoon sets in again.

      translated by Julia Guez

Translator’s Note by Julia Guez

It has been twenty years since I have visited Punta Arenas, the place where Rolando Cárdenas was born, or Santiago, the city where, fifteen years before I arrived, he died. In the poems that make up En El Invierno de la Provincia, the city is abstract, often unnamed; it isn’t described, really; it isn’t alive the way Patagonia is absolutely teeming. Punta Arenas, not far from Torres Del Paine National Park, and Santiago, are set up as poles. Patagonia is never abstracted, though. Even when Cárdenas seems to be spinning something of a mythology, a set of high-lyrical creation myths, around the geography, geology, the flora and the fauna there—even when he’s working through centuries of indigenous, colonial and post-colonial history rooted in the Southern Cone—Cárdenas renders this place in extraordinary detail. Something of an ecopoetic ars poetica in the poem, “Message for Magallanes (From The Stone),” when he writes, “and for people who’ve only known sun, / I give them your geography, piece by piece.” These “pedazos” or “pieces” are sensory details; feelings—states projected upon (or derived from) the landscape; they are images.

In this poem, and so many others, Cárdenas presents these images through simile. In my translation, many of these similes are “translated into metaphors.” This means to set-up a more powerful encounter with another construction Cárdenas uses often, that is, the conditional prompt around “as if.” In a literal translation, the similes “con tu silencio completo como un círculo / creciendo como un riguroso y lento musgo” would be set up with the word, “like,” as in “your silence like a circle” or “growing like a moss.” In my translation, however, these lines are asked to read as metaphors, “your complete silence, a circle / growing like moss, that rigorous, that slow.” Instead of using “like” and “like” in this sequence, I reproduce the repetition of “como” with a double-touch on the word, “that.” This, to me, protects some of the music in the line and its many long “o” sounds—silencio, completo, como, circulo, creciendo, como, riguroso, lento, musgo; in my translation, though, you’ll notice repetition of the “c” and “s” sounds, as in, complete, silence, circle, moss, rigorous and slow. The sonic effects are different, of course; they’re analogous, if not exactly equivalent. The compression of the simile into a metaphor (requiring the subtraction of the word, “like” or “as,” also means to protect the image from any dilution into English, which tends to need many more words to get even the simplest and the most beautiful moments across from the Spanish.

               The Visit

I have not dared to awaken the secret of time.
Thus, I have come quietly,
like a slow leaf beneath water,
to this place where everyone sleeps and dreams.

Barely could the stillness of pines be noticed,
barely was the space broken by pigeons left behind.
The day was the peace rising from the ground.

I walked, as in an abandoned city;
autumn had the same color as the fog
when going through its narrow pathways,
listening to my footsteps, as if they came from afar,
was just like a child’s fear of darkness.

I would touch the fountains stained by violent rust;
I would simply lift a leaf or a twig;
I would feel around the silent dwellings;
I would feel around the air as if I were a blind man,
for it was so long since I had been there,
awed by things I had never believed in before,
and I was not feeling the southern wind cooling my face,
nor the possibility that the sky might suddenly change,
because never had I felt more alone
than when gazing at this plot of land
with flowers looking for a sun that did not exist,
as if everything was made for something uncanny,
looking at myself from within and yearning to know.

Perhaps that is why there are bells
that toll to be heard by no one,
bells made from haze flying in the rain,
and I would feel, growing the grass and crawling the worms,
I would feel the dampness as if it were a wall,
and words were my sole possession.
I talked to them about all these years.
I asked them about certain things,
knowing I would never receive an answer,
because no one would be able to utter them
and because I was only just passing by.

      translated by Felipe Acevedo Riquelme

Translator’s Note by Felipe Acevedo Riquelme

From the beginning, the translation of Rolando Cárdenas’s complete works was marked by the decision not to entrust it to a single translator, but to a diverse group. The series editors of the Unsung Masters Series intuited that to convey the texture of such a broad and varied work, multiple readings and sensitivities were required. A single voice risked flattening what in Cárdenas is heterogeneous. That is, his movement between lyric and narrative, between the intimate and the collective, between the urban and the Patagonian wind barren landscapes.

By chance—and by affinity—this translation team reproduced the typology cited by Juan G. Ramírez Giraldo^[1] (drawing on Wendy Lesser). Within this framework, poets such as July Westhale, Julia Guez, and Mathew Weitman can be situated in the category of those who understand translation as a creative exercise; alongside them, a professional translator, María Paz Wallffiguer Mardones, brings rigor, thoroughness, and ethics; a bilingual lover of literature whose main occupation lies in other fields, Mary Ann Christiansen, approaches translation from her own unique perspective; and academics, including Mathew and myself, turn to theory and criticism to look for answers.

This plurality becomes evident in the translators’ notes: Julia Guez reflects on how to transform similes into metaphors to preserve the music of Spanish; Mary Ann Christiansen focuses on maintaining rhythm and atmosphere, even if it means leaving words in Spanish or relying on family memory to name birds and trees; María Paz emphasizes the ethics of translation as a “labor of fatigue,” where exhaustion is inseparable from responsibility; while I myself tend to read these decisions through literary theory, seeking the conceptual framework that helps us understand translation as a political and survivalist act.

Notes:

^[1] Ramírez Giraldo, Juan G. “The Limits and Forms of Literary Translation.” The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Lawrence Raw, Routledge, 2018, pp. 61–77.

from Migratory Poems 

               The Silences

Sometimes in the house
the only sound was the crackling of wood in the stove
and the rhythmic hum of the spinning winder
where grandmother lost herself.

All gathered, all silent,
as if called to solemnly preside over winter,
with a posture much like that in night dreams
but with two lives behind those years:
one, with thousands of blanched trees,
and the other, allowing the silence of now to grow
with the gale circling this house.

The crackling wood devours their words,
and the turns of the winder withdraw and lull them.

On the inside, the house is a wooden silence,
but after so much time,
someone stirs from their seat and moves toward the fire,
for some stray raindrop that bubbled in the tub
is reason enough to comment briefly on the cloudless sky.

      translated by Mary Ann Christensen

               The Face on the Bow, or the Route of Allan Williers

And after the arrival of winter,
a morning filled with a sweet ash,
desolately solitary, seeking something lost in memory,
the last vagabond lost among the corners of a house
adrift and silent.
to finally stumble upon the face lost deep within a book.

“. . . and I still remember my youth
and the feeling that will never come back anymore . . .”

Joseph Conrad then emerged from a hidden space,
the summer landscape through a half-open window,
the twilight streets of the city resting on its docks
with snow that lit up and bloomed on the dead trees.
In those solitary hours, the word was nourishment,
a migratory dream made from its own substance
like a summoned sky taking various shapes,
the gloomiest day, the most secret rain,
the warmest nook at the edge of the world,
the pristine air of the rover of latitudes,
the incorrigible traveler over the seas of the East.

Then his hazy face came forth from the shadows,
springing from the wood with clear outlines
of a hand fashioning a compact memory,
a transparent fruit to gaze upon a tree,
a tender, perfumed heart at its center
like a single lamp on the bow of a ship.

And so one day Allan Williers set out to sea,
toward ancient, secretive kingdoms.
With eyes skimming a fleeing sky,
he was a man absorbed in his seafaring home,
his own voice calling from other shores
through the mist like in a waking dream,
with that sleeping face among the stars returning to its domain,
toward all distant lands yet to be revealed
and the tallest stars with their trembling cold.

Between waves like columns or cathedrals,
falling into the deepest abysses of the sea
against the still sky, three masts shone
creaking with power in a thick liquid of pulpy trees,
searching for the strange land of the skuas,
the dark birds that foresee death,
or beneath the luminous flight of the albatross,
made of the same mighty matter as wind and water,
that water, so cold, it “hurt and burned like fire.”
A spirited steed was the white masts and spars,
breaking the strained air and the roars of glaciers
shattering with a tremor that flooded even the gray clouds
in its unwavering course,
the damp, unmoving figurehead
where silence makes no sense,
while rounding Cape Horn Rock,
baptized so by a Dutch captain in memory of home.

Across the land swept a desolate white wind,
echoing in the salt and the dream of that absent face,
always toward the possibility of the horizon and its other signs,
in a sun from another time, over the scattered south
and its dwellers born from the light of the ice,
with endless sleep in their forest of beech,
along the routes of the Chilote canoes toward slow settlements,
resurrecting the ghosts of Caribbean buccaneers or Nordic lands,
and those left adrift seeking cities in the fog,
tracing the foam trails of feats on agave rafts
and forgotten muskets amidst the crash of storms,
down the slopes of those who returned with Robinson Crusoe,
the solitary of lost days of childhood,
reconstructing the entire route of José de Moraleda’s dugout canoe,
the very one that would make us dream over his chart of the Great Island,
sailing as if through a night sky over submerged hills,
emerging from time, after a long slumber,
with Conrad’s face as a lamp that pushed back the night
so that Allan Williers
could continue seeking the items that would join them eternally to the sea.

      translated by Mary Ann Christensen

Translator’s Note by Mary Ann Christensen: 

Working on Poemas Migratorios was a rare opportunity to revisit a landscape I left almost nine years ago. I am grateful that I had some first-hand knowledge of the subject matter and was able to use my upbringing as a resource. These poems are steeped in images of the sea, wind and desolation as well as the presence of something ancestral within that loneliness. Cárdenas uses rhythm and silences to depict this landscape; I did not have to imagine it because I recognize it from memory.

The first step of translation was one I did quite pragmatically. I simply translated word for word, with no account for rhythm, imagery or any other poetic devices. I turned the poems to English very mechanically, barely thinking about it. But once this was achieved I took a great pause to read the original and then my crude translation. By far, my largest aim was to pay tribute to the atmosphere created by Cárdenas.

To achieve this, I had to choose what to sacrifice. Because something had to be sacrificed, I cannot see another way to get a message across. On occasion, it was word choice—changing an adjective or an adverb here or there that was somewhat further removed from the original term—but that created an alliteration that worked, or had a connotation that further evoked Cárdenas’s imagery.

There were times where I decided that the trade-off was to have no trade-off. That some elements, usually ones relating to nature and the naming of it, should remain in Spanish and I needed to contextualize the words surrounding it. Finding the English equivalent sometimes meant travelling too close to the realm of species and genus and it all felt too scientific. I often reached out to my big brother—a tour guide who holds a deep knowledge of birds and trees from the south of Chile, specifically Chiloé and Patagonia. He often helped me find the middle ground between indigenous/common names and genus which often took away greatly from the poem. We texted back and forth between seven thousand miles and a four-hour time difference and reminded me of words and names that I had forgotten in the time and distance between us that were brought back to me during this venture.

from What, Behind Those Walls 

               Clock, the Tired Face of the House

What silence fills this house.
In it, the old clock is the tired face of time:
an ancient gentleman dozing through the afternoon.

We are protected by his stillness,
but this guardian disturbs us with his determined presence—
points to us with his cyclical eye from everywhere
as if from some unseen shore.

The sun is already old when we see it for the first time
& the night is naïve when we—
the simultaneous inhabitants & prisoners
of its imperturbable rhythm—
finally notice it.

Today, the fragile snow
reminds us of the slow rush of blood
as it falls with the starlight
for hours. We’ve gotten used to it.

Time is silent in its sphere
where Death does not rise
& our lives are like fruits that never rot.
The end & the beginning are a singular vastness
collected by numbers
in a solitary circle.

What a strange way to mark our steps:
this simple & terrible terrestrial object,
in the quiet of the house,
with its tired face.

 
      translated by Mathew Weitman

                Revelation of the Snow

How many bells do we remember ringing in the graveyard:
absently, they’ve lived with us since yesterday
—today & tomorrow—
like the taste of some fruit
we’ve never gotten used to.

But the snow will reveal
the unburied, the exiled,
those who—like us—wander
with lightning & ire, without measuring
the confines of their strange rooms,
without completing their nightly rounds,
& their days of rose-colored winds—
without completing the small yet perfect circle
in which they most feel the ownership
of their blood’s accustomed movement.

The earth turns:
this is the inexorable law that keeps us
from each other. We’re astonished
to recognize the day as the day
& the night as the most disturbing part
of the world: it returns to us over & over again,
helps us die with its invisible force,
timidly lucid. At the same time,
something marks us—something disquieting,
like a deep calling voice that transforms
everything into a white song.

We always ask the snow
—eternal & strange—
to reveal its secrets:
beneath it, we find
every face we’ve ever loved.

      translated by Mathew Weitman

Translator’s Note by Mathew Weitman

Que, Tras Esos Muros, the final volume of poetry Rolando Cárdenas would live to see published in his all-too-brief career, is filled with the most mature iterations of his most enduring lyrical motifs: friendship, ancestral memory, and the vastly contrasting landscapes of Santiago and Punta Arenas. With this, I do not mean to suggest that one can track the refinement of some inchoate themes first explored in Tránsito Breve that are finally “realized” in his final collections; but rather, with Que, Tras Esos Muros comes an almost abrupt shift in Cárdenas’s sensibility as a poet. Though his subjects remain the same well-worn sites of lyric inquiry, they are marked by a newfound poignancy. Gone the sound of clinking glasses and the laughter of friends; instead, the empty table. Gone are the faces of our beloveds, buried beneath the snow.

Throughout this collection—Cárdenas’s first in over a decade, and his first of the Pinochet regime^[1]—the speaker of these poems is often suspended in liminal spaces: in the disused houses of myth and memory; between the steps of Seven League Boots. Our ancestors return but are almost unrecognizable—as mythical as a tale retold by The Brothers Grimm. The genocides of the civilizations before us—the Fuegians, the Selk ‘Nam—serve as important reminders of a silent colonial past we’ve never escaped. The guanacos return to the hills, the old taverns fall apart, the red roofs of the city remind us of something we can’t quite name. The only constant is the seasons: an expected change that never fails to surprise us.

I could never shake the feeling that the poems in Que, Tras Esos Muros, while not overtly political, are especially coded, charged with censorship, knowingly enciphered. In these translations, I have sought to highlight such suggestions without sacrificing the brilliance with which Cárdenas obscures them. For example, in “The Revelation of Snow,” I have translated “sin medir los limites de su extraña habitación” (literally^[2]: “without measuring the limits of their strange rooms”) to “Without measuring the confines of their strange rooms.”

Despite the tonal shift of Que, Tras Esos Muros, formally, these poems remain characteristically Cárdenasian: images accrue with parataxis, breath is the measure of every line. While I have made minor changes to stanzaic length, punctuation, and—in very few cases—the order of certain images, I have done my best to preserve the flowing syntax of these poems (the colon and the em dash being my tools of choice). As such, these translations are my best attempts to bring forth the music of Rolando Cárdenas by prioritizing the singularity of his poetics.

Notes:

^[1] Though Poemas Migratorios was published in 1974, it was selected as the winner of the prestigious Pedro de Oña Award in 1972 (less than a year before the September 11^th military coup). One can deduce that the two year gulf between this honor and the book’s ensuing self-publication was a consequence of the Pinochet regime.

^[2] I don’t mean to suggest here that a “literal” translation is ever possible, but only to illustrate how my process differs from the more exacting translations of someone like Vladamir Nabokov.

from Vast Empires 

                Herons

What color fills the day
when the heron, slender stem, is above the water,
and below its own reflection.

The afternoon is a pause
from its own pleasant descent, gentle of neck,
exile and intoxication, golden scattered clouds.

That happens in the vast maritime provinces
frequented by coirón grasses
according to the hues the wind wishes to bestow
across hills until it finds new lagoons,
small oases populated by stubborn waters,
yet blue for the queens’ repose.

Therefore, they are not even sings
that emerge from a constellation,
accusing them from afar,
nor do their flights pierce the air
spurred by harsh contrasts of arriving snow
or immature men.

Thus, they grow bored of their beauty
and their mysterious silence.

      translated by María Paz Wallffiguer Mardones

               Snowing

It will be the purest garment chosen for you.
Owner without perennial shores, caves from above.
To descend, and descend again is her only will
without traced paths toward hidden mornings
without routes of the night,
her dark nakedness has also been discovered.

It is a splendid sight from above.
The city rising toward her foaming darts,
careened vessels, ghostly ships anchored
emerge with small forests and hidden birds,
houses, belongings, and inhabitants in their white dream
called to meet an unbidden sun
from that mansion descending, absorbing and beautiful
to softly take possession of promised destinies.

Clearly, in this unburied earthly city
its noble and ambitious treasures will be found
delights for visible generations
that will believe unwritten chronicles,
there are no borders nor smoky traces
to reign with majesty across its expanse.

      translated by María Paz Wallffiguer Mardones

Translator’s Note by María Paz Wallffiguer Mardones

Somehow, writing a translator’s note always feels like writing a letter to an angry reader—apologizing for maybe ruining the work of their favorite artist, but also trying to justify why I did it. This, honestly, might be worse. Considering that I haven’t read any previous translations of Rolando Cárdenas’s poems into any language, maybe I haven’t ruined it for English readers just yet.

One of my teachers used to say that most of the time, translating poetry is a work of tiredness: you deliver the poem into a different language knowing it could be improved, but you feel exhausted—of language itself, of imagery, of rhythm, of interpretations—and mostly you feel tired of your own mind constantly debating and acknowledging your limitations. Nonetheless, while reading and working with Rolando’s poems, despite the tiredness, I was deeply moved by his use of Spanish in such a simple, refined, and thoughtful way, his secretive mastery of portraying those mesmerizing realms of longing, solitude, and nature as his own manner of expressing exhaustion: through memory, not as a mere revision of his life and what he saw, but as a way of immortalizing his Punta Arenas, his ancestors, and his friends. Therefore, as foreign as these translations of Rolando’s poems might be to English readers, they were intended as a way of bringing the readers a little closer to a language, to a poetry, that’s deeply connected to the life and history of a man who was, in essence, a foreigner even in his own country, except for that little and distant piece of land that he felt like home: his beloved Punta Arenas.