Vida en marte
Tekst- Rozmiar: 70 str. 2 ilustracje
- Kategoria: literaturoznawstwoEdytuj
Primera edición: mayo 2013
Segunda edición: noviembre 2020
Título original: Life on Mars
Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith
Derechos de traducción gestionados por Graywolf Press
Todos los derechos reservados
© Vaso Roto Ediciones, 2020
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ISBN: 978-84-121038-6-1
eISBN: 978-84-123598-7-9
IBIC: DCF
Tracy K. Smith
Vida en Marte
for Raf
Para Raf
ÍNDICE
The Weather in Space
El clima en el espacio
One
Uno
Sci-Fi
Ciencia ficción
My God, It’s Full of Stars
Dios mío, está lleno de estrellas
The Universe Is a House Party
El universo es una fiesta
The Museum of Obsolescence
El museo de la obsolescencia
Cathedral Kitsch
Catedral kitsch
At Some Point, They’ll Want to Know What It Was Like
En algún momento querrán saber cómo fue
It & Co.
Ello y Cía.
The Largeness We Can’t See
La grandeza que no podemos ver
Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?
¿No te preguntas, a veces?
Savior Machine
La máquina de salvación
The Soul
El alma
The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
El universo: banda sonora original
Two
Dos
The Speed of Belief
La velocidad de la creencia
It’s Not
No es
Three
Tres
Life on Mars
Vida en Marte
Solstice
Solsticio
No-Fly Zone
Zona de exclusión aérea
Challenger
Contrincante
Ransom
Rescate
They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected
Deben amar todo lo que él ha elegido y odiar todo lo que ha rechazado
Four
Cuatro
The Universe as Primal Scream
El universo como un alarido primitivo
Everything That Ever Was
Todo lo que siempre fue
Aubade
Alborada
Field Guide
Guía de campo
Eggs Norwegian
Huevos a la noruega
The Good Life
La buena vida
Willed in Autumn
Deseo de otoño
Song
Canción
Alternate Take
Toma alternativa
Sacrament
Sacramento
When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me
Cuando tu pequeña forma desciendió hasta mí
Us & Co.
Nosotros y Cía.
Notas
Agradecimientos
THE WEATHER IN SPACE
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive—
Faces radiant with panic.
EL CLIMA EN EL ESPACIO
¿Dios es ser o fuerza pura? ¿El viento
O quien lo ordena? Cuando nuestras vidas se ralentizan
Y podemos retener todo lo que amamos, descansa
En nuestro regazo como una muñeca de trapo. Cuando la tormenta
Arrecia y nada nos pertenece, perseguimos
Todo aquello que con certeza perderemos, llenos de vida,
Rostros radiantes de pánico.
ONE
UNO
SCI-FI
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To a Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once
And for all, scrutable and safe.
CIENCIA FICCIÓN
No habrá bordes sino curvas.
Líneas limpias apuntando siempre hacia adelante.
La Historia, con su rígida columna y sus esquinas
Gastadas será sustituida con matices,
Igual que los dinosaurios dieron paso
A montones y montones de hielo.
Las mujeres seguirán siendo mujeres, pero
Su cualidad estará vacía. El sexo,
Tras haber sobrevivido a todas las amenazas, dará placer
Sólo a la mente, y sólo en ella existirá.
Para entretenernos, bailaremos con nosotros mismos
Ante espejos decorados con bombillas doradas.
El más anciano de entre nosotros reconocerá ese brillo,
Pero la palabra sol habrá sido reasignada
A un dispositivo Estándar Neutralizador de Uranio
Localizado en hogares y asilos.
Y sí, viviremos mucho más tiempo, gracias
Al consenso general. Ingrávidos, desquiciados,
A eones de nuestra propia luna, vagaremos
En la neblina espacial, que será de una vez
Por todas, clara y segura.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS
1.
We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man
Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.
Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space.…Though
Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,
Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best
While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.
2.
Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once
[politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.
Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires
Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.
Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,
Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.
A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth
Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.
3.
Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—
When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.
Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be
One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959.
4.
In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on….
In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?
On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.
5.
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.