miércoles, 29 de enero de 2014

MAXINE CHERNOFF [10.850]

Maxine Chernoff

Maxine Chernoff 

Nacida en 1952 en Chicago, Illinois, EE.UU. y asistió a la Universidad de Illinois en Chicago. Novelista, escritora, poeta, académica y editora de revistas literarias.
Es fan de la literatura de América Latina y sus primeros poemas en prosa reconocen la influencia de Julio Cortázar y Clarice Lispector. Maxine es titular de la cátedra de Escritura Creativa en la Universidad Estatal de San Francisco, editora de New American Writing, y de Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, laureado con el PEN USA Translation Award 2009 junto a Paul Hoover. Ha publicado 14 libros de poemas, recientemente To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn 2011) y Without (Shearsman 2012). Su próximo libro, Here, del cual es tomado este poema, será publicado por Counterpath Press en 2014. Maxine es NEA Fellow 2013 en poesía y Visiting International Scholar en la Universidad de Exeter en Devon, Inglaterra.

Obras 

Novelas 

A Boy in Winter (Crown Publishing, 1999; Harper Flamingo Australia, 2000)
American Heaven (Coffee House Press, 1996), a finalist for the Bay Area Book
Reviewers Award
Plain Grief (Summit, 1991; available as e-book from Previewport.com, 2001)

Cuentos 

Some of Her Friends That Year: New & Selected Stories (Coffee House Press, 2002), a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award
Signs of Devotion: (stories) (Simon & Schuster, 1993) a New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 1993.
Bop , stories (Coffee House Press, 1986; Vintage Contemporaries, 1987)

Poesía

"Without" (Shearsman, England, 2012)
A House in Summer" (Argotist Press, England, 2012)
To Be Read in the Dark" (Omnidawn, 2011)
The Turning , (Apogee Press, 2008)
Among the Names , (Apogee Press, 2005)
Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems (Salt Publications, 2005)
World: Poems 1991–2001 (Salt Publications, 2001)
Leap Year Day: New & Selected Poems (Another Chicago Press, 1990; Jensen Daniels, 1999)
Japan (Avenue B Press, 1988)
New Faces of 1952 (Ithaca House, 1985)
Utopia TV Store (The Yellow Press, 1979)
A Vegetable Emergency , prose poems (Beyond Baroque Foundation, 1976)
The Last Aurochs (Now Press, 1976)

Editora

Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin , co-translated with Paul Hoover; (Omnidawn, 2008)
New American Writing (with Paul Hoover), (1986) — present)

Premios 

1985 Carl Sanburg Award,
1985 PEN New Books Award
1986 Friends of American Writers' Award
1986 LSU Southern Review Fiction Award
1993 Sun-Times Fiction Prize
1988 CCLM Editors' Award
2002 Marin Arts Council Fellowship
1996 and 2002 BABRA finalist
2009 PEN Translation Award
5 Illinois Arts Council Fellowships
2013 NEA Poetry Fellowship





Hay un mundo para cada apetito
—Bachelard

Fuiste protagonista de la película con Maud Gonne y Sócrates y Julieta y una bandada de gorriones que eran un punto fijo como la aguja de una catedral pero hecha de plumas. Estabas con ropa y sin ropa y no tenías puesto nada visible salvo cuando te sentaste o te paraste y empezaste a hablar, y entonces las palabras estaban hechas de hilo negro y tus dedos las sostenían como en el esquema de un sueño. Estabas ahí y no ahí cuando en parte te sostuve, la idea de vos se fue apagando hasta volverse la insinuación de un dejo de luz junto a una ventana en un cielo bien al oeste. Y bajo la ventana, tu cara no era íntima como las de esas personas que uno ama sino más vaga y por tanto más íntima en su complejidad sombría. Si el agua es la prueba de la sed y lo cognoscible se cierra sobre sí como una hora de satisfacción con un libro, entonces las historias pueden terminar mientras empiezan sin el sufijo del tiempo y sus presiones. Fuiste protagonista de la película, y ciertas necesidades volaron como figuras animadas por su propio reconocimiento.

traducción de Valeria Meiller




Lost and Found

I am looking for the photo that would make all the difference in my life. It’s very small and subject to fits of amnesia, turning up in poker hands, grocery carts, under the unturned stone. The photo shows me at the lost and found looking for an earlier photo, the one that would have made all the difference then. My past evades me like a politician. Wielding a fly-swatter, it destroys my collection of cereal boxes, my childhood lived close to the breakfast table. Only that photo can help me locate my fourteen lost children, who look just like me. When I call the Bureau of Missing Persons, they say, “Try the Bureau of Missing Photos.” They have a fine collection. Here’s one of Calvin Coolidge’s seventh wedding. Here’s one of a man going over a cliff on a dogsled. Here’s my Uncle Arthur the night he bought the prize peacock. O photo! End your tour of the world in a hot air balloon. Resign your job at the mirror-testing laboratory. Come home to me, you little fool, before I find I can live without you.






Granted

A film is always like a book and not like a conversation.
                                — Christian Metz

As I saw your face nearing
my face, snow fell through
a keyhole and opened the door.
We went inside and watched
windows wax green and gold.
Spring, we decided, was more
oppressive than winter with
its alyssum and clover
and the sheer weight of life
crowding us off the page.
We stayed in bed for years
and took our cures patiently
from each other’s cups.
We read Bleak House and
stored our money in socks.
Nothing opened as we did.






Scene

The cinema is a specific language.
           — Christian Metz

What the body might guess,
what the hand requests,
what language assumes
becomes amulet,
which is to say
I am carrying your face
in a locket in a box
to a virtual location
guarded by kestrels,
suggesting the scene’s
geography of love and dirt,
trees ripe with darkness
and bones’ white luster.
In the moonlit blue house,
where snow won’t fall
unless called upon,
grace enters as requested,
lands next to you, grasped,
as if love were a reflex
simple as weather.






SHE SHOWS YOU WHERE TO LOOK

Names and forms
and from a crouch
a trial before breathing.
Mirages bruised,
"big fluffy flakes,"
speech, and notions.
The nations scattered,
an attitude of blue--
useless preface to
the waves bleeding,
the hand, occult,
the name erased
by jazz and heartstrings.
Orpheus misspelled.
Her eager thoughts,
stumbling, spare.
A fickle calypso
moving in
the distance,
like June light
in broken
February sky.






BENEATH THE FORM

A Zen student
and a great blue heron.
A Christmas wreath
and her short blue dress.
The dust of art,
best name for
a colorless liquid.
The concept of God,
hungry and receding.
Poet as laborer,
the uses of stone
on Saturdays
when momentary release
gives way to eternal
dilemma, when
Sam asks Darryl
to pull over
at the next translation.
Tainted author
of your own sad
birth, between breaths
you are your own
witness, your own
excavation.






CARE

As a tableau
in search of innocence
she looked desperate,
translated, lured
by approval toward
metaphor and soup.
He had the presence
of a king, kindly
providing
a counterexample
of grace and obedience.
As in "history is
broken," consciousness
breathing, all notions
sinister. Inside
the room, they staged
the definitive production
of the quest motif
in Western corporations.
We waited, dewy-eyed,
naked, more observers
than readers, more
smoke than guarantees.










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