Mary O'MALLEY
Nació en Connemara, Irlanda en 1954, e impartió clases en el University College Galway donde enseñó poesía y bellas artes a nivel de postgrado durante diez años. Vivió en Lisboa ocho años y ejerció como docente en la Universidade Nova en esa ciudad. Sirvió en el consejo de Poesía Irlandés y formó parte del comité de Festival de Poesía Internacional de Cuirt en ocho ocasiones, siendo la autora de su programa educacional. Ha residido en Paris, EEUU y en el buque de investigación de la marina irlandesa. Ha sido una activista de la educación en Medio Ambiente a lo largo de dos décadas centrando su interés en los ámbitos marinos. Ostentó la "Silla de Estudios Irlandeses" en Villanova el último año.
Ha publicado los libros de poesía:
A Consideration of Silk, Salmon Poetry Galway, 1990
Where the Rocks Float, Salmon, Galway, 1993
The Knife in the Wave, Salmon Co.Clare, 1997
Asylum Road, Salmon Publishing, 2001
The Boning Hall (New & Selected), Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2002
A Perfect V, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2006.
Antologías:
Three Irish Poets, Carcanet Press Ltd. 2003 ISBN 978-1-85754-683-5
SALMON: A Journey in Poetry 1981-2007, edited by Jessie Lendennie
The Making of a Poem: a Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand, WW Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 2001).
Artículo 45, sección 4
No voy a conspirar.
Tengo una constitución.
Cuatro mujeres y un hombre
con un destornillador
podrían arreglar esto, con una fregona,
un cubo, jirones de sueños
y un juego o dos de cartas
las sotas, las reinas, los ases
por fin sobre la mesa.
Elegimos la avaricia y ya se puede decir
que los dados iban bien cargados. Descárguenlos.
El pozo está sucio,
el templo vacío.
Quemaron las naves
y un andrajoso regimiento
de fantasmas exiliados
recorre el mundo
murmurando “Mentiras. Todo mentiras”
y las derrochadas líneas
de “La Constitución irlandesa
en Época de Alzheimers” 1.
Hay un tiempo de metáforas
y un tiempo para descartarlas.
Se acabó. Regresaron los fantasmas
a la tienda del ropavejero.
Banqueros, buenas noches.
A arremangarse, manos
a la obra y arréglenlo.
¿Indignación? Mi rabia está helada.
Tengo un nieto.
¿De qué le sirve la rabia? Él tiene
sus pequeñas tragedias, además,
tragedias futuras, sus alegrías,
un voto por venir, palabras arrojadas
por diversión al viento.
No voy a conspirar.
Tiene una constitución.
Y derecho a ella.
Esta es mi nación plural, harapienta,
y la amo.
Tengo una República.
Una vez lucharon por ella
para luego desgraciarla.
Levanten sus rodillas lloricas
y sálvenla.
1 Del original en irlandés: “Bunracht na hEireann in Am Alzheimers”.
(Traducción de Julia Piera)
Article 45, Section 4
I won’t collude.
I have a constitution.
Four women and a man
with a screwdriver
could fix this with a mop,
bucket, rags of dream
and a game or two of cards
every jack, ace, queen
on the table this time.
We elected greed and you could say
the dice were loaded. Unload them.
The well is dirty,
the tabernacle empty.
You burned the boats
and exiled ghosts
a tatterdemalion regiment
wandering the world
muttering ’Lies. All lies’
and flittered lines
from ‘Bunracht na hEireann
in Am Alzheimers.’
There’s a time for metaphor
A time to ditch it.
It’s over. The ghosts are back
in the rag and bone shop.
Goodnight bankers.
Sleeves up, shoulder
to the wheel, and shift it.
Anger? My rage is chilled.
I have a grandchild.
What use is rage to him? Besides
He has his own small tragedies
and those to come, his joys,
a vote to come, words flung
into the wind for fun.
I won’t collude.
He has a constitution.
and a right to it.
This is my tattered ragtag nation
and I love it.
I have a Republic.
You fought
for it once
Then you disgraced it.
Get off your whining knees
And save it.
Lo que Irlanda necesita
Ni más hombres de finanzas ni empresas petrolíferas
no necesita más laboratorios,
administradores ni doctores.
No necesita más abogados,
oficinas ni apartados de correos
ni cátedras de Artimañas en las Universidades.
No necesita más inspectores
de prisiones, fosas sépticas, desagües
ni más molinos gigantes para someter Connaught
y anexionarse España.
Lo que Irlanda necesita
en cada ministerio
es un bailarín deslumbrante
que toque los huesos a los funcionarios
secretarias, enfermeras, contables
con sus hombros, sus muñecas, su vaivén de caderas
sobre sus clavículas y hombros
por todo el gastado trapecio
a través de sus ordinarios ordenadores
arriba en sus esternones y mandíbulas
que prosperen los esqueletos.
Que un giróvago salvaje cambie el ritmo
que les enseñe qué es qué
y, como tributo a Yeats y Aristóteles,
les dé con la vara en el culo.
(Traducción de Julia Piera)
What Ireland needs
Is not more moneymen or oil companies
She does not need more laboratories
Is not more moneymen or oil companies
She does not need more laboratories
Administrators, or doctors.
She does not need more lawyers
Or offices or post office boxes
She does not need more lawyers
Or offices or post office boxes
Or chairs of Funny Business in Universities.
She does not need more inspectors
Of prisons, septic tanks, drains
Nor more giant windmills to subdue Connaught
And annexe Spain.
What Ireland needs
In every government department
Is an incredible dancing man
To play the bones for civil servants
Secretaries, Nurses, number crunchers
On his elbows, his wrists, his jiggling hips
On their clavicles and elbows
All along the old trapezium
Down across their rude computers
Up their mandibles and sternum
With a flourish of the skeletons.
A wild whirly man to put pep in their step
And teach them what’s what
And in homage to Yeats and Aristotle
She does not need more inspectors
Of prisons, septic tanks, drains
Nor more giant windmills to subdue Connaught
And annexe Spain.
What Ireland needs
In every government department
Is an incredible dancing man
To play the bones for civil servants
Secretaries, Nurses, number crunchers
On his elbows, his wrists, his jiggling hips
On their clavicles and elbows
All along the old trapezium
Down across their rude computers
Up their mandibles and sternum
With a flourish of the skeletons.
A wild whirly man to put pep in their step
And teach them what’s what
And in homage to Yeats and Aristotle
Beat the taws upon their bottoms.
Estatuas
Europa es el caparazón abierto de una tortuga
roto a ladrillazos, a disparos,
con canciones de amor desplazándose en tiempo profundo,
traicionando fronteras a cámara lenta.
Mi país es una prenda usada,
mal cortada y con sobreprecio.
Sólo la costa me pertenece, desde siempre,
esta hermosa y accidentada línea.
Ahora toca quitársela de encima, soltar
amarras, no como ciertas estatuas, Fedra
digamos, o Maeve, antes de que la nación
que amaba y llevaba puesta se convirtiera en una mortaja,
salió de ella, con el pecho al aire, desnuda,
y vistió jirones de luz.-
fue un despertar que superó a los dioses
su “nada más que perder” una amenaza
sino en silencio, como la gente de mi tierra
que se va en barcos o aviones
pero vuelve siempre
para bodas, funerales y el destino
(Traducción de Julia Piera)
Statues
Europe is a turtle’s back broken
open with bricks, with gunfire,
with love songs shifting in deep time,
borders snaking in slow motion.
My country is a worn out thing,
badly cut and overpriced.
I only ever owned the coast,
this beautiful indented line.
It’s time to shake it off, loosen
the ties, not the way some statue, Phedre
say, or Maeve , before the nation
she wore and loved became a shroud
stepped out of it, went bare-breasted
and clothed herself in rags of light -
such get-up made the gods feel bested
its ‘nothing more to lose’ a threat -
but quietly, the way the people of my place
have taken boats and planes and gone
and almost always come home
for weddings, funerals and fate.
Europe is a turtle’s back broken
open with bricks, with gunfire,
with love songs shifting in deep time,
borders snaking in slow motion.
My country is a worn out thing,
badly cut and overpriced.
I only ever owned the coast,
this beautiful indented line.
It’s time to shake it off, loosen
the ties, not the way some statue, Phedre
say, or Maeve , before the nation
she wore and loved became a shroud
stepped out of it, went bare-breasted
and clothed herself in rags of light -
such get-up made the gods feel bested
its ‘nothing more to lose’ a threat -
but quietly, the way the people of my place
have taken boats and planes and gone
and almost always come home
for weddings, funerals and fate.
ST. JOHN'S EVE
In the blue light that let us see
my husband’s shirt buttons on bonfire night
and see our mink-coated dog
in the distance at half eleven at night,
a butterfly wings in from Borneo. It is the colour
of luminous blue fish in an aquarium.
It drinks our attention until the lavender hills,
the silver hound leaping for a tennis ball,
the girl throwing it, sixteen and beautiful,
become a film, a vacuumed surface.
We watch this creature visiting from space,
from heaven, from somewhere else, transfixed.
Go back, I want to say, You are in the wrong place.
It hovers for a while, pulsing blue light,
then flies off towards the coast.
We stare, robbed of a dimension. I am afraid.
I asked God what sacrifice would be enough
to keep us all together. I am talking with a stranger.
Naturalists write neater poems than lovers.
I would have promised anything.
All I observed beside the fire blossoming
below the house was a brown O on each wing.
I could taste the shining bone that would remain
a charred promise in the morning ashes.
COMMUNION AT THE GATE THEATRE
This is the time of life when a woman
goes to Dublin to the theatre to get away
the night every Leaving Cert student in Ireland
is up from the country to see the same RSC production.
Hamlet is small and elegant and very English. What did
she expect – that after all those years
he would have grown really Danish, the lies
would be less eloquent, gestures less fluid?
Tonight she finds the prince tedious and self-obsessed.
You are thirty years old for Christ’s sake,
she shouts, startling the audience.
The students are disapproving, then delighted.
Now that they have stopped texting one another,
the girls are shaping some of the words.
There is Royal Shakespearean body language
between Claudius and Gertrude.
The boys whistle, applaud uneasily.
The woman thinks Gertrude is entitled to her lover’s kiss.
What kind of twisted little shit are you?
she asks Hamlet, but silently. Hamlet is relentless.
The actor fifty if he’s a day, torturing his mother
who is the same age. No one cares.
It is as bad as MacLiammoir playing Romeo.
The kids are loving it. We are rearing
a generation of throwbacks, she thinks,
without Latin to sustain them, much less history.
She checks the exits, measures her chances. She rises
in a crouch just as a hush is spreading through the house.
Here and there along the rows the students begin
To mouth Hamlet’s soliloquy. The half-formed faces
half-lit are devout. At What is a man is his chief good be…
but to sleep…the ungodly voices join in as at Mass.
ARRIVAL IN PARIS
Fluent gesture. Already on the Beauvais bus a man
strokes his son’s head with a palm cupped.
The child’s black hair responds like a young cat.
A boy is sulking beautifully,
legs crossed at the ankles. The girl
ignoring him is reading Kafka – La Procès.
He utters soft plosives, little plumes of indignation
astonished at her cruelty for at least ten kilometres.
When they make up, she rubs the side of his face
With slow fingers for another five before he defrosts.
There are banks of hawthorn along the motorway.
By Paris, the lovers are reconciled. Outside
open-pored sandstone drinks in the south.
I think of Blaithin, her skin made of flowers,
the touch of sun opening them.
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