Four Poems from Letters from New York

Written by Evgueni Bezzubikoff
Translated from the Spanish by Paola García

| |

August, 2010

Note of a Farewell

Robert Capa would say
In order to take the same photograph
you need the same source of light.
Time and latitude.
The nearest distance.

The images that you keep
Are different from those
I will carry with me in life.

God’s Wars

I have seen an Iraqi father
holding his small child.
They cried of sadness and fear.
I stopped wondering about this wretched world.
And my comfort bled
the way some pictures of Vietnam
or a fallen cop in Lima do.
The inequity of God
preying on human kind.

Reproach

Should one day your husband go to sea
and wisdom or oblivion take my wife
I would be.

With you.

The hope that life unfolds differently.
With you.

And my heart, veiled, secret.
Writes to you.

Should Life mistake destinies
(Then)

With you.

In the Time of Farewells

I lost it all. My numbers, your letters, my limits. All the notebooks, the pleasant drowsiness of a smile, the light, your face. I lost. Honestly, simply, and silently. But I learned of freedom and of resilience. When a woman leaves, a trace of rust remains. And a glittering flower that I keep in a drawer and time.

Bios

Evgueni Bezzubikoff

Evgueni Bezzubikoff Diaz was born in Huancayo, Perú in 1978. He studied at the Colegio Salesiano and graduated from the Instituto Pedagógico Nacional Monterrico (IPNM) in 2000 with a degree in Education, majoring in the English language. He has lived in the United States since 2001, but wrote poetry well before his voluntary exile to this country, winning IPNM’s Primer Premio de Poesía, Libertad Bajo Palabra, in 2000. Cartas de Nueva York was published by Hipocampo Editores (Lima, Perú) in 2007. His new book, Crónica del Adiós will be published in 2010 by the same press.

Paola García

Paola García, writer and translator, grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2002 with a degree in Psychology, and received her Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School in 2005. She is fluent in Spanish, Italian, and English, and has been professionally translating literary works as well as legal and corporate documents since 2003. She lives in New York City.

Cartas de Nueva York. Copyright (c) Evgueni Bezzubikoff, 2007. English translation copyright (c) Paola García, 2010.