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Leprosario
| Article
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12453 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
1,499 Words |
| Author
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Reinaldo Arenas; translated by Andrew Hurley
Reinaldo Arenas, persecuted in Castro's Cuba, lives and writes
in New York and Miami. He has three books appearing in coming
months: The Graveyard of the Angels (Avon), Singing in the
Well (Viking), and Farewell to the Sea (Penguin/Viking).
Translator Andrew Hurley has translated Farewell to the Sea
and Singing in the Well, as well as Armando Valladares'
celebrated Against All Hope. |
Excerpt from the poem Leprosarium (The Leper Colony).
The Island's area is 111,111 square kilometers (according to the Army)
or 120,500 square kilometers (by the Bureau of Census figures).
Its principal product is sugar cane.
Its most valuable metal, nickel.
It now has a population, comprised of a mixture of virtually every race,
of some 9,000,000 people.
It is long and narrow, its shape most often compared to the outline of
a cayman or of its own peculiarly fashioned plowshare.
Its climate is torrid and bullying.
Its basic tradition: superficiality, inconstancy, and slothfulness.
111,111 square kilometers
(according to the Army)
of mind-numbing tedium.
120,500 square kilometers
(according to the Census Bureau)
given over in perpetuity to erosion and putrefaction, to corruption and pollution.
120,000 or 111,000 square kilometers
incontrovertibility imposing their pitch and yaw, their roll, their sway over all.
111,111 or 120,000 square kilometers
absolutely shut,
armored about by the ocean,
walled in by sun and water,
their fundamental tradition holding the redoubt in thrall.
Beyond this insignificant hill,
still other heights of no great importance,
an anonymous mound of clods,
the flat wash of waves.
Swirling dust, or a landslide, the mangrove swamp with its untiring itch
gnawing, gnawing;
and in the midst of the cloud of dust, of the earth's
...
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