To my Country you come abandoning every path.When I think of my Country, my pockets fill.Cyclopes whose only eye is the sea,our gaze creates the new day.When trees think of my Country, spring awakens.To my Country you come forcing the stars to follow,opening a hole in the wall, where Saturn passes,sticking its hand in the depths of the moon.Loss drives you to my Country.When you are the sea, my Country arrives on every wave. El Habitante Del SolA mi País se llega dejando todos los caminos.Cuando pienso en mi País, se llenan mis bolsillos.Cíclopes cuyo único ojo es el mar,nuestra mirada provoca el nuevo día.Cuando los árboles piensan en mi País, nace la primavera.A mi País se llega haciendo que nos sigan las estrellas,abriendo un agujero en la pared, que atraviese a Saturno,metiendo la mano en el fondo de la luna.A mi País conduce el extravío.Cuando se es el mar, a mi País se llega en cada ola.
Resident of the Sun
Feature Date
- September 20, 2024
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- Translation
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English Copyright © 2024 by Michael Martin Shea.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Augusto Lunel was a Peruvian poet, born either in 1923 or 1925, as either Augusto Gutiérrez or Augusto Sánchez del Ottre (accounts vary). In the 1950s he moved to Mexico City, where he became associated with the city’s literary and cultural elite as part of the transnational neovanguardista movement of the mid-century. His first book, Los Puentes (1955), was published with the assistance of Octavio Paz and illustrated by Leonora Carrington. By the early 1970s, Lunel had moved to France—by some accounts, he stayed in Paris, by others he went south. His second book, Espejos Paralelos, was published in Lima in 1971. He is perhaps most famous for the first line of his untitled manifesto, which is not infrequently invoked by novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa: “Estamos contra todas las leyes, empezando por la ley de la gravedad” (“We are against every law, beginning with the law of gravity”). According to Vargas Llosa, Lunel was also, at one point, the bodyguard for Charles de Gaulle, though there is little evidence for this claim.
Michael Martin Shea is the author of multiple chapbooks of poetry and hybrid prose, including the forthcoming To Hell With Good Intentions (Beautiful Days Press, 2024). He is also the translator of the Argentine poet Liliana Ponce and has published two chapbooks of Ponce’s work: Diary (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and Fudekara (Cardboard House Press, 2022). His poems and translations have appeared in Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, jubilat, New England Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2015 he has served on the editorial team of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology project.
Poesía en acción
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame
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Johannes Göransson
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Managing Editors
Paul Cunningham
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