from
The Solitudes
Hamish Ballantyne
Hamish Ballantyne (b. 1994) is a poet and translator from Vancouver Island. His first chapbook, Imitation Crab, is forthcoming from KFB in 2020. Hamish works on the Downtown Eastside for half the year and as a mushroom picker for the rest.
“The Solitudes is the last work that Luis de Góngora published in his lifetime. Originally envisioning it as an epic comprising four parts, or “solitudes,” Góngora had completed less than two at the time of his death. At the heart of the text is an act of time-travel. What begins on the terms of a colonial narrative — spurned in love, the protagonist (known only as the wanderer / stranger / pilgrim) leaves the court to try his luck in the New World — pivots impossibly out of historical time after the protagonist’s boat is shipwrecked. The only survivor, the wanderer is washed ashore on a mythical island, a castaway in the generic conventions of the pastoral. My translations perform a similar act of time travel, refracting the text through the poetics and registers of several of its Spanish-language descendants: the works of Borges, Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel. In the poem’s dedication, Góngora offers his concept of the poem: ‘Steps of a pilgrim these / wandering verses.’ Language is the space the poem traverses. The wanderings of the stranger — the narrative substance of the text — feel secondary. So little is revealed about the protagonist, some readers have commented, that language is the real hero of the tale.
If this is the case, then the antihero of this translation (devilish reflection) is misinterpretation. I seek to estrange my own use of English, taking direction from Spanish constructions and sonic patterns, and to reproduce elements of Góngora’s poetic forms (rhyme, metre) in fragmentary, stilted glimpses. I make interpretive leaps in bad faith. I treat Góngora (this is maybe justifiable) as a loose cannon whose work constantly escaped his designs for it, and I seek to follow him in this.”

he slept
and remembered
when the birds clinked
the bell of morning—
the sun—stumbles
off his foamy porch
to the car
Like an obelisk light
crashes into the shack
the grateful pilgrim departs
led by a goatherd who shows him
a ridge
once a theatre for fauns
who lived in these mountains
arrives there and the sight so
much—standing green and green
on a leaf
still as lentil
as a map unfolds
them—mist
sorting itself
out—sun still puzzling the sense
of zero distance
as a brother dim-eyed
shy barely listening but
rapt awe scans
the river’s garbled disquisition
delivered wearing an apple
tree
Silver castle
keyring
smothering
jailbird
From spring to jasper
sea—forgets pride
where memory hides
