Alfredo Trejos in translation
Read more here to see the translations from Spanish to English of the poems that Alfredo Trejos is reading.
Or you can read the Spanish transcriptions in MahMag Spanish HERE
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Alfredo Trejos (1977) is a native of San Jose, Costa Rica. He has published two books of poetry through Ediciones Perro Azul (Blue Dog Editions); Carta sin cuerpo (Letter without a Body) (2001) and Arrullo para la noche tóxica (Lullabye for a Toxic Night) (2005). He has been sponsered by the Centro Studi, Cultura e Societá from Turín, Italy. He has also been invited to the International Poetry Festivals in San Miguel, El Salvador in 2000, Managua, Nicaragua in 2002, and Granada, Nicaragua in 2005. He is considered to be one of the bright young gems of poetry in contemporary Tico (Costa Rican) poetry. His poetry often focuses on issues of religious, social or political contention.
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Verdict
To Paul and Charlotte
A man who doesn't allow the angels
to smell his drinks, hangs
from the ends of coffins
for a fair commission,
and holds the hands of the dead
so that they may receive their final salary
and one final and advantageous slap in the face
because you have to drink from something
because the last testament of someone else
is the dust into which we transformed beforehand.
A man in the morning pours the foam of his beer
on to the pit bull so that later he can joke about the archbishop's
bald woman who incubates the golden egg of his faith.
A man, like an observant scarecrow
on the agitated altar of an old car, thirsty
which in itself is a miracle of truth.
A man who hears the telephone ring like a requiem
and knows that it is a woman who is calling given
that she forgot to turn off the lights upon leaving him
she is the one who knows best the difficulty of living with fixed matters.
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Taxi Driver
To Bernard Hermann
The traffic lights are from the fog
when the fog clears they turn off
so that the revolutionary race
of our lives may begin.
At a certain time some taxi driver doesn't go out for passengers anymore
He goes out for personal matters
for that gray death which lounges on the corners
for those places that are acidic on the maps
he goes out hunting small game between the fountain jets
in that great shooting range that is the night.
A full body mirror
is also a rear view mirror.
Are you talking to me?
the taxi driver asks you
the sleepless god looking
back at the world that is reflected.
Poems translated from the Spanish by Andrés Alfaro