Yolanda Castaño
Yolanda Castaño Poems
My looks suggest I like
things that I do not.
Everyone speaks through
...
I,
who traced by car the banks of the Neretva,
who exhausted on bicycle the steaming streets of Cophehnague.
I who measured with my own arms the holes of Sarajevo,
who crossed, in the driver's seat, the border of Slovenia
...
We are making a detailed inventory,
like the herbarium of an unforeseeable constellation.
First are the lilies, adornment of splattered stars;
...
The entire sky is squatting. An intransitive thirst.
To speak in a foreign tongue
is like dressing in borrowed clothing.
...
The world is a hotel with no reception desk.
The gift of eloquence is not a common good.
Loaves and fishes were not distributed that way.
Meat to the starboard, fishbones to the port.
...
I shall begin with its density. Its acidity, its ph.
It walks just like a woman:
between the massacre of the invisible
and the concentration camp of visibility.
...
That nostalgia, the violets,
a rubric so alien to our languages,
being on a trip, Armenia, foreign signs,
the fleshy layer that covers my sensation.
...
Yolanda Castaño Biography
Yolanda Castaño Pereira (Santiago de Compostela, 1977) is a Galician painter, literacy critic and poet. Since 1990, she has lived in Corunna, where she studied Spanish Philology at the University of A Coruña. She translated her poems to Spanish and has been the General Secretary at the Association of Galician-language Writers (Spanish: Asociación de Escritores en Lingua Galega) and at Letras de Cal. She has also collaborated in several publications, such as Festa da palabra silenciada, Dorna, O Correo Galego (El Correo Gallego), A nosa terra and El Mundo.)
The Best Poem Of Yolanda Castaño
Pretending That The Pain She Feels Is Pain
My looks suggest I like
things that I do not.
Everyone speaks through
closed lips.
As does this.
The walls of a grotto where, ten thousand years ago,
someone sullies the natural essence of the stone.
Coins, alternating current,
a girl born with beauty in her genes,
pock-marked by hang-ups.
Like an orgasm in Hedy Lamarr, like Nikola Tesla's eyes.
A country where one needn't be,
but can merely
appear to.
A peeling away of gloves,
a touch of spice, the most prestigious
of all dubbing schools.
Capital is the nightmare
of being caught in our symbolic capacity.
The most flattering of all: mortuary makeup.
Years of work turned into equestrian granite.
An industry of poverty, wolfram in kitchen gardens.
Like an ardent body, aware but
feigning innocence.
Cheap false eyelashes, an image
identical to itself.
Like political poetry confused
with a selfie in the bathroom mirror.
The metonymy of evil.
The normative wrenched.
A set stage, a menu, an emergency escape from the fires of discourse.
Something whose roots stretch out to the air and longs
to return to the soil, once time
has elapsed since it burst into light-
like the eyes in potatoes.
The poem's gaze is like this too:
worker ants in single file,
flattened forever
in timeless lines,
shreds of gestures
that look like
something else.
Translation by Carys Evans-Corrales
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