Tomás’s increasingly histrionic manner signaled his reading was drawing to a close, and after yet another terrible poem he paused, looked at the audience again, and then abandoned the podium without a word, at which point everyone applauded. When the applause died down Arturo nodded to me. We approached the podium and he explained that I would read the poem in English and then he would offer the translation. He might also have claimed that, even if one had no English, some of the power of the original would be palpable. While he was saying this or something like it I poured myself a glass of water, nearly spilling it when I drank, and opened my notebook. When he turned and looked at me to signal I should start, I said thank you into the microphone and began to read my poem, to read it in a deadpan and monotonic but surprisingly confident way, considering my knees were shaking and my hands were freezing, to read it as if either I was so convinced of the poem’s power that it needed no assistance from dramatic vocalization, or, contrarily, like it wasn’t poetry at all, just an announcement of some sort: this train is delayed due to trackwork ahead, etc. I fantasized as I listened to myself that the undecidability of my style — was it an acknowledgment of the poem’s intrinsic energy or a reading appropriate to its utter banality — would have its own kind of power, especially in Tomás’s wake:
Under the arc of the cello
I open the Lorca at random
I turn my head and watch
The lights slide by, a clearing
Among possible referents
Among the people perusing
The gallery walls, dull glow
Of orange and purple, child
Behind glass, adult retreating
I bit hard to deepen the cut
I imagined the passengers
Could see me, imagined I was
A passenger that could see me
Looking up …
When I finished my portion of the reading I returned to my seat as the crowd applauded and then I realized I was no doubt supposed to stand with Arturo as he read his translations, but I was too relaxed now to rejoin him at the podium.
Arturo hesitated and I imagined he had expected my performance to be more like Tomás’s than it was, had undertaken the translation with a much more dramatic performance in mind, and now he was trying to figure out if he needed to read the translation in the manner in which I’d read the original or if he should deliver it as he had envisioned it prior to my reading; I was glad to see him struggle. Then he began to read the translation in what he must have thought was the midpoint between my style and Tomás’s, gripping the podium like the latter, but modeling my detachment, which had the strange and appropriate effect of making his voice sound dubbed.
At first I heard only so many Spanish words, but nothing I could recognize as my own; after all, there was nothing particularly original about my original poems, comprised as they were of mistranslations intermixed with repurposed fragments from deleted e — mails. But as the poem went on I slowly began to recognize something like my voice, if that’s the word, a recognition made all the more strange in that I’d never recognized my voice before. Something in the arrangement of the lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence; it was like walking into a room where I was sure I’d never been, but seeing in the furniture or roaches in the ashtray or the coffee cup on the window ledge beside the shower signs that I had only recently left. Not that I’d ever owned that particular couch or cup, but that the specific disposition of those objects, the way they had been lived with, required or implied me; not that I was suffering from amnesia or déjà vu, but that I was both in that room and outside of it, maybe in the park, and not just in the park, but also in innumerable other possible rooms and parks at once. Any contingent object, couch or cup, “orange” or “naranja,” could form the constellation that I was, could form it without me, but that’s not really right; it was like seeing myself looking down at myself looking up.
When Arturo finished reading there was a long pause followed by what I experienced as unusually loud applause, and Arturo gestured toward me, redirecting that applause, and then said something about Tomás into the microphone, the applause thickening to include him before it gradually tapered off. People rose from their seats and either left to smoke, I guess smoking was bad for the art, or broke for the wine and tapas. Teresa approached and congratulated me and said I had done a wonderful job. Rafa embraced me, Rafa never really talked, and then I saw that María José was waiting to speak with me, American fellows in tow.
I introduced Teresa to María José and vice versa, and Teresa let fly a barrage of compliments about my writing and said something about how wonderful it was that the foundation had brought me to Madrid. While I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying, it was clear it was eloquent, that Teresa spoke not as a friend but as a self-appointed representative of Spanish Art, and that María José was impressed, if a little put off. To me María José said she had enjoyed the reading very much, she looked forward to talking with me about how my new poems related to my research about the Spanish Civil War, perhaps at one of the upcoming events where fellows would be presenting their work, and I blinked a few times and said claro. Then one of the fellows introduced herself and said she too was a poet, basically yelled it, and that she would love to have coffee sometime and talk Spanish poetry. I blinked at her as well, but, before I could say claro, Arturo was pulling me away from the group to introduce me to Tomás, who had the air of a man badly misunderstood.
We shook hands and I said I liked your reading and he thanked me but didn’t say anything back, I guess because he didn’t like my poetry and because Tomás couldn’t lie for the sake of politeness when it came to the most sacrosanct of arts. I was surprised how furious I became and how fast, but I didn’t say anything; I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been mere graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.
When I felt my face had made its point, I left him without saying excuse me, walked out of the gallery, and stood a few feet apart from the other smokers and lit my own cigarette, impervious to the cold. I sensed that the other smokers were whispering about me in respectfully hushed tones, and while I knew this was less because of any particular response they’d had to my reading than because I had been presented to them as a significant foreign writer, it nevertheless felt good. Eventually one of the group approached me and introduced himself as Abel. We shook hands and he said he enjoyed the reading, then explained that his photographs were hanging in the gallery and I said, although I hadn’t really seen them, that they were excellent. Perhaps because I paid him this compliment as if my knowledge of photography were considerable, he seemed eager to demonstrate some understanding of poetry, and he began to compare my writing with a Spanish writer I didn’t know. As he grew increasingly animated another smoker joined us, and after listening for a while he began to disagree with Abel, lightly at first, then with increasing intensity. The more heated the exchange, the more rapid the speech, and the less I understood; in the afterglow of what increasingly felt like my triumphant reading, however, I had the confidence to conduct or project a translation of pure will, and I came to believe I could follow the back and forth, which had the arc and feel of debates I’d heard before.