THE CONTRARY JAIME GIL
What’s the point of moving house? Of dumping this cave that’s darker
than my name – and that’s saying something! –
put up a few net curtains,
take in a maid,
renounce the boho life –
if it’s only for you, you bore, to come trotting along,
you bloody drone, useless git, suited tool,
moron? You’re an embarrassment,
with your little washed mitts
coming to eat off my plate and dirty my house.
Sure, you’re holding up the bars in the late night pits
with pimps and florists,
the dead streets of the dawn
and you’re coming home pissed
to fluorescent lifts,
where you catch yourself catching yourself in the mirror –
your face hacked
your eyes coal holes in the snow
that you don’t wanna close.
I ought to give you a good talking to
but you’d only laugh, shit! you remind me of all those days
and nights that tell me I’ve aged.
You know I can tell you’ve lost your moves. That breezy air
and devil may care attitude
are pony tricks now that you’re over the hill
and well into your thirties –
and as for that doe-eyed smile – yea, the one they all fall for –
Sunday’s leftovers. It’s pathetic.
And all the while you look at me with those little orphan eyes and weep, weep, weep
and promise me that “I won’t do it again.”
Jesus, if you weren’t such a tramp!
and if I hadn’t known for such a long time
that your pep is my decrepitude
the rock you perish on my rock….
your comings and goings have me skittery,
panicked, sunk in a blue funk of fear,
tetchy to be down in the hole once more,
oh the shame is unforgiveable
of you getting too close for comfort.
Sure, I’ll take you to bed with me, but believe me
when I tell you it’s hell on wheels.
Dripping impotently over the furniture,
dying with every step we sway arm in arm
groping around the room and across the floor
drunk and sobbing.
Ah, the lot of man in love
and what’s even worse
in love with himself.
Jaime Gil de Biedma (Barcelona, 1929-1990) was in his own words ‘a not very prolific, but excessively rigorous writer. The author of a short, but significant body of poetry.’(1) ‘Almost every other line in Gil de Biedma's poetry is a borrowing, an adaptation or an outright theft from another source, which is ironically reinterpreted in the new poem, [exactly as Eliot did]. The difference is that to read the polyglot Wasteland you need a volume of notes, whereas Gil de Biedma is able to weave these quotations seamlessly into his conversational rhetoric without calling attention to them.’(2) Gil de Biedma stopped writing poetry ten years before his death insisting that the character he had invented, the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, had said all that he had to say.
For copyright reasons, the original Spanish poem “Contra Jaime Gil de Biedma” which has been translated for Colony 2, cannot be published here, but is available online at http://www.poesi.as/jgb68999.htm.
1. Jaime Gil de Biedma, Antología Personal, Visor Libros, Madrid, 1998.
2. Spanish songs of Experience: An interview with James Nolan, Susan Ballyn, Barcelona, 1994.
Keith Payne lives in Vigo: Translations have appeared in The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation Vols I & II, Forked Tongues: Galician, Catalan and Basque Women’s Poetry in Translations by Irish Writers, Ed. Manuela Palacios (Shearsman, 2012) and Mountain-Islandglacier (Broken Dimanche Press, 2012.) Poems & essays have appeared in The Irish Times, The Dublin Review of Books, Cuadrivio: Un trébol irlandés, Estudios Irlandeses:Journal of Irish Studies, The SHOp and The Stinging Fly, among others. Forthcoming translations include poems by Juan Gelman and Efraín Huerta.
His translation of “Contra Jaime Gil de Biedma” is something of a “transcontemporation”, a word Jennifer K Dick highlights in her wonderful review “Of Tradition and Experiment X” (Tears in the Fence #59), quoting from The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather: “transcontemporation is to a poem what RoboCop is to a normal police officer” (161).