JOSÉ SARRIA

(TRANSLATION BY GORDON E. MCNEER)

( I meet Jose in a festival, and impressed by his presentation of poetry, I came to know that he teaches Business Science, but reading his poetry i find him very sensitive and introvert . He has capacity of looking deep inside. His photography is extension of his poetry.  We are presenting him as editor’s Choice.–RS)

JOSÉ SARRIA is a Poet, essayist and literary critic. Corresponding Academician from the Royal Academy of Córdoba, Graduate in Economics and Business Sciences from the University of Málaga and Master in Business Administration MBA from the IBusiness School (Associated Center of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos-Madrid). He has published fifteen individual books of poetry and fiction. His work has been translated into Italian (by Emilio Coco), French (by Ahmed Oubali), Arabic (by Abdul Hadi Sadoum, Mohamed Néjib ben Jemia, Raja Bahri and Meimouna Hached Khabou), English (by Charles Olsen), to Sephardic (by Margalit Matitiahu) and to Romanian (by Costel Drejoi).

His poetry is included in more than 40 national and international poetry anthologies, as well as in specialized magazines from Spain, Italy, Tunisia, Mexico, Argentina, Israel, Romania, England, Beirut and Qatar.

POEMS FROM ‘EULOGY OF TIME’

THE BEST OF MYSELF

I listen to my silences and I discover

the defeats of a life that have served

to go along weaving

with infinite patience, with the firm

hope of lost causes,

this sadness that gives me so much pleasure:

the essence of my acts,

the best of myself.

(From Inventario de derrotas)

THE PURE NAME OF THINGS

      “I work with words, that’s to say,

       I place the silences carefully”

(ANTONIO RIVERO TARAVILLO)

To perfect these poems

and strike down all that which presupposes

an artifice foreign to emotion:

then, only then,

can the pure

name of things spring forth.

(From Tiempo de espera)

MEMORY

Memory is time at a standstill

in a precise place

where, young

for an instant we were

eternal, invincible, immortal:

a spring where the gazelles

of our early years gathered

to drink from its waters,

still pure from our fire and our wounds.

(From El Libro de las aguas)

THE COUNTRY OF WORDS

I have no other country than the word

and the crimson color of the geraniums:

the final vestige of my Southern origin

where there is a white house

that gathers up the sound of the waterwheel

carried along by the water,

a kingdom of quince trees and pomegranates

with their luxuriant orchards,

a peaceful refuge on the edge of oblivion:

the place where my most private time is spent.

I will always treasure the certainty

that in the end we will be left with

the murmuring of the water in the irrigation ditches,

the sustenance of the geraniums

and the common ground of the word.

(From El Libro de las aguas)

Sephardic Songs

“Besides the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down, and even wept,

Remembering Zion,

On the willow trees in the middle of her

We hang our harps.

And those who had carried us off captive

Asked us to sing,

And those who had devastated us

Asked us for joy, saying;

Sing us some of the psalms to the Lord

In the land of strangers?”

(Book of Psalms 137:1-4)

LONG AGO I THOUGHT I POSSESSED GOD

Or perhaps long-ago God thought

that he could possess me. In the end

we were both overcome

by the same fear of so much solitude.

(From Sepharad)