The River

The River Gastón Baquero (bio) Translated by Greg Simon (bio) and Steven F. White (bio) I've spent sixty years on the banks of a river. Only those who are living there can see it. People heading toward the western market looked at us with fear. They don't understand why the dampness would cling to our clothing, or how we'd reel in those fish for them, the color of blood oranges, from the invisible water. One day a man fell in, and did not reappear. Passersby, interrupting errands to the market, exclaimed, "Where did he go?" "When is he coming back?" and, "How marvelous, those fiery yellow fish!" Those of us born to the river kept quiet. Smiled enigmatically. Said nothing. Gave no sign. The language of our tribe is silence. We wanted to protect our invisible river. On its banks the world belonged to us – as did its mystery. Gastón Baquero Gastón Baquero (1916–1997) was born in Banes, which is now part of the province of Holguin in Cuba. In spite of the rural poverty in which he was born and reared, he was educated as an agronomist before becoming a journalist and poet. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution began, he left the island nation for Spain, where he lived until his death in Madrid in 1997, having published several collections of essays, as well as eight volumes of poems. The Angel of Rain, a selection of his poetry in English translation by Greg Simon and Steven F. White, will be published this summer by Eastern Washington University Press. Greg Simon Greg Simon, a native of Minnesota, has published translations of poetry from the work of Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian writers. He is the co-translator, with Steven F. White and Christopher Maurer, of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York (FSG, 1988). Simon is currently an associate editor with Trask House Books and The Salt River Review. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Steven F. White Steven F. White, a professor of modern languages and literature at St. Lawrence University, has edited and translated anthologies of contemporary poetry from Nicaragua, Chile, and Brazil. He is author of Modern Nicaraguan Poetry: Dialogues with France and the United States (1993) and five books of poems, including Landscape with One Candle and Assyrian Bees (1995), published in a bilingual edition in Brazil, and Fire that Engenders Fire (2000), published in bilingual edition in Madrid. He is a corresponding member of the Nicaraguan Academy of the Language and an advisory and contributing editor of Callaloo. Copyright © 2006 Charles H. Rowell

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