Metaphor of Outrage, Translation of Carlos Bousono's Poem: Metafora Del Desafuero

Metaphor of outrage, Translation of Carlos Bousono’s poem : Metafora del desafuero ( In celebration of a birthday) for Andrés Amoros Having been outside of you, yourself, dizzying voyage and then the quiet, beggar of your conscience, hermit in the desert of your inaction, believing only in the cactus/thistle, in the excessive stone, without a hole from which to drink, without food, without bread, miserable and without grove like a boat struck by tempest but a tempest not particularly disruptive, without the grandeur of this sum of experience in a sea, now, later, monotonous, without end, monochromic, with greying water, or, better still, without it, sailing on it in its non-colour, sailing in the not-water, with continuity in the never-monotony, or in the midst of ruins after an earth-quake that leaves everthing low, rather in a place where there was no house nor where they put up monuments, neither was the floor split open, nor were there cracks, there, exiled, without the remembrance of a lost country, dumb, without the notion of a language ido* all the shine shorn off, all persuation, all complaint, irremediably left alone, but without solitude, yet you hadn’t any memory of any earlier companionship, there, where no form of evocation could touch you, even if to accomplish this, you had to be precise with the previous declaration ; there, there you were with your back to your own being, without seeing, without seeing yourself, even if sometimes the opposite took place and you began to think with great clear-sightedness who knows if for his (sic) condition, that is, principally, your knee, which happened, during this period, to occupy the totality of your attentions and which grew (perceived then as of a short distance) with it, your enormous knee, your extraordinary foot, your great foot, stepping on the treeless plain with resonance, in a clatter like the rattle of a tambourine, your gigantic foot, your treacherous leg, rotund, which grew longer, alone and autonomous, to a point where nobody could ever reach it, and after that, but only afterwards, your entire body made up of indeterminate materal, of noise, such that your skeleton without peer, your terrible skeleton, advancing with great strides towards no one, towards nothing, because later everything of a sudden began to diminish in size and returned little by little to its initial state, and every part of your body began, by slow degrees – yes, this – to absent itself : first the flesh and the skin disappeared, and then your erect sex : impenitent, the object of ridicule, even if the nails continued with indifference to grow, attentive exclusively to its pre-occupation with its strange sense of avariciousness in an effort to acquire much more : the hair, the beard, without paying any attention to how parsimoniously it proceeded, but, following which, that in itself, subjected to such a state of enrapture, obliterated itself, and arrived punctually on the generalization of the scrupulous duty to obedience, which is to disengage itself, in all precision, without any exception whatsoever, nor leaving even an iota of dust on the polished surface of the piece of furniture, disorder, the chaos of not being seen, the scandal of invisibility, of confusion, there, on the obverse side of truth, on the other side of lying on the frontier which it was deemed not worthy of being demarcated, this area without topography where truth and lies appeared intermingled as the self-same answer to the question that you didn’t pose. Oh ! Beggar of your conscience ! Oh ! Scrutinisor ! Oh ! finicky Explorer ! Oh ! Celebrator of the unfortunate ! * Ido, cf. Idus, meaning the « Ides » of March, etc., in English. I don’t quite know. Could the poet be so kind as to enlighten us ? © T. Wignesan – Paris, 2013