The Question, Translation of Carlos Bousono's Poem: La Cuestion

The Question, Translation of Carlos Bousono’s poem : La Cuestion « …Oh ! God, Oh ! Centre »* for Vicente Puchol (* Note by the editor, Alejandro D. Amusco, attesting that the above quotation was not included in Bousono’s Antologia poética, 1976, and on the « mysterious Centre » on which the poem is a cogitation. T. Wignesan) Yes, we know it : would you like to find the secret precinct, the invulnerable enclosed sanctum, to enter through any hole into the incredible spectacle, to penetrate the labyrinth and find the powerful Centre. As if a thief could rob the totality of light to find, as I say, the powerful Centre, the absolute Centre, the immobile Centre of the tempest which moves by itself, a Centre where nothing is found to budge, where everything is absorbed into itself, like love, containing itself in itself, not on its periphery, but fully wrapped in its contents, overflowing like the apparition of a card in the suit of Spanish cards, like an enormous cup of manifestation which augments, like a wave which continues to mount higher and higher and beyond its highest limits, farther yet than possibility’s horizons ; and keeps growing afterwards, going on for days, and the spectacle of its extermination – the hideous knowledge and the joy of recognising its loss ; and which continues growing for an immemorial duration in the direction of its own centre : terrible, like a persistent cascade pouring down its interior, a flooding within the experience of feeling well in one’s being, an existential waterfall without end which retracts - having stopped flowing – inwards into its own Centre. Ai ! The crucial question is therefore to enter the labyrinth, The big question comes down to making the move. Be warned that it is only an act of penetration, a simple act of transfer ; it would suffice to make a gesture with an idea that brings joy, perchance it might suffice just to find water in the barn or a path in the woods, or in the woods to fall upon an exit through the hole (where we came in), to proffer with the key to the enigma the solution of the charade, and discover the other side of the abysm, the reversal of the plot, before the roof deteriorates under probing fingers… © T. Wignesan – Paris, 2013