Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin
Elizabeth Macklin is the recipient of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Kirmen Uribe's Meanwhile Take My Hand (Graywolf Press, 2007) .
I Love You, No
Even though he worked in the steel mills
in those times, through and through
he remained a farmer.
In October, he’d roast the red peppers
on the balcony at home
with the acetylene torch.
His sounding voice
silenced everyone.
His daughter stood up to him.
He never said I love you.
Tobacco and steel dust
plowed through his vocal cords.
A field of poppy less two leaves.
His daughter has married into another city.
The retiree brings a gift.
Not rubies, not red silk, either.
Over the years he lifted the parts from the mill.
With the acetylene torch
Inch by inch he made a bed from the steel.
He never said I love you.
Birds in Winter
Saving the birds was our mission that whole winter.
Saving the birds imprisoned in the snow.
All along the beach most of them were hidden,
nestled in the shade of the black sea.
The birds were black, too.
From the coverts we’d take them and carry them home
in our coat pockets.
The tiniest birds, barely contained
in even our child-sized hands.
Later we’d lay them beside the warm stove.
But the birds never lasted long.
In two or three hours they died.
We didn’t see why,
didn’t understand their bad luck.
After all, we’d given them
breadcrumbs moistened in milk,
held to their mouths, to eat,
and furnished a nest for each
with our most colorful scarves.
But it was useless, they kept on dying.
Furious, our parents told us
not to bring home any more birds,
they were dying of too much heat.
And that nature is wise,
spring would come with its own birds.
We sat and considered their statements,
it could be that they will be right.
The Gold Ring
Father lost his wedding ring in the ocean once. Like all the trawlermen, he’d take it from his finger to put on a neck chain, not to lose the finger as the net went out.
Several tides after that, our aunt, while cleaning some hake, found a gold ring in the belly of one of the fish.
Once she’d washed it off, she examined the letters and numbers engraved inside. Though it couldn’t be true, the date and the initials were those of our parents’ wedding.
By all appearances, Father himself had caught the hake that had swallowed the ring. In all of the wide blue sea.
Peaceable summer nights brings the inland wind, and the memories.
I look at the sky, and it dawns that coincidences are the planets with the amplest orbits.
Only every so often have they come round.
The ring’s is far too great a coincidence. It would have been lost and found in that same stone sink. But that doesn’t matter. What’s most important now is this: for years and years, the story of the rind was entirely believable to our small, children’s intelligence.
Nights, the ocean has a shimmer of hake.
The stars go leaping around like the scales.
The Cuckoo
to Aitzol
He heard the first cuckoo at the beginning of April.
Because he’d been feeling on edge, maybe,
from an inclination to order the chaos, maybe,
he wanted to know which notes the cuckoo sang.
He sat waiting with his pitch pipe
next afternoon: when
would the cuckoo sing?
He finally achieved it:
the pitch pipe told no lies.
Si-sol were the cuckoo’s notes.
The discovery shook the countryside.
Everyone wanted to prove whether truly those
were the notes that the cuckoo sang.
The measurements were not in harmony.
Each had his or her own truth.
One said it was fa-re, another said it was mi-do.
No one managed to agree.
Meanwhile the cuckoo when on singing in the forest,
mi-do, not fa-re, not si-sol, either.
As it has a thousand years before,
The cuckoo sang cuccu, cuccu.
"I Love You, No", "Birds in Winter", "The Gold Ring", "The Cuckoo". Copyright © 2007 by Kirmen Uribe and Elizabeth Macklin. Reprinted from Meanwhile Take My Hand with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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