Author: gabrielsmy

When in France

The sheets on this bed are damp.
The radiator doesn’t work.
I cannot sleep at night, there is so much noise.

I have lost my keys.
I cannot open my case.
It doesn’t work.

Excuse me, sir, that seat is mine.
I cannot find my ticket!
That man is following me everywhere.

There has been an accident!
Someone robbed me.
He has lost consciousness.

I feel sick. The noise is terrible.
I did not know that I had to pay.
I am lost. He is losing blood.

From Collins’ Pocket Interpreters: France, 1937.

the long night

it was raining a little bit all day
kinder drizzly and very damp
airplanes were buzzing overhead
most all the time jes like a lot of hornets
we seed quite a lot of our machinegun
battalion across the road from us
blowed up by the big shells

the woods were all mussed up
and looked as if a terrible cyclone
done swept through them
and all through the long night
those big guns flashed and growled
jes like the lightning and thunder
when it storms in the mountains at home

and oh, my! we had to pass the wounded
and some of them were on stretchers going
back to the dressing stations and some
were lying around moaning and twitching
and oh, my! the dead were all along the road
and their mouths were open and their eyes too
but they couldn’t see nothing no more nohow

i’m atelling you the little log cabin in wolf valley
in old tennessee seemed a long long way off

From Sergeant Alvin C. York’s diary, 7 October 1918.

The legacy of Chuchi-jo

The Kan’ei-ji temple is a quiet pagoda
home to a simple engraved stone.
Here supporters of the emperor
attacked the forces of the last Tokugawa shogun.

Home to a simple engraved stone,
a memorial to the souls.
Attacked the forces of the last Tokugawa shogun
(there are still bullet holes).

A memorial to the souls:
Matsuyama was plagued by guilt
(there are still bullet holes)
crickets and grasshoppers that had been killed.

Matsuyama was plagued by guilt
guilt at having caused the deaths;
crickets and grasshoppers that had been killed,
killed in the production of a scientific text.

Guilt at having caused the deaths.
To console the spirits of the flies
killed in the production of a scientific text,
few visitors stop by.

To console the spirits of the flies.
Here supporters of the emperor…
Few visitors stop by;
the Kan’ei-ji temple is a quiet pagoda.

From the listing for Mushizuka at Kan’ei-ji Temple.

Paul

From a walled garden and some shepherds’ huts,
a huge, tri-peaked white zeppelin would come
into view. Then Paul Hollywood would close in
across the lawn, his silver quiff cutting

the air like a fin. A crisp oxford shirt
meant to make his eyes pop—a velvety navy
just across the color wheel from his tan.
Mary dispensed praise prudently, as if

pressing a toffee into your palm. But
Paul Hollywood can entwine seven strands
of dough into an ornamental wreath
with the dexterity of a concert pianist.

The rest of the time, he will handle your
bread like airport security. He flips
it upside down, knocks on its bottom,
interrogates it with sausage fingers.

When he is done, he dusts his hands and sheaths
them in his denim carapace. Sometimes we
observed Paul from afar, smoking alone
near the meadows’ edge, pacing like a bull.

From Inside the world of “The Great British Bake Off”.

They looked at him falling down stairs every day

They looked at him falling down stairs every day,
every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.
It’s not our president, we can’t have it.
Like these stairs, I walk very slowly.

Nobody has to set a record. Just
try not to fall. We don’t want that.
Be cool, be cool when you walk down,
but don’t, don’t bop down the stairs.

So one thing with Obama, I had
zero respect for him as a president
but he would bop down those stairs.
Dada dada da da, bop bop bop

he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on.
Eventually bad things are going to happen.

President Trump’s speech to US military officials (54:43).

Direcciones

It depends on where you give it from
you can give it from the Church of Escazú
from the tied-up donkey, 200 metres
from the María Auxiliadora school

The poem of my childhood would begin with Super Aguimar
or the one a Nicaraguan gave to Ștefan Baciu
from Las Delicias del Volga
the old fig tree of San Pedro
there’s also a dog lying outside

There is a Welsh word hiraeth
a deep nostalgia for the landscape we were raised in
in Portuguese they say saudade, in Galician morriña
in German sehnsucht, in Romanian dor

In the Colón promenade there used to be an obelisk
people still stay, from the obelisk’s scar…
the butterflies that embark on that expedition die along the way
and it’s their great-granddaughters who finish the journey

Subtitles from Navigating a City Without Street Addresses.