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Teresa Korondi is a Uruguayan author and poet who also engages in translation, publishes, preforms her poetry and lectures about literature all over Latin America. She had published ten books, including the award-winning poetry book Rodó porque rodaba which received a National Poetry Award of the Ministry of Culture and Education, Otaku, published in Argentina, a book of her lectures at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, and the University of Palermo in Argentina as well as her prize-winning poetry-song album Bo.
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Teresa Korondi: Four poems translated by Gili Haimovich with the poet
Crying while crying
The biggest storm of all
actually cries
I look at the river’s pharynx
that crosses the ankles of the sand
Dunes of nostalgia in muddy water
It’s not leaving that worries me
but to stay when the others leave
That’s why I admire the landscape of the other
The seas are swaying the boats
the fantastic embraces
Tongues of water are licking this great avenue
I think that these enormous mouths
will one day swallow the city
that will no longer be ours
Yet we will inhabit as a single ghost
this airy atmosphere
that the wave has left uncovered
***
Now they are melted
the auroras of chance
So we are painting
I tripped halfway
in the womb of the street
Where we were conceived
humankind
split down the middle
as a peerless pair
Half-dead
in boredom
until the stumble
the clumsiness
the twilight fruit
A cardinal fusion
of bodies
We stumble
it is foretold
to rise
among the living
like odd gods
***
Behind the overhang
the white love is entangled
My two feet rise
I want to speak
of loneliness in the ballroom
The steps in a circle
sometimes
reign the scene of the route
The energy rasps
the volume of sound
before the vice of a whole hand
that seeks to brush
my open hips
All this
to be so alone
begging for moments
in which we are
a simple gerund
***
So blind and mute
I was saving the word
from its high pedestal
Then you told me
that I had to be calm
That the water that was falling in gushes
had to fit in a bowl
To make music with the edges
as if they were crystals
caressed by fingers
You taught me
that I had to move the pieces
so slowly
that it would seem still
To speak so slowly
that the noun
no longer had any form
It were a word
open like a vowel
saving
the mouth from the muted
You showed me
that I had to feel
the voids
between the leaves
of an early spring
To stop there to be nothing
to be wind of contemplation
Now I know
that words
can fall apart
between the lips
They are infinitely beautiful
when one feels
they have no meaning at all
They are just letters touching each other
glyphs melting
until that exact moment
when we may cry
Gili Haimovich is a prizewinning bilingual poet. She translated the first Estonian poetry book in Israel for which she received a formal Letter of Appreciation for the Foreign Ministry of Estonia. She has also translated into English poems of eminent Israeli poets such as Nurit Zarchi and Maya Weinberg for which she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and poems by Fiona Sampson, Dara Barnat and more into Hebrew. She is the editor of the forthcoming English – French anthology poetry Under Our Ruptured Sky – made in response to the Hamas – Israel war.
The High Window 