Summary, by Jamie Torres Bodet

We live by not being . . . By being we die.

We are a project in everything while we live.

Project of hope in desire;

and, when we possess the desired end,

project of evasion, thirst of abandon.

In the young wheatfield, green is always

anxiety of the stem. It ends in gold.

But, where begins all that ends?

We live by inventing what we are not.

In contrast, the magnificent absolute

of what no longer suffers change

of what no longer

either time or oblivion can change,

this solid piece

of unalterable life which is death,

how it guarantees, defines,

reveals and shows us up in everything.

We live only believing that we existed.

We will always be posthumous.

****

TRANSLATED BY SONJA KARSEN

From “Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology,” edited by Stephen Tapscott (University of Texas Press: 448 pp., $24.95 paper)