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Lidice Megla Poetry/translation
LÃdice Megla PoesÃa/traducciones
Autora/poeta/translator/literary
Some published prologues and book links by the Author
2016-2021
The Art of Clipping our Nails and “Universing”
The Art of Clipping Nails is a book that carries that unique quality found in rivers; there is a sound in it, a “flowing liquidity” that is rare, and only present in good poetry.
Michael’s poetry shook me right to the core. I was taken aback by the multiplicity of images; songs and voices deep within, there is an immediate calling in Michael that ruptures the senses with its force of words and images, an almost painful honesty that captivates, this current, this torrent that is Michael when he exercises the calling from within, it compels, for when one reads this young author, one feels from the start the presence of an enlivened verse, a live water emanating from the poems, and this flow, this force creates an entity that stands free on its own right, amid the page.
That unit, that “it” is the poet’s voice. Despite his young age, Megla’s unique and wise lyric lets us roam freely in a deep inner world, which reveals to the poetry lover that he is a total poet reminiscing Blake, Frost, and some of the Zen masters. His poetic voice constitutes a standalone metaphor of this times. It carries great pain and energy. And by this I mean, he gives us the gift of a highly philosophical verse, one that compels to feel he himself is the abyss, he is poem, and when he becomes his poems, they are submarine inhabitants of the author’s dissimilar, inner worlds, fishes of the great abyssal depths, swimming in the midst with Death, Love, Life, and the whole of creation, fishes breeding with the futility of passing, intertwined with the infallible, yet inconsequential mark of our presence in the universe. Herein, a direct poet, indeed! He who becomes word, Megla wields imageries with an innate force that impels them like a beast sending them to the depths to look at life in the face, to ask of her the answer to our most fundamental question, what is life itself. As if they were amulets to which the soul clings in desperation, then armed with all the questions and answers, he puts them outright, he wears them like a crest, he allows us but a glimpse into the poets “mundos”, and “trasmundos”, going from the highest peaks of thinking, he lets us into the gates of Depths; we become trespassers into the world of “the Fool”, (as Megla calls himself) for we too, as the poet compels, shall see life for what it is; a Passing, a fleeting state of being, a trying, a stone on our way which made by our own doings, a learn and fail at the mastery of the art of washing our bowl; another beautiful metaphor, an allegory that came to the poet while preforming such mundane task made into a poem, this in my view, constitutes magnificent, innovative poetry.
With great mastery of the haiku and the koana, Michael enters nature, becomes a tree, speaks to a beloved valley, or decides to go “grassing”, raining, “universing” (the poets’ own term). In other poems he acknowledges the profound importance that entails assuming Sadness as a potential friend, an essential state of being, understanding it as another “flow” of the river, of that water , of Death, he tells us the way is accepting finitude as the infinite, he embraces Loneliness as an equal, as an essential cloak the true poet wears, for it is right in there he
dwells, it is the modus operandi of the poet who is, by choice, committed to his time.
I here then, leave you with these poems, these artefacts, these fishes in a reverie of verses. May they take you high and low, like they took me, raining, grassing, living, fooling, dying, “universing”, as we keep trying to live and figure, that graceful yet intricate “Art of Clipping Our Nails”.
Lidice Megla (Author, Translator & Poet) Canmore, June 27th, 2020
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Translator’s Words. Living Dead in Silkeborg. Short Stories.
I here present the reader my attempt of an English rendition of José Hugo Fernandez’s book of short stories, Muerto Vivo en Silkeborg/Living Dead in Silkeborg, a journey comparable with a quantic trip into psychedelic micro worlds.
In the pages that follow a cosmos wills itself into existence. Rarely are the principles of Time and Pathos so masterfully intertwined within the fabric of time itself, the weave of the intersection of life’s mysteries so deftly revealed.
The tone chosen for the rendition tries to respect that of the author’s in as much as the differences between the two languages allows it, keeping it so, that it blends as smoothly as possible, with the current and well-seasoned way in which it was originally crafted by Fernandez: the right elements that elevate the genre.
The characters do not stop to dwell upon offering explanations, rather they delve in challenging the psyche with an invitation to jump into the arena of the mind where infinite possibilities, and outcomes battle each other. They may be as real (or not) as Time itself, or as complicated (or not) as Philosophy, and as universal as Consciousness. The trip sent me into the buzzling streets of Havana, a Parisian square, where fallen leaves danced in unison with Frost’s white flakes and communicated with a slog from Borneo and together, we sat with an ancient specter in a singing rocking chair. A real treat.
Fernández comes to the difficult craft of storytelling armed with his best, the kind of ammunition reminiscence Bulgakov and Maupassant, the kind that aims at imagination right in the mind, propelling it afar through time and wind following Chuang Tzu, Kafka, Borges, Lezama, Nietzsche into the crevasses and dungeons of the plane of thought, down and upward until surreal imaginary intertwines with everyday occurrence.
This edition asks to be read with a gentle regard for the word, and the difficult, but fascinating art of recreating a text.
Lidice Megla.
Nanaimo, Vancouver Island. 7/7/2021
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-Book Translations:
The Skin of the Scream ( 5 Art Brut Interviews) by Yaysis Ojeda Becerra. English Translation: Lidice Megla
-Children's Literature:
https://www.amazon.com/F%C3%A1bula-Mariposa-El-Ciempi%C3%A9s-Spanish/dp/108240697X
-Converging Parallels (Poetry)
https://www.amazon.ae/Paralelas-convergentes-Converging-parallels-volver/dp/B098RYLGS7
Living Dead in Silkeborg José Hugo Fernandez. English Translation Lidice Megla
-Literary Magazine and Projects:
https://advaitamspeaksliterary.wordpress.com/tag/world-literature/
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