Retrato del autor: Ángel Loochkartt
Gonzalo Márquez Cristo: ENGLISH
Born in Bogotá in 1963. He has published two editions of the book of poetry Apocalipsis de la rosa, (Ediciones Quimera del Oro, 1989, Hojas Sueltas, 1990), the novel Ritual de títeres (Tiempos Modernos, 1992), the book of short stories El Tempestario (Común Presencia Editores, 1998) La palabra liberada (Coleccion Los Conjurados, 2001), Oscuro nacimiento (Colección Los Conjurados, 2005), La morada fugitiva (Los Conjurados 2014), and the book Grandes entrevistas de Común Presencia (2010). In 1989, he participated in the founding of the cultural magazine Común Presencia, and he currently serves as director. In 1999, he directed the cultural television program Letra Viva. His work has received praise by important writers, such as E.M. Cioran, Antonio Gamoneda, Roberto Juarroz, Olga Orozco, Alfredo Silva Estrada, Roger Munier, Claude Fell, José Angel Valente, Eugenio Montejo, Jorge Rodríguez Padrón, Fernand Verhesen y António Ramos Rosa, among others. Several of his poems and short stories have been translated to Portuguese, Italian, Russian, English, French...
Translated by Scott Bailey and Rebecca Morgan
SHORE OF FLESH
Those who are born from the night:
strangers in all countries
with the eye of sex are witnesses
of countless successive corners
that compose horror
and who know that freedom without sharing
feeds peaceful suicide
For the makers of darkness:
Cruel collectors of nests
dreamed by strange birds,
music hides between two bodies:
a constellation of blood that forecasts
a new town of invisible men.
Later, time will be useless…
Virgins remembering cruelties
will awaken their shadows,
and I —moon hunter—
will announce the infancy of death.
LOST WORDS
Someone deciphers the rain's writing and nevertheless can’t escape.
An avalanche of images takes the word away from us; we resort to screaming or weeping, sometimes to indifference, but we know we need war to be innocent.
The ashes offer up everything.
Since we banished night, the most profound alliances have disappeared and our persecutors can find us.
A wound always remembers life. Every birth comes from its tunnel. A tree burns in our watery eyes.
Truth—to say what is forbidden—imposes its rein of terror… and we’ve decided to dwell with our hands folded.
We believed poetry could teach us to die...
We persist…Frequently we show the strange smile of fear. If we flee, solitude will victimize someone. That’s why the word goes from hand to hand building an invisible dwelling.
Sometimes to survive we renounce knowing.
And when everyone is asleep we write, but a poem is the fossil of a dream, the cadaver of a god…
Can we still save ourselves?
MAKING OF OBLIVION
A woman who kisses herself in the mirror, hides with her soul, water is her solitude.
A boy hidden in a closet tries to die.
A man's tears fall in his coffee cup.
A teenager stalls his watch with his fingers and trembles.
In the wind there is a message we will not understand.
Your shadow rebels.
We prepare ourselves to flee from everything we love.
He who doesn’t flee will be condemned to oblivion.
Wind speaks with fire.
I wait for my voice.
Traveling is also the opposite of death.
While the seed deceives the bird, we aren’t lost.
We will love each other in other faces.
Nobody can hide in a memory.
Will someone come to bury our names?
WHO SAID DEATH WAS LIKE TRAVELING?
Words are invented to hide something, sometimes to not lose ourselves and in the worst of cases to save us…because to dream in this Age of Fire, to begin exile or to survive, is the equivalent of treason.
The poem denounces us. Truth left marks on the faces. Who said that death was like traveling? Where are those who have perfected its pain? How long will we have to pay for all that we did to the night?
We are certain the inquisitors will return. We extended the devastation so much that those to come will create other invisible gods in order to remain.
Imagination has not been able to drive us. We have always fought from the side of our enemies (in indifference or participating in their vane conflict). It is not from defeat... No one can save himself from victory.
From poetry to desire, passing through hallucinogens stripped of their rites, through strange fetishes or even through cruel utopias, we eagerly give ourselves to the most diverse forms of self destruction.
Knowing did nothing for life. Neither did religion nor the prostitute selling omens.
Truth is only in the door that opens. In a touch, in a blade of grass, in a sip of water. In a scream.
To be is to search.
Writing or desperation found in us an unknown color. We found that time nests in mirrors and that planting is like asking the earth.
But until we replace the seed, we will have learned nothing.
The minute-arrow of the watch tints our chest red. The verb to die is only conjugated in first person. Time grows.
I feel that someone has kidnapped my dreams...
DESCENT TO THE LIGHT
IN THE NAME OF THE SHOUT
OBSCURE BIRTH
RESTITUTIONS
THE ALLOTTED SHADOW
THE BOOK OF WATER
THE EARTH’S APPOINTMENT