María Ángeles Pérez López, Valladolid (Spain), 1967. Poet and professor of Literature at Universidad de Salamanca. She has published six poetry collections: Tratado sobre la geografía del desastre (1997), La sola materia (1998), Carnalidad del frío (2000), La ausente (2004), Atavío y puñal (2012) and Fiebre y compasión de los metales (2016). Several anthologies of her work have been published in Caracas, Mexico City, Quito, New York, Monterrey and Bogotá. A new anthology of her work is currently being published in La Habana.
[Elefantes] Como los elefantes, la mujer se inquieta ante los huesos de su especie, mueve nerviosamente la cabeza, se extravía y tropieza en su dolor. Los esqueletos largos, mascarones que arrojaron el mar y el pleistoceno para dormir, lavados por el agua hasta volverse láminas de luz, son una herida abierta y silenciosa que los grandes mamíferos levantan con tal delicadeza, con colmillos en su arabesco y su melancolía. Porque los elefantes, la mujer, elevan la osamenta de los suyos y los acunan con sus grandes dientes, los mecen con pasión y con trastorno. Como los elefantes, la mujer cubre su piel de arena y de termitas, arroja a sus costillas, su espaldar la tierra de sus muertos, se recubre de su aspereza seca, ventolera o ráfaga de tiempo calcinado y canta lentamente una canción que en su baja frecuencia, solo escuchan congéneres lejanos, primordiales. Cuando pinta sus dientes de marfil, dentina opaca y blanca, romboidal que prestigia su boca y su alegría, la mujer talla en ellos la aflicción preciosa, endurecida como laja que atraviesa la luz y la somete.
(de Atavío y puñal, 2012)
[Elephants] A woman, like elephants, is unsettled by the bones of her species, nervously shaking her head, she wanders and stumbles over her pain. Long skeletons, figureheads the sea and Pleistocene cast to sleep, washed by the water until they become sheets of light, they are an open and silent wound that the great mammals raise ever so gently, with their tusks in their arabesque and melancholy. Since elephants, a woman, lift the bones of their own and they cradle them with their great teeth, they rock them with passion and with distress. A woman, like elephants, covers her skin with sand and termites, casts to her side, her back the earth of her dead, she recovers from her dry brusqueness, gust of wind or burst of incinerated time and she slowly sings a melody whose low frequencies are only heard by distant, primordial sisters. When she paints her teeth with ivory, rhomboidal opaque white dentin that enhances her mouth and her happiness, woman carves her pain in them precious, hardened like the slate that crosses and subdues the light. (from Atavío y puñal, 2012) (Translated by Jennifer Rathbun)