Before Lorca
I. By Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khatib, after Jack Spicer
Written to explain himself
The night when darkness conceals
from the brightness of the dimpled suns
all the secrets of elegance, only then
slinking down into the firmament
and trying to rise up straight again
flawed and thwarted by its fleeting —
The night when aurora and envoys seek
to interrupt the pleasure of our sleep
anemones in spotted robes
revel in the splendid clothes
styled for them by Beauty while
narcissus train their eyes on us
and the stars that carry us away
to a garden more pure than empowered
teeming with flowers that seize their chance
to end with hate what they have come to fear.
¿Qué ángel llevas oculto en la mejilla?
¿Qué voz perfecta dirá las verdades del trigo?
II. By Ibn Zamrak, after Jack Spicer
Written to adorn the Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra
Ask the glowing horizon if you doubt:
I have always trusted it to define me.
Though I compelled first light’s fidelity
In time it saw my hopes, came to agree,
And conceived my febrile soul faithfully.
The tyrant in the foothills sanctions disloyalty,
proposes evil and warrants it authority
as he quells love’s rebels of my heart’s quality
while my upturned, upset core and I, weak
though we seem, prefer simply to be,
rejecting nature’s counsel all equally.
This pavilion built up to keep the stars’ light out
contracts, dimples and sets them, jewels in my redoubt.
I unsheathe my sword and balance our accounts.
From the Author: “Before Lorca” is part of a book-length project that explores the outer edge of translation as it bleeds into composition de novo. Written under the influence of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, these two poems are English translations of two late medieval Arabic poems from the city-state of Granada that experiment with Arabic, English, and early Romance forms as a way of situating them in their geographies and poetic traditions.
S.J. Pearce is a writer and translator who lives in New York City. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Asymptote, Copihue, River Heron Review, and others; her public-facing literary criticism has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Public Books, and the Washington Post. Her first chapbook manuscript was named a finalist for the Laurel Review’s 2021 Midwest Chapbook Competition and the Omnidawn 2023 Poetry Chapbook Contest, as well as a semifinalist for the 2023 Verse/Tomaz Salamun Prize. She was a member of the 2022 cohort of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. In the academic realm, she teaches medieval literature and cultural history at New York University and publishes on the history of reading and translation in the medieval Mediterranean world.