Rodolfo Häsler is born in Santiago de Cuba in 1958. He leaves in Havana as child and with 10 years old his family moves to Barcelona. He study french literature and historical art in Lausanne, Switzerland. He works as translator.
He publish seven poetry books:
Poemas de arena (Barcelona, 1982); Tratado de licantropía (Madrid, 1988); Elleife (Barcelona, 1993); De la belleza del puro pensamiento (Barcelona, 1997); Paisaje, tiempo azul (Mexico City, 2001); Cabeza de ébano (Barcelona, 2007) and Diario de la urraca (published at the same time in Madrid, Mexico City and Caracas, 2013). Some of his books are translated into german, portuguese, italian, french and macedonian. He was included in several poetry anthologies in Spain and Latin America.
The Poet
What’s shining in his head? It must be a sounding violin,
an instrument that knows how to order, dictating to the ear
constant confidences, details of life dissolved in water,
I don’t know if he knows how to swim, still, it’s a traveler’s life,
a timbre, an indisposition of Maldoror.
Havana
(in Lezama Lima’s house)
for Reina Maria Rodriguez
What an impressive silence in the small lobby,
the exact spot where the sonorous voice
demanded its coffee every afternoon, served
in a bone china cup by a loving mother. Infallible antidote
for easing the breathless pace, in between bursts of laughter
and recommending Gongora, a daily dose of French writers,
poets of the rose. Admiring Casal and cursing Virgilio,
he managed to extol the shadows in front of the dark window.
Oh the Maya, Ariosto, the unassailable Spanish legacy.
The shuttered window is now a takonoma of emptiness.
BERN
(To my father)
From above I contemplate the buck-toothed beast
and I recall that as a kid I played with a soft-toy
replica, much less imposing,
a mainstay in the bringing up of all Alpine children.
The moat is the way out of the medieval labyrinth,
a meandering path of ochre sandstone
in which the most astonishing needles
and house windows were forged by hand.
In one window, my father, who is now my son,
played the viola with method and insistence
whilst I studied the gothic dialect of my ancestors.
The underground stores of potatoes and apples,
the barrels of village must, the meeting places of guilds
and their emblems, the blue stork, the devourer of children,
the golden carp or the eye of the needle
end up in death’s wheel that goads the Bernese
along with the symbol of the bear, the beast.
From the snow-blanketed heights I go down to the beast’s abode,
and leaning against the edge, I peer into its jaws.
