Rodolfo Häsler was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1958 and since 1968 leaves in Barcelona, Spain.
Study French Literature and Historical Art in Lausanne University and work as german translator (complete poetry of Novalis, Heine, short stories of Kafka, etc).
He published seven poetry books:
Poemas de arena (Editorial E.R., Barcelona, 1982);
Tratado de licantropía (Endymión, Madrid, 1988);
Elleife (Aula de Poesía of Barcelona Prize; El Bardo, Barcelona, 1993); (translated into italian)
De la belleza del puro pensamiento (Cintas Fellowship Prize, New York, 1997; El Bardo, Barcelona, 1997);
Paisaje, tiempo azul (Aldus, Mexico City, 2001);
Cabeza de ébano (Igitur, Barcelona, 2007); (translated into italian, french, macedonian and portuguese)
Diario de la urraca (Huerga y Fierro, Madrid, 2013; Mangos de Hacha, Mexico City, 2013 and Kalathos, Caracas, 2013); (translated into french, german and english)
And two anthologies of his own poetry: Antología de Tenerife (Tenerife, 2007; Entre perro y lobo (La Habana, 2017)
His poetry is included in several anthologies in Spain and Latin America.
Rodolfo Häsler
Translated by
Katherine M. Hedeen
and
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Quill View
to Blanca Andreu
I find myself in a well-tended garden
with two lanceolate cypresses, a peach tree
in bloom and a fountain. In its perfection I take it
for a Persian orchard. As I ponder the
bursting of a rose lost in thought
a voice brings me back to the beauty of the grove,
a voice strange, hermaphrodite: take up the quill
and write, take up the quill and write all you know.
Tuesday
The word magpie: I read it in the mirror.
A smooth cut in the glass, what does it suggest to you?
The image slips through the mercury slot
and runs to a subway entrance, destination Jabaquara.
The land’s statuary shadow smooths down the lens,
uncovers nothing, only strangeness and pain.
A bird’s cawing,
and one cloudy day, perhaps today, maybe tomorrow,
its intention ends before the rhythm of the universe.
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.
