'Los Artilleros', by Roberto Bolaño
a translation by Daniel E. Pritchard
'The Battery'
In this poem, the battery hang together.
Their faces blank, hands
with their bodies interlaced, or in pockets.
Some eyes are closed, some look at the ground.
The rest of them are reading you.
Vacant eyes, erased by time. They return
to meet each other now that this interlude is over.
The encounter only shores up
the certainty of their union.
I'd been reading over The Romantic Dogs, the collection of Bolaño's poetry from New Directions, translated by Laura Healy, and recently browsed some of Pound's translations — gave me the itch, so I decided to re-translate this shorter poem from the book just to see how different my English version could be while being fairly 'true' to the original poem. Enjoy!
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