To a Poet

Ninety years after his death, memories of Medardo Ángel Silva meander as a shadow and echo through the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador. You need not doubt that he is still there. You can only ride so many of the darting white city buses before finding yourself humming along to Julio Jaramillo singing “El alma en los labios” , which the teenage chulillo blasts to battle the humidity. Museums display first additions of his work and celebrate him even along the Malecón 2000, a swanky riverside develop where he would have wandered along enjoying his beloved darkness broken only by a streetlamp’s wandering light.

In contemporary Ecuador, he may be one of the few writers anyone may recall, though he exists more as a portrait, a lovelorn depressive—an archetype of a romantic that even he occasionally draws as crudely as any in current pop culture. He is a near celebrity but not really a writer, gone down to the fate of Kerouac and Hemingway; Silva is the poet as imagined by all those who have never read of stanza of poetry. With this fate in his homeland, it’s not surprising that his work has not been widely exported.

Furthermore, Ecuador even in present day is a country where the rich or famous have white skin, inherited money and a fine education acquired abroad. In contrast, Silva came from a poor family, of a multiracial black/mestizo background in a country that still relegates their black population to being soccer players or manual laborers, supported his mother through journalism after his father died while Silva was in his teens, never went to university (actually dropping out of high school) and taught himself French so he could read Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire and helped give a group of his contemporaries the name of the Decapitated Generation with his suicide on June 10, 1919.  

Before his death he published various journalism pieces, one book of poetry, a novella, but more importantly, a vast swath of poems remained unedited upon his death. A translation of his poems appeared in France in 1926, and to the best of my knowledge no available English translation exists.

II.

So I have decided to take on the project to bring Silva’s poems to an English audience as a labor of love. After reading Mi ciudad, I knew that one day the idea would overpower me and I would begin to translate his poems, even if I, unlike the thousands of Ecuadorian children born to immigrant parents in the United States, am not truly bilingual. I started learning Spanish at the ripe old age of 25 and learned Spanish walking the streets and talking to whomever I could under the grand cathedrals of Cuenca, Ecuador. Still I hope maybe someone will stumble across this and hear the beauty in Silva’s Spanish and see that it can at the very least roughly be translated into English.

I will be posting the bilingual versions of his poems as I edit them and will also print poems honoring him or some that he has inspired me to write. If anyone who has read all this way would like to offer alternate translations that would be welcome. Anything else including videos, pictures, recitations, and poems inspired by Silva would be wonderful. Email me at eevanvleet@gmail.com