This Small, Precious World

Mundo nomasito/This Small, Precious World, a book of 6o poems, published in 1975, just months before his death, was Salarrué’s last gift to Cuscatlán.  He subtitled the collection “an island in the sky.” He prefaces the book, characteristically, with an explanation to his readers.  This is yesterdays’s book, he says, written today.  When I was young, walking a path, I dropped a mirror; 30 years later I’ve returned; weeds covered the path but I found the mirror.  He has returned from New York to his home in El Salvador, able to see it and appreciate it with even greater love and compassion.  These poems are a lyrical complement to his earlier Tales of Clay.

The 3 poems I have translated exemplify his spirituality, simplicity and love for Cuscatlán’s natural world.

The Mango Trees

Three tall mango trees

on the hill,

three circles of mist

standing together amid wild grasses

wet with morning dew,

heavy with fragrance,

there, where yellow flowers cluster.

            Leafy islands.

            Seated shepherds

            wrapped in clouds,

            looking south . . .

With many tender hearts they love

the quiet on the hill.

They play their mockingbird flutes

for their flocks.

Their shoulders droop,

the years weigh on their knotted

and calloused roots.

            From afar you can see

            the three on the hill . . .

            You come closer:

            first they seem of the earth,

            then they are of the sky,

            heavy in the sultry clime;

            airborne between the rain and the mist;

            rooted,

            floating . . . according to the time and weather . . .

A shadow sleeps naked

under their solitude.

In the heat of the day

you embrace the shadow

and sleep beside her.

The smell of honey wakes you.

            Your eyes mistake

            the fruit for the bird.

            You listen, but what do you hear?

            Ah, yes! . . . harps strummed by the wind

            Ah, yes! . . . the rustling of leaves;

            shouts from the distant blue,

            from the faraway valley;

            shouts that are the echoes of shouts,

            someone calling, a muted bellowing:

bulls, ranch hands, school children

playing tag, a maiden pursued,

the blowing of a horn?

Screams of screams . . . ;

ghosts of howls . . .

And up there, eternal silence

and clouds that noiselessly collide:

ghosts of shadow and water,

never the same, always silent.

Among the clouds

pass years

that themselves are echoes of clouds more subtle,

more silent . . .

The Garden

My house sits so high, so high,

so high up

that my front yard

is the sky.

I have a garden for daylight

and another at night,

where bright stars flower

on crystal stems.

In the daytime garden three flowerpots

like canoes filled with violets

float on the horizon.

There are carnations in the window boxes;

wildflowers snake along the swail;

maguey on the hillside

and in the washtub in the East,

a grand and golden sunflower.

This garden is my world! . . .

The Path

  

A path

alone:

a hollow,

a tall and smiling

eucalyptus,

dancing a waltz as it dreams

on pillows of air

beside the laughing spring.

Grassy path . . . .

Mozotes that play a circle game

around the weeds

and cling to skirts

like children,

stick to pant legs,

hang on the dog's

shaggy tail.

The shade is like a cool shower.

The milky lily grows there,

the quequeishcón

(with its ivory-tipped

carnelian tongue);

“Mary’s Heart;"

ash-gray mushrooms,

and along the fence,

lemon grass

and "St. Peter's Tears."

Lonely path,

you hear the thud of the sapodilla plum

falling on the dried mud.

A songbird's desperate call, chío,

is repeated in the distance.

Is it an echo or his twin brother?

Both sing their shrill song

and fly from post to branch,

their breasts yellow

like the zapote flower.

What time is it? . . .

It is the deeply fragrant

hour of midday,

bluest of blue

lightest of light.

The wind sets the wire fence humming;

it blows on the back of the

brush-laden hill;

the flirtatious butterfly flutters

her yellow wings;

one, two, three,

like a litany

of rose petals falling.

Faintly marked path,

traces of absence,

ribbon of illusion,

a longing that disappears

like the trail of a snake:

a deep, unmarked longing

that we followed

like wandering sleepwalkers,

touching, smelling,

hearing everything

without analyzing . . .;

looking toward infinity,

where memory is a lavender pool

and a kiss is a tranquil island.

We are beside the rock,

among dry mango seeds,

where we roll on the grass

holding our head in our hands;

where we smell father-mud,

dung and carao honey,

and tannin that bleeds from the tree trunk

and a sweet, sweet aroma

of some unknown, hidden

flower.

What is this flower, Lord?

Is it the blossom

of the bee and the hummingbird,

or the "forget-me-not,"

or the flower of life,

that opens in the depth of feeling?

Dear solitary path,

I love you like a beast of burden.

Cuscatlan

Introduction

When Salarrué left El Salvador in 1946 to assume the post of Cultural Attaché to the Salvadoran Embassy, he exchanged the piney woods, the fragrant flowers and the familiar birds of his beloved Cuscatlán for the crowded, fast-paced, brick-and-concrete world of New York City. It was an exhilarating as well as a conflictual time for him.  He worked on his painting, he fell in love with a beautiful socialite, he wrote a novel in English and a novel, short stories and poems in Spanish. Pedro Juan, the protagonist of the novel in Spanish, Catleya luna (Moon Orchid), is an artist who is working on a novel while falling in love with a woman who embodies his ideal of the perfect soul mate. The challenge he has set himself in his novel is to explain the root cause of the racial and political conflicts of his country.  As he ponders the unjust treatment of the indigenous population, he reconstructs their history.  His contemporaries call this their myths, but he insists it is their reality, their true history.  This history unfolds not in El Salvador but in Cuzcatlán.  The following is my translation of a selection from pages 138-140 of chapter 7 of the second edition of Catleya luna,(first edition 1970) published in 1980 by the Ministry of Culture.

***

. . . This exceptional land, this unique region, his Cuscatlán, . . . was like a magic island.  An island is so much more than the schoolchild's definition of "a body of land surrounded on all sides by water."  An island could be in the middle of a continent; it could be a high plateau, a barren upland [. . .] Cuscatlán was undeniably an island because first of all, his heart surrounded it with love, a love that was not patriotic, although it encompassed the beautiful civic spirit of that virile country known as El Salvador.  Secondly, it was like an adventitious root in the isthmus, different from the other countries, even geographically.  It was a tight cluster of fiery volcanoes on a narrow swath of land, crowded with valleys and lakes, pleated with mountains teeming with life, with hard work, with agriculture, wasting nothing; dotted with enchanting villages where the indigenous and the colonial Spanish produced a felicitous mix, creating the environment for a peaceful race, prone to dream yet hard-working, energetic and as courageous as any people anywhere.  If one were to fly over Cuscatlán one could easily see what an island this small piece of America is.  To the north of the island, the mountains of Honduras appear in monotonous repetition like the enormous waves of a sea frozen in place by a magic spell.  And then the gulf and its diminutive archipelago of small islands to the southeast and the vast Pacific that blows its salty breath like acrid foam from the boiling and crashing waves.  From on high, between swatches of clouds in a cobalt blue sky and swells from the living foamy depths, this happy land seemed to be dozing, wrapped in its white and blue flag.

*  *  *

            Cuscatlán came from a great distance.  Pedro Juan imagined its beginnings: its birth foretold, it was among the chosen, protected by powerful supernatural forces.  Illumination from the sacred dwelling places of the indigenous gods nourished the Destiny of these lands with its heat and light.  There is the uppermost heaven, Teoteocán, the dwelling place of Ometeuctli, the Lord of all duality; Ilhuicatl, the lower heaven; Tlalocán or Paradise, home of the true godparents of Cuscatlán, Tlaloc and Chalchuitlicueye (she of the green sash), the male and female water deities.  Then Mictlán, the kindom of shadow, extends beneath the volcanoes and plains.  There the 400 meridians, the Cenzón-Huitznahuas, the true "spirits of nature," so familiar to the clairvoyant native of this mysterious land, cultivate the vegetable and mineral life.  On the surface of this land of mountains, on the very soil, which is as sacred a dwelling place as the higher and lower realms, the gods walk and dance and fly.  There live Centeol, the god of corn; Ehecatl the god of the wind; Suchipili and Suchiquetzali, the male and female gods of song and dance and flowers, the Lords of Tropical Springtime.  Now and again the awesome Camaxtli makes an appearance.  Cuetcalzín and Cabracán, forgers of fearsome earthquakes, take shelter in the caves of blood and struggle (in the company of the tepescuintle, the raccoon, the tamagás snake, the tamazul and the ayutuste); there also dwell Cipit, who slyly tempts one to carnal love, and Siguanahuate who resides in the Zompantli or place of skulls and bones, and the goddess Suicoate, the serpent of fire who slides unseen along the spine of her victims or her chosen ones, driving them mad or enlightening them as the case may be.

            In the sky Tonatiuh the Sun and Metzi the Moon and Tezcatlipoca of the smoking mirror scattering plagues and the many Chapulate who trail hunger in their wake.

            In the legendary and mysterious region of Tlapallán (Land of the Rainbow), when the Aztec dynasties fell, in the eleventh century, the great Topilzín Axil created and ruled over the domain of Cuzcatlán.  Topilzín Axil, a high priest and powerful king, returned from the third Tulán (which he and his faithful followers had abandoned after the death of King Huémac in the cave of Cincalco) to the primitive and semi-legendary Tulán del Güija.  The true Tulán of legend, improbable but not impossible birthplace of the Toltecas-Nahoas, existed in an early Orient that historians, unaware of the esoteric sources of knowledge, consider mythical, when in truth it was the original Toltec center of the ancient Atlantis.  The original Toltecs, later scattered throughout the world, were but the third sub-race of the fourth human race, the Atlantean race, from which the copper and bronze-skinned Native Americans descended as well as the Mongolian and other Oriental branches, people of high cheekbones, slanted eyes and straight hair. 

            When he left on his civilizing journey, Topalzín lived first among the Maya of Yucatán, not as a conquerer but as a Master or Avatar.  He is known by the name Kukulkán.  Among them he is the highest religious authority.  He founded the city of Mayapán in approximately 1000 AD, restored Chichén-Ttzá and then continued west, organizing and civilizing until he reached Cuscatlán.

            Later, in the thirteenth century, there was another exceptional king of Cuscatlán, Tutecotzimit, who had defeated the terrible Caumichín or flying fish, chief of the allied armies who was tortured and killed for trying to reinstate the sacrificial rites abolished by Kukulkán.

            Other famous kings of Cuscatlán were Tonaltut, Silguanzímit and Mactenasun.  The exact history of Cuscatlán remains hidden in a mist.  Far from being undesirable, this retains the mystery of that which one day, whether deciphered from a stellae of Cuscatlán or discerned on the back of a vase from Tazumal or flowing from the lips of a stone figure from Santa Lucía Cozumalhuapa, will be revealed to the astonishment and pleasure of our people.