
Poema del norteamericano Jhon Oliver dedicado al bibliotecario de la Biblioteca Histórica de la USAL Eduardo Hernández Pérez
Según cuenta Crear en Salamanca. «el poema, dedicado al bibliotecario Eduardo Hernández, fue enviado por el autor a Alfredo Pérez Alencart, con expreso encargo de conseguir un traductor salmantino. En esta ciudad que mucho apreciaba hizo este trabajo Laurent Wigley». El poema aparecerá en la antología «Por ocho centurias», que se editará con ocasión del VIII Centenario del a Universidad de Salamanca
SALAMANCA
para Eduardo Hernández
___________________
SALAMANCA
for Eduardo Hernández
Should this protruding tummy of mine reveal
another tumor within like Russian dolls
of mundane secretions and gastric flushing
then my sonnets will start to taste of chemo,
and where can I put the trapezoids of sky
I cut from leaning roofs of Salamanca
when the best team of translators in the world
toiled up the fated cobblestone street of Faith,
entering great doors under sandstone glances
of Nando e Isa who ethnic cleansed the Jews
and banished Muslims to the gritty Maghreb
same year the Taino discovered Columbus,
and climbing past a labyrinth of classrooms
reached the shrineroom of the Incunabulae
where leather volumes gleam with gold like molars
and ordinary folks are detained by glass.
Eduardo Hernández shows us vellum gospels
hand-crabbed by monks with frequent carpal tunnel
Copernicus as censored by Gachupín
multilingual edition Fray de León
whose Russian, Ekaterina informs us,
disgraces our profession. A library
of memory may fit on a fingernail,
Borges’ library fits cozy in my brain,
my Spanish is just about good enough to
keep up as Eduardo explains how printing
was the cyberspace of the Siglo XV,
whereupon with an iron key he unlocks
a seeming bookcase to another chamber
even more climate-controlled for fragile texts
within which is a coffer or treasure-chest
Eduardo opens with another black key
and draws forth, on its wooden scroll, a Torah,
a homegirl far from home, a little sister,
so many centuries in captivity,
which my shabby red-diaper self-taught Hebrew
sounds haltingly V’OMER MOSHE ADONAI
to let the goyim know that God and Moses
were having a conversation on the mountain
and on my return my cat scan comes out clean.