[Newspoetry] An Important Translation

[Mike Lehman]

One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated
by
the humblest of our people.

They will be asked what they did when their country was slowly dying
out,
like a sweet campfire, small and abandoned.

No one will ask them about their dress or their long siestas after
lunch, or
about their futile struggles against "nothingness," or about their
ontological way to make money. No, they won't be questioned on Greek
mythology, or about the self-disgust they felt when someone deep inside
them was getting ready to die the coward's death. They will be asked
nothing about their absurd justifications nurtured in the shadow of a
huge lie.

On that day, the humble people will come, those who never had a place in
the books and poems of the apolitical intellectuals but who daily
delivered
their bread and milk, their eggs and tortillas; those who mended their
clothes, those who drove their cars, those who took care of their dogs
and
gardens, and worked for them, and they will ask: "What did you do when
the poor suffered, when tenderness and life were dangerously burning out
in them?"

Apolitical intellectuals of my sweet country, you will have nothing to
say,

A vulture of silence will eat your guts. Your own misery will gnaw at
your
souls. And you will be mute in your shame.

 [From Tomorrow Triumphant, selected poems of Otto Rene Castillo,
translated from the Spanish by Francisco X. Alarcon: "On March 19,
1967, in the remote highlands of Guatemala, a 31-year old poet name
Otto Rene Castillo was burned at the stake after being savagely tortured
and mutilated for four days by the Guatemalan Army."]