Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 271, Volume 49 Number 5, May - June 2023.

Tribute Paid
to the Immortality of the ‘Bar Internacional’
César Tiempo
When he breaks his vow of solitude
 – a poor wedding gift like his daily bread –
the poet lets himself be won over by the city
and by the seven streets of their seven joys.
In front of his door the rural caravan
of Lacroze streetcars passes like a sweet wind
– green gust that unifies the peoples of Israel
Into a bundle of blond souls and rapid dreams –
He climbs aboard and crosses odd numbered avenues
as old as Aion and like Aion modern
and at the noisy curve of Pasteur Street and Corrientes
he enters the bar of bars.
‘Bar Internacional!’
where the Jewish clan   
innocuously recovers
from the persecutions of Imperial Russia!

One of those Cossacks
– the executioners
who fan the storm – stoops
(from two meters to one-fifty)
in the doorway for two pesos
and folds himself into a ninety-degree angle
with the elasticity of a contortionist
before the good-humored Jews
who can relax at a sight without threat
and forget the crack of knouts
and the servility of hooligans
facing the stage where seven or eight scoundrels
dance and sing and make balalaikas moan.

Surely, they are not Essenes
These insatiable sybarites
who speak in the nasal voice of our forebears
(who say we are, of course, so-called Jews)
while they may add biscotti, sweets, crumpets
to ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image