Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe‘s stunning interpretation of a poem by the early 20th century Mexican poet Amado Nervo, for which I was pleased to be able to contribute the English translation. Pablo Barrangán and Gabriella Roy act. The music is by archiv ev noise.

Eduardo shared some notes on his process:

This year it was my intention to challenge myself to make at least one video with text on the screen. That might be seen as a slight challenge, but not for me. I consider it very difficult to insert the text on the screen at the same time that one is watching the images and not feel lost with the sense of the poem and the images. This is my first video with the text on the screen since Green Stones in the House of Night, where the poems appeared in a very different way.

My inspiration for inserting the text here is the style that Marc Neys (aka Swoon) uses in his videos—neat, clean, precise. I also wanted to maintain the rhythm of the reading in order to not lose the sense of the poem, so here I tried to make a slow but continuous reading of the poem by Amado Nervo. The reason I didn’t use the periods, commas and exclamation marks from the original text is that I felt that they would disturb the cleanness I was looking for, after consulting with Dave Bonta, the translator. I consider this a poetic license.

Thanks to Dave for suggesting I pick one of the translations that he and many others talented translators are making of great poets from Latin America in the Facebook group Poetry from the Other Americas and on Via Negativa. I chose the poem by Amado Nervo in the first place because I prefer to work with short texts now, and also because I found in “Ofertorio” a way of continuing my investigations of religious symbols and themes that I started in my video Consideraciones sobre la luz, based on a poem by Laura M. Kaminski.

I am not obsessed with Catholic imagery but I find it interesting, and I tried to make suggestions with it, trying to renew my vision of it, not being sexually explicit as that could be the easy way. I don’t know if I hit my target, but that was my goal. As inspiration, I used what in Spain are called “Estampas de la Virgen”—those little pictures of the Virgin Mary with a prayer in them.

Other thing I wanted to do in this video was include both texts, English and Spanish, in the same video, rather than making two different videos as I have been doing with my remixes from The Poetry Storehouse, and divide the video into two related parts, using an actor and an actress. I always imagine big scenes while I am preparing the recordings, but I know that at the end I have to adjust my wishes of a grand production to what I actually can do, and that is a beautiful process of searching for simplicity.

I hope you enjoy the result.