Francisco Aragón: California Poets Part 10, Three Poems

Francisco Aragón

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Francisco Aragón

Three Poems

Fair Oaks Street 

                         San Francisco

Wooden façades 

seem to be saying 

You don’t belong 

here anymore 

and the Victorian

that birthed you 

no longer sees 

you—scrawny 

buzz cut tank 

top  brother

sisters grew 

up there too 

a short walk 

from the corner 

grocer’s Moony’s 

his German

Shepherd 

that once 

snarled chased

you home your 

small sticky  

fist releasing

the popsicle

Saint James 

grammar

school as well 

The house sold

—two tony 

condos now

no garage

The street still

courses 

through you

And you took

Dave 

to see it 

decades later 

so you could say

Here is where

Lines to Bob for his 80th

Tom Barber,

your student

at Saint Mary’s

across the bay,

left Field Guide

on his desk

in plain view

that day 

in 1982

after our run

around Lake

Merced—cross 

country 

at Riordan. What’s

that? I said,

pointing at the

leafy cover. Mr.

Barber picked

it up, cracked it

open, began 

reading aloud 

Melón

a bilingual fable

if you slice   

swallow 

a few seeds

you’ll sprout 

maravillas

he whispers 

carrying

the boy to 

and from 

his jardín 

pájaros

and bees 

are the best

enemigos 

escucha 

he instructs

hand cupped 

at his ear 

gesturing

for the child 

to listen too… 

snow-haired 

he unfurls

from inside 

his shirt

the sky 

petals 

float               

down

abre 

la boca 

taste us

swallow

please

     after Francisco X. Alarcón (1954 – 2016)

Interview

October 19th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Francisco Aragón, Poet, Professor, Editor, Translator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: It was a great honor and privilege to feature three of your poems in California Poets, Part 10. More than a year and a half has passed since then, so I'd like to begin the interview by asking if you might perhaps have some new work to share?

FA: Thank you for this. I have the following two poems:

Voorhies Lot, 10 PM

                        Davis, CA                         

     ...hoo-hoo-hoo  there 

it goes again I 

    hear it too

this time, standing

    beside his car

and something in him 

    glows when he turns

his face toward

    the trees at the far

end of the lot—it isn’t 

    a saw whet

or a barn it could be a...

    —hoo-hoo-hoo  I’ll

have to check my

    recordings

and field guides 

    he says,

like any true

amateur

                   in memory of Jim McElroy (1953 - 2021)

Aqua

(Rubén Darío)

Musical ocean,

marvelous ocean,

the subtle scent of salt,

spectrum and layers of sound,

texture of my swaddling days

in which the hours blur

into movement—series of soothing

steps

leaving me in a trance, bathed

Musical ocean,

marvelous ocean

of diamonds rising fragile

lace coming apart mirroring

the cities in the sky

blue and white

from which bloom perpetual

songs

father ocean, mother ocean, spirit

unseen, overtaking me

Billowing propulsion, sea

expedition of explorers

harassed by fierce cyclical winds

menace of the most jagged of crags

those golden, oar-driven boats,

wooden vessels their purple sails

coming upon it: a blue bellowing

bull

and she astride it, riding

over the roiling expanse

that sound arresting, the froth

a throng of throngs—

where does it begin where

does it end this deity

of the sea as arms surface, emerging

like swords slicing

through the foam

and then you see it

soaking through, rising 

falling—a heaving bed

of roses 

DG: Thank you for sharing these new pieces. I enjoyed them a lot. Let's dive into Handbook of Foams, a translation of Gerardo Diego’s 1924 collection Manual de espumas, which you released this year. The book, in many ways, goes back to the early days of your career because it was, in fact, Diego’s poems, under the guidance of Louis Bourne, you had translated for the MA thesis in Spain, which featured twenty of the thirty poems from the collection. Could you talk a bit more about Bourne’s guidance along with the extent to which you reworked the original translations you had done for this most recent project?

FA: Thank you for this question. Louis Bourne embodies what I’d describe this way: the accomplished artist so passionate about the work itself that they’re less interested in advocating for the work. The result, in my view, is that his work as a translator and a poet doesn’t have the readership it merits. He’s lived a good chunk of his adult life in Madrid, where he retired to after his years as a Spanish professor in Georgia. Here’s a snippet of “Mostly Madrid,” the essay that punctuates Handbook of Foams, on Bourne:

“My introduction to his work in this vein, The Crackling Sun, was a selected poems by Spanish Nobel laureate Vincente Aleixandre, a contemporary of Lorca’s. The book included Bourne’s critical study of Aleixandre’s oeuvre. The volume clocked in at nearly two hundred pages. I loved it. Bourne’s mode of thesis advising? Dinner for two and a bottle of wine. We’d meet in his favorite Chinese restaurant every two months. In addition to going over, and offering feedback on, drafts of my Diego translations, our sessions were sprawling conversations on poetry, on translating Spanish poetry.”  But if I had to name the most valuable nugget of wisdom (at least for me) he gifted me with it was this: prioritize or privilege, for the English reader, an image, even when the Spanish original isn’t offering an obvious image. An example I’ve been sharing from Handbook of Foams is Diego’s use of the verb nacer (literally: to be born). Under Bourne’s guidance, I made various imagistic choices when it came to carrying over that concept into the English-language poem.

DG: Diego, in his own words, considered the possibility that these poems might, “to the reader, seem cold, but I remember very well the blood they cost me.” What were your own impressions of the pieces when you first encountered them and to what extent did those feelings change when you returned, years later, to the work of translating them?

FA: I was utterly mesmerized the first time I encountered these poems—in the basement café of the International Institute in Madrid, Spain circa 1990. And by that I mean that I was so overtaken by them that I begun uttering, almost involuntarily, the poems out loud. Before I knew it, I was saying the final words of the final poem to myself, in a low whisper (“Espectáculo”):

Cae sobre el mar la lluvia

como un telón de teatro

which I render as:

Rain falls over the sea

like a stage curtain

But as the years progressed, the concept that really began to take hold of me (which I don’t think Louis Bourne would necessarily approve of!) is that for me “translation” became, has become, a form of “re-writing” the poem in English, taking as inspiration the original Spanish text. This became my “post-Bourne” guiding principal. I want the poem to sound as if it were written in English.

DG: Many of the individual poems in the collection are dedicated to art critics, artists, translators, and fellow poets, but the whole book is really dedicated to “José de Ciria Escalante,” a young poet who died at the age of twenty-one, with the following lines, “indelible friend, these poems which he loved, aspire to be flowers.” How much of Escalante’s poetry have you read in the original Spanish and, to your knowledge, has any serious translation of his work into English been undertaken by anyone?

FA: I lament to say that although I did a fair amount of research, which resulted in my introduction (“Contextualizing Handbook of Foams”), that research did not include learning who, in detail, who José de Ciria Escalante” was.  That said, I do want to comment on your observation about the book’s multiple dedications.  Twenty of the collection’s thirty poems are, indeed, dedicated to various individuals. I often make light of the fact that the longest poem in the collection (“Canción fluvial / Riversong”) is dedicated to Juan Gris, the noted Spanish cubist artist. But beyond that, it wasn’t something I gave much thought—until now. In a review of Handbook of Foams, slated to appear in Poetry International online, the poet-translator Alexandra Lytton Regalado took this gesture, on Diego’s part, as evidence of how much he must have valued community. She writes:

“These dedications create the feeling that Diego is constantly writing in conversation with fellow writers, artists, friends, beloveds. Each poem hinges on a relationship and underlines the feeling of poetry as bridge.”

I love that expressed sentiment. It wasn’t something that occurred to me, but it’s a lovely thought.

DG: The uniqueness of each language, by its mere vocabulary that often has no direct equivalents to English, invariably poses challenges, which naturally aren’t the only ones. What difficulties did you encounter in the translation process and how did you navigate through them?

FA: I recently recorded a conversation for Words on a Wire, a radio show/podcast based in El Paso, TX (https://wordsonawire.org/about). The host was fiction writer, Daniel Chacón, the show’s co-founder. We did a fun, deep-dive into Handbook of Foams, and something he said appealed to me: one strategy readers could adopt for Gerardo Diego is to surrender any attachment to logic, and to approach this poetry as a child might approach play. He asked about difficulties I encountered, and I decided to hone in on one passage of “Riversong,” the piece dedicated to Juan Gris. It’s a six-line stanza that I could not make heads or tails of—meaning: I knew, or could make out, what each of the stanza’s thirty-three words meant, but taken as a whole, I couldn’t really assign any logic sense to the whole stanza. In the end, I let myself off the hook of trying to “understand,” and instead embraced this sense of play, where sound is concerned—namely, creating an ambiance of non-traditional rhyme, and leave it at that:

The telegraphic spider

sends out the night

and as a local well relaxes

in its cage of glass

the multicopier and star enrage

the poet who’s flown to the gate

DG: To what extent does your approach to translation change with regard to each author in question? In other words, how different, for instance, is the process when you’re translating Lorca as opposed to Darío? Diego as opposed to Alarcón?

FA: Translating the work of Francisco X. Alarcón is something I did, off and on, for thirty years. I began translating him in 1986 until his death in 2016. Two things: he’s the only living poet I have translated, and because we became friends, I could always count on him to answer any questions I had. But among the things I valued about our relationship is that he also gave me a generous amount of freedom. He never tried to impose how he might translate his own poem, which he did a fair amount of. He honored my sense or grasp of the idiomatic. That said, I’ve come to recognize that the manner in which I translated him early on, when I was still an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, was, to be honest, tentative and not especially imaginative. But when I decided to include a few translations in my second book, Glow of Our Sweat (2010), I revisited a couple of my Alarcón translations and made adjustments, implementing some of the things I learned from Louis Bourne.  With Rubén Darío, I’ve taken the most liberties, for reasons I highlight in my concluding essay (“My Rubén”), in my third book, After Rubén (2020). My work with Lorca were co-translations of his homoerotic sonnets, with my late undergraduate mentor Jack Walsh, and these were done around the time I was first translating Alarcón, the late 1980s.

DG: Some poems in the collection are written with conventional breaks and stanzas, while others feature long spaces between words, indents, and at times also one-word lines. What role did form play for poets like Diego? Was it related to Creeley’s idea that form is an extension of content or are there perhaps other considerations?

FA: Gerardo Diego’s initial guiding light, as argued in my introduction, when he began writing and publishing his avant-garde verse in the late teens of the twentieth century was the innovative verse of Vincente Huidobro, a Chilean poet who spent extensive periods of time in Europe, mainly Paris and Madrid. In fact, Gerardo Diego spent a few weeks in the French capital right before he wrote the poems in Handbook of Foams. Based on his correspondence at that time, one of things that most struck him were his long conversations with the Spanish cubist, Juan Gris. And so I would argue that the ideas swirling around cubism were a major influence. That said, other scholars have pointed to music as the particular aesthetic phenomena that influenced Diego’s avant-garde sensibilities, which would include, in my estimation, how deployed language on the page. As far as Robert Creeley, Handbook of Foams was written four years before Creeley was born.

DG: Given that your debut poetry collection, Puerta del Sol (2005), was published in a bilingual edition, I’m curious about the extent to which the act of translating helps you expand the possibilities of English in ways non-bilingual writers might not be able to. In other words, do the linguistic possibilities of Spanish, which are naturally different from those of English (and vice-versa), give you ideas that you then “translate” into your own poems?

FA: I don’t think I’ve ever thought about my artistic practice in quite those terms, but it’s a fascinating question. What I can share, where Puerta del Sol is concerned, is that the deliberate decision to make Puerta del Sol a dual-language book was the result of being in a Spanish-language creative writing class at UC Davis—taught by Francisco X. Alarcón. It was in the context of that class that I decided to experiment with self-translation—that is, taking my English-language poems and rendering them into Spanish. It was, in some ways, a very personal experience.  One of the pieces I self-translated was a poem that ended up not finding its way into a book until After Rubén, but which best illustrates what I’m hinting at. It has to do with “Photo, 1945.” The “you” in that poem, the person the poem is addressed to, is my mother’s father—a person who wouldn’t have read or spoken a word of English. And so, on the one hand, the original version of that poem is in English. And yet, I remember the experience of reading aloud, to myself, the Spanish-language version of the poem, and experiencing a sensation closer to the idea of authenticity. It moved me.

DG: There’s a commonly held belief that translation is somehow less of a creative act than the production of original work. Being a person who’s written both a respectable amount of original poetry and translated a great deal, is there an argument to be made that translation is, in fact, the creation of a unique text rather than an act of simple transmission?

FA: I’ll share a story, which I think, is related, as part of my answer to this question.  During my two years as a graduate student at UC Davis (1998-2000), I befriended an Irish professor, Jim McElroy, who became a dear friend, and who passed away a few years ago. I took an independent study on Irish poetry with him, and he sometimes invited Irish poets to campus. In the spring of 2000, he invited the Irish-language poet, Nuala Ni Domhnaill. On the day of her visit, I was tasked with keeping her company one afternoon and I asked her the following question: “Do you get as much satisfaction at the conclusion of translating a poem by someone else as you do at the conclusion of writing a poem yourself?” We had been having a sprawling conversation over a few beers, and I wanted to learn her views on this subject. I knew what my answer was, but I wanted to know hers. Based on how our conversation had been going, until then, I suspected that she was going to share my view. I’ll never forget her one word answer. “Absolutely.” Earlier I mentioned this notion of translation as an act of “re-writing” the poem in the target language. And so, yes: I do

view translation as a creative act or activity. That said, it could not happen without the source text as inspiration or muse.

DG: If you could spend a day with any poet you’ve translated, who would you choose and why?

FA: Based on my particular personal trajectory, the answer to this question should be Rubén Darío, but after thinking about it, I would say, Gerardo Diego. During my research on him, I became so fascinated with the decade of the 1920s, and the fervent artistic activity that was taking place during those years. The year Diego composed Handbook of Foams, 1922, is sort of emblematic. One only has to ponder the works of literature, the visual arts and music, that were produced around this time.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

FA: I recently gave a reading at NYU and one of my fellow readers was the Chilean-born poet, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, whose work I wasn’t familiar with. They read from a collection of poems titled, A/An: Observation upon Witches. Carrying out this work required working with legal documents and archives from the Salem witch trials. Her performance from this work utterly captivated me, and I’m enjoying the book now, which is from 2024 and published by End of the Line Press.  In terms of what I’m working on, for a number of years now, I’ve been increasingly interested in poems that take as inspiration works of visual art. I’ve been spending considerable time at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, a relatively new space (2023) at the University of Notre Dame, where I teach. The working title of my current manuscript, which is in its infancy, truth be told, is Theories of Art.

Author Bio:

A native of San Francisco, California, Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of three book of poetry, Puerta del Sol (2005), Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and After Rubén (2020), as well as the translator, into English, of the recently published, Handbook of Foams (2026) by Spanish poet Gerardo Diego. He is the editor of the award-winning anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). His poems have appeared in over twenty anthologies, most recently in Latino Poetry (Library of America, 2024). He has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, and art galleries, as well as at the Dodge Poetry Festival. He’s a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches and directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Otherwise, he resides in Carlsbad, CA with his husband. For more information, visit: http://franciscoaragon.net