The Egyptian Room

The Egyptian Room — Web Exclusive

By Francesc Parcerisas
Translated by Cyrus Cassells

Sitting in the museum's Egyptian room,
I'm audience to a honey-rich
buzzing of bees.
The past is fully alive:
yellow and blue,
like the laborer's threshed wheat,
or that stork sipping
from a turquoise river
captured on papyrus.
In a flash, everything's scrambled:
the stonemason with his sieve
in the pitiless sun
and the slave meekly
fanning the pharaoh
wait for me in a taxicab
down the street.
A flock of in-a-hurry ducks
crosses the overcast sky;
an ibis snivels at the next table,
drunk and barbarous.
Folks claim passions
can't be painted any longer,
but this fresco's
a four-thousand-year-old mirror.
Like the mural's black dog,
death will arrive,
and we'll imagine ourselves unripe,
unready,
or we'll lament having
to surrender in our sleep
so many scant, fleeting
moments of joy,
well aware the Nile barge glides
endlessly under the blazing sun.

Francesc Parcerisas is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry, including Triumph of the Present and The Golden Age. Considered the premier Catalan poet of his "miracle generation" of poets who came of age as Franco’s public banning of the Catalan language came to an end, he is also a masterly, award-winning translator of an impressive array of international writers, including Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Cesare Pavese, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Among his numerous translations from French, Italian, and English into Catalan, he is most famous in Catalonia for his translation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Cyrus Cassells is the author of More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Beautiful Signor (1997), which won the Lambda Literary Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (1994), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mud Actor (1982), which was a National Poetry Series selection. He is also the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.