Tercera Estación Literaria: Tomás Andréu
We are honored to present a brief but meaningful selection of Tomás Andréu’s poetry. Andréu, a poet of short and absurd verses, doesn’t have the recognition he deserves in contemporary Salvadoran literature, which is why we believe that so much more can be done to share his work, in our country and beyond. His style is approachable, yet profound; and his themes are related to everyday life.
This anthology comes from his only published book in 2025, El disfraz de los impulsos, a comprehensive compilation of his poems done by Jorge Ávalos. Our criteria is based on two of the poet’s concerns: death and existentialism. There are other poems that are about unrequited love or the consequences of time, but we think that the first ones mentioned are the most developed themes in his work.
His poetry delves into different aspects of death. For example, in III, there’s a tender portrayal about dying: the earth is our mother and, as such, she takes us back after our last living moments. In Dead? Never!, death is shown as the new life awaiting us; and, in Omen, the speaker suffers a martyr’s death provoked by the heavy weight of reality’s absurdity.
At the same time, existentialism is a prevailing topic. Hollow destroys the human experience through precise and brutal images that are vulgar and beautiful at the same time; with a consistent and fluent structure, and a disheartening final verse: it’s a beautiful and philosophical poem that exposes how truly insignificant humanity is. Then we have Who? This poem contains generally absurd questions that gradually go from concreteness to abstraction. The questions seem like they are for no one in particular, but one could infer that they are directed to divinity, because there is no person able to be responsible for what the speaker demands.
We only hope that this anthology does justice to his oeuvre. This edition of the Estación Literaria is an effort to keep his flame alive long after his passing. If you’re interested in more of his poetry, El disfraz de los impulsos is only available in Spanish at Librería Universitaria, located in the University of El Salvador. Moreover, we want to express our everlasting gratitude to Evelyn Rúa, whose incisive comments and suggestions were critical to these translations, and also to Andy Martinez, the poet’s brother and literary executor, who placed his faith in us to translate Andreu’s beautiful poems.
From Café para tres
III
The good side of dying is
the earth’s embrace in her dreams:
she sees many offsprings
in each handful of dust.
From De ningún lado hacia ninguna parte
Omen
I shall die insane,
while cursing worldly and celestial names
and writing epitaphs on stones and trees
for the dead who never lived.
I shall die between multitudes
like true loners do:
between voices we own and the ones that we don’t,
between crosses and unknown names,
between ill waters and the scent of strange flowers,
between borrowed time and hostile company,
between the banishment of your arms
that never met me,
between the never-ending fear
of somebody who knew nothing but his own fate.
I shall die insane.
I shall die in my inner exile,
where no wire fence could ever defeat me,
where fruits were long-lasting
and the afternoons, a gray tranquility,
like the one I never came back from
while I wrote your name on stone.
Hollow
We are fleeting:
a lightning in the middle of the night
would last longer than our whole existence,
and the brightness of a tobacco strand
would burn more than all of our dreams.
We are effete:
a rotten dog under the midday sun
who, by nature, would be a kind supplier of retribution
and something newer under the sun,
even more than the fruit we bore.
We are puny:
a wave from the deep blue sea
would be more graceful than our ideas,
and, on the relieving shore,
a name upon the sand would slowly reach oblivion,
after ours.
We are desolation:
the barren Sahara desert, in its vast solitude,
would be more fertile than our swarm of sperm,
and the infinite, flashing sand
would endure longer than our progeny.
We are fleeting,
we are effete,
we are puny,
we are desolation.
We are the poem that nobody concludes.
Who?
Where does the complicit look of the perished days go?
—And what about the radiance of your name shining on the tip of my pencil?—
Who will gather those leaves crushed in our hands, cast to the wind and cradled upon the back of those filthy and pestilent waters?
Who will deliver those never-written letters to the usual recipient?
Who will keep pushing for one’s suicide and the other’s murder?
Who will adopt the three-legged dog with black spots on its snout?
Who will answer the questions of the unconceived children?
Who, from the living, will answer us when dead?
Who will justify this silence that no one knows?
Who will listen to the tormented and silent scream that dies of despair?
Who will bring us the meaning of remorse without being guilty?
Who is the who we ask?
Who is who, and where does the one who speaks remain?
Dead? Never!
I shall never be a corpse:
I shall feed worms that will turn into butterflies,
the rain shall come and make of my bones
a generous garden for the ants.
I shall never be a corpse:
I shall nourish the trees and be nest and bread for the birds,
and the wind shall force me to sleep from leaf to leaf:
I shall be chlorophyll, sap and pollen.
I shall never be a corpse:
the sun shall gild my skin
and the celestial bodies shall echo through me,
and, within their light, I shall conjugate.
I shall never be a corpse,
for, from my remains,
from my sediments,
others like me shall have been born.
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