The Pocket Radio
She asked us for a pocket radio to listen to the news in the hospital.
She asked us for a pocket radio to listen to the news in the hospital.
Politics was sacrosanct for her generation,
we kids had to be quiet as mice
when the news was on, no matter what.
Just a few months before the end of the ceasefire
she got sick. She was worried,
she suspected things would go wrong,
the illness would proceed, in her body and the body politic.
She was born the year the war began,
in ’36,
and hadn’t known a season of peace since then.
One day she turned the pocket radio off.
She didn’t want to be attending to bad news.
Though she tried to be heartening,
“everything will get set to rights,”
I knew—and she did too—
the moment of peace would come to an end.
She didn’t see the end of the peace process.
At first I would turn on her pocket radio,
“everything will get set to rights,”
but the words there kept striking me
as foreign, incomprehensible,
cold as a clinical case history.
Nowadays I don’t turn on the radio.
I’d rather be quiet as mice,
and try to remember her voice.
Kirmen Uribe is a Basque writer. He won his first literary award, in 1995, when he was in prison for resisting the military draft (since he didn’t care to participate in the then-obligatory service). In October of 2009 he was awarded the Spanish Literature Prize, for his novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao.
Elizabeth Macklin is the author of A Woman Kneeling in the Big City (1994) and You’ve Just Been Told (2000). An Amy Lowell Scholarship in 1999 led her to translate Kirmen Uribe’s Meanwhile Take My Hand (2007), a finalist for the 2008 PEN Translation Fund Award. She translated Uribe’s Bilbao—New York—Bilbao in 2014.
