El encuentro
POESÍA
de Luis Alberto de Cuenca
a Juan Manuel de Prada
En Salamanca, el último noviembre,
te encontré por la calle, tan delgada
como entonces, pero con más arrugas.
Dabas clases de no sé qué muy raro
(Textología, por ejemplo) y eras
muy feliz explicando a tus alumnus
lo divino y lo humano. Me dijiste
que cus hijos quedaron en Madrid,
con su padre, y que solo los veías
—ya eran mayores—tres o cuatro veces
al año; que te habías doctorado
(¡por fin!) y que ahora solo te faltaba
ser funcionaria para ver el mundo
desde el lugar que merecías.
Yo
te dije que bueno, que pasaba
por allí casualmente, que tenia
un amigo escritor en Salamanca
y que había venido a visitarlo.
Tú me dijiste: «¿Tienes mucha prisa
o podernos tomarnos algo juntos?».
Después de muchas copas, con el alba
siguiendo nuestra pista, te lo dije:
« Desde entonces no ha habido otra mujer».
Y en mi interior bullía la mentira
al alimón con el deseo, y todo
—aquel horrible bar, cú y yo, la noche—
era tan esperpéntico y absurdo
que se parecía a la vida.
Brief Encounter
POETRY
by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
for Juan Manuel de Prada
It happened in Salamanca, last November.
I ran into you on the street, as slender
as before, though a little bit worn.
You said you were teaching, I’m not sure
what, something odd, Cultural Theory
perhaps, and that it made you happy to explain
to your students all things human and divine.
You said your children had stayed in Madrid
with their father, that you saw them
three or four times a year (they’re all grown up),
that you had finished your doctorate (finally),
and that the only thing you’d like
is a government job to travel the world in style.
As for me, I said, I’m only here for the day
to see a friend in Salamanca. And you said:
Are you in a hurry? How about a drink?
After many drinks, with the dawn in close pursuit,
I said: “Since you there’s been no other woman.”
It wasn’t true. Inside me, deceit fed on desire.
Then everything—the dingy bar, you and me, the dark—
became as absurd and grotesque as life itself.
(translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat)
Luis Alberto de Cuenca, a writer and scholar, possesses one of Spain’s most distinctive poetic voices. In 2015, he received the National Poetry Prize for his book Cuaderno de vacaciones. From 1996 to 2000 he was the Director of Spain’s national library, in 2021 won the prestigious Federico García Lorca International Poetry Prize, and in 2025 The Reina Sofia Prize for Poetry. “El encuentro” (“Brief Encounter”) was originally published in Spanish in 1996 in Por fuertes y fronteras. More recently, it appeared in Cuenca’s retrospective collection, Los mundos y los días: Poesía 1970-2009, by Visor Libros in Madrid, Spain, in 2021.
Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s writing has been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. He has published several books of poetry in Spanish and English, among them Sin lengua, deslenguado and Bilingual Blues. Pérez Firmat’s books of cultural criticism include Life on the Hyphen and Tongue Ties. His most recent book is My Favorite Monster, a volume of translations of the poems of Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca, published by Lavender Ink in 2024. Pérez Firmat is the David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University.
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