Mexico, (1939-2014)
A Hog Meeting Its God
- I am seven. On the farm, I watch
- through a window as a man crosses himself
- then proceeds to slaughter a hog.
- I do not want to watch the spectacle.
- Almost human are the
- premonitory cries.
- (Nearly human, zoologists tell us,
- are the organs of the intelligent hog,
- more, even, than of dog or horse.)
- God’s creatures, my grandmother calls them.
- Brother hog, St. Francis would have said.
- Now but butchered flesh and dripping blood.
- And I am a child but I ask myself:
- Did God create hogs only for us to eat?
- Whom does He answer, the prayer of the hog
- or the man who crossed himself and then slit its throat?
- If God exists, why must this hog suffer?
- The flesh bubbles in the oil.
- Soon, I will be stuffing myself like a hog.
- But I shall not cross myself at table.
Questions about Pigs and Curses Visited upon the Aforementioned
Does any animal give more of itself?
— Jovellanos
- Why are all their names insults?
- Pig swill-guzzler hog porker swine.
- They live off slop; they pig out
- (because they will be pigged out upon).
- On their bellies or their hocks, scorn gnaws at them
- their ludicrous appearance, their lechery
- their fear of obscene proprietors.
- Dying, no one screams more piteously,
- echoing interminably:
- and to think, this is why they fattened me.
- What pigs, what filthy slobs, what swine.
Boar: Wild Pig
- A wild boar, a dart:
- the dart is embedded
- in the crown of a frenzied head;
- the boar bolts, hopelessly,
- sprinkling the forest with its dying blood.
- In snout and cheeks
- other darts quiver
- like desperate, wingless birds.
- Indescribable frustration:
- not in turn to take aim
- with bow or rifle
- and plug the frenzied heads
- of the wild pigs that have murdered him.
José Emilio Pacheco. An Ark for the Next Millennium: Poems. Translations by Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press (1993).
About the Poet:
José Emilio Pacheco, Mexico, (1939-2014), was a poet, educator, essayist, translator, novelist and short story writer. In his Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Pacheco and the second or maternal family name is Berny. Thus, his full name would be José Emilio Pacheco Berny.
He was awarded with the Mexican National Poetry Prize in 1969 for his collection No me preguntas cómo pasa el tiempo (Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By). His collection El silencio de la luna (The Silence of the Moon) was awarded the Premio José Asunción Silva for the best book in Spanish to appear in any country between 1990 and 1995. In 2009 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish-speaking world, for his body-of-work.
Pacheco translated works by Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams, Yevgeny Yevtuschenko, and Albert Einstein, among others. He taught at UNAM, as well as the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Essex, and many others in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century. [DES-06/22]