Four
Translated from Ramón Hondal’s Scratch (2019) by Elena Lahr-Vivaz
There is the Scratch. The Scratch, what is it?
The record is cleaned to eliminate the Scratch. No. The Scratch is maintained. The Scratch is part of the music, and as much as the music is loved, to remember how that Scratch that passes from the groove to the ear and causes the needle that goes and goes to jump.
The scratch is the noise, that which interferes, that which should be superfluous. But it is not superfluous. The Scratch is not superfluous. One. Two. One after another. Three. Four. It is not superfluous.
The turning of the record comes with the Scratch. The turning of the sound. The music is indebted to the Scratch, to the noise.
There is the Scratch. Scratch. Even if cleaned the Scratch remains. Insistent dust in the groove. It jabs its tip of dust in the electric tip of the needle and makes its own music.
The Scratch.
Ramón Hondal is a Cuban poet who lives in Havana. Hondal is the author of Diálogos (Dialogues), published by Ediciones Extramuros in 2014; Scratch, published by Bokeh Press in 2019; and Prótesis (Prosthesis), published by Casa Vacía in 2019. In 2013, Hondal received the Luis Rogelio Nogueras Award (for Diálogos). With his poetry published in Europe and the United States as well as Cuba, Hondal has received growing acclaim for his work and increasing recognition from critics. Hondal’s poetry is included in Javier L. Mora and Ángel Pérez’s anthology Long-Playing Poetry. Cuba: Generación Cero (2017), and is frequently published as well on websites such as Diario de Cuba and Rialta. Hondal serves as an editor for poet Reina María Rodríguez’s Torre de Letras imprint, where he has overseen the publication of a Cuban edition of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s 1937 novel Ferdydurke (2015), among other titles.
Elena Lahr-Vivaz is a writer, translator, and professor. Lahr-Vivaz received her PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds the post of Associate Professor of Spanish at Rutgers University–Newark, where she specializes in Latin American literature and film. Lahr-Vivaz is the author of Writing Islands: Space and Identity in the Transnational Cuban Archipelago (forthcoming, University Press of Florida in 2022) and Mexican Melodrama: Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave (University of Arizona Press, 2016; published in Spanish by Rialta Ediciones, 2019).