Page 23 of Only Lovers in the Building

LITERARY TRANSLATOR BENEDICTO ROMERO RECEIVES MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP

The World Tribune’s Lesly Kennedy speaks with Benedicto Romero about the MacArthur Fellowship and his father’s influence on his work.

This year’s roster of MacArthur Foundation fellowship winners includes thirty-two-year-old Benedicto “Ben” Romero. Born and raised in South Florida, the respected literary translator is the son of the late poet Sabato Romero. Ben distinguished himself by, as he put it, “eliminating the imaginary barrier of language and bridging cultures.” Each so-called Genius Grant comes with an award for $800,000. I started by asking what led him to this line of work.

Romero: It came naturally. Like many children growing up in South Florida, I grew up in a Spanish-speaking household. My grandmother struggled with English. I routinely translated her correspondence, her shows, magazine clippings, coupons . . . At some point, there was no veil between English and Spanish, her world and mine.

Kennedy: Tell us how you came to translate the collection of poems that catapulted Cuban author Juaquin Tomas to literary fame.

Romero: The collection tells a quiet coming-of-age story of two brothers in 1950s Havana. They were first published in the original Spanish by a small press out in Indiana. A year later, they decided to translate the poems into English to widen the audience. That’s when I got the call.

Kennedy: The plan worked because the critics praised Tomas’s literary achievement. He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and you, a PEN/Faulkner award, now the MacArthur Fellowship grant. Let’s talk about early influences. Your father, the poet Sabato Romero, passed away last year. What influence has he had on your work?

Romero: None that I can think of. He’s an artist. I’m a wordsmith, if anything.

Kennedy: Still, you captured the musicality of Tomas’s words beautifully. Your work is extremely precise.

Romero: The author had a point of view. I did not want to dilute it in a torrent of words.

Kennedy: You’re being modest.

Romero: I promise I’m not.

Kennedy: What’s your take on your father’s most famous work, his inaugural poem, “Promise of Dawn”?

Romero: I’d have chosen a better title. [Laughs]. Otherwise, I’ve nothing to add. It stands on its own.

Lily set her phone aside and got out of bed for a glass of water. She played with the words of the interview in her mind, moving them around. What journalist Lesly Kennedy took for modesty she took for caginess. Ben had danced around the questions about his father and his impressive body of work. This morning, by the pool, he’d danced around her questions about his own impressive body of work. No harm, no foul: she’d danced around his questions, too. At this rate, they could join the Alvin Ailey dance company.

He is his father’s son, Roxanna had said. That’s the problem.

Lily was her mother’s daughter, a woman who never left a single stone unturned—not in her garden or anywhere else. A licensed social worker, it was literally her job. She would discover the secrets buried in Ben’s beautiful mind.

Chapter Seven

Ben’s Journal

April 19, Death in Late Spring

April is the cruelest month. —T.S. Eliot

Outside the hospital, spring shows its colors. The parking lot is slick from a sun-shower. The air smells of grass. Birds sing, and one craps on your windshield. A tree dumps pink flowers everywhere. All this life, and he is dead.

Dying alone is a joke, an empty threat, until you watch it play out. If you hadn’t dragged your feet, delayed this visit, you might’ve saved him from this fate, but every story has the ending it deserves.

The first time you visited, you got lost in the hospice ward’s long, dim, ghostly halls. By the time you found his room, he was either asleep or unconscious. The bed was a boat tethered to land by tubes pumping fluids or oxygen. You hated seeing him like that, but you couldn’t look away. Head propped up to ease his breathing; thin and waxy skin, once golden, now a dull brown; sunken eyes, coal-black hair turned ash gray. There was nothing left of the titan who loomed so large over your life, the myth who held so much space in your mind. It was a shock seeing him like this, reduced to nothing, like any abuelito on his last days. How different from that man who, one frigid January morning in Washington, DC, stepped up to the inaugural podium and made history.

That poem is not his best work. The message is generic, expected. A new administration ushers in change, an opportunity for a nation to make whole those shattered by the hammer of injustice. But who are these nameless victims, exactly? And what injustice had they suffered? It was anyone’s guess.

Here, you could show some mercy. It was likely the best he could do. Riddled with disease, as he was at the time, his once-sharp mind was dulled by radiation and chemotherapy and whatever else. No one would know it. With some makeup, a tailored suit, a fake tan, and a hairpiece, he’d fooled them all, including you.

That first visit didn’t last long. You hadn’t made the pilgrimage to pray and weep at his bedside. You left disappointed, itching for a fight.

This time, he isn’t asleep: he’s dead.

The nurse hands you a worn leather box. “For you,” she says.

“What’s in it?” you ask.