Thursday, February 7, 2013

"To a cat" by Jorge Luis Borges


No mirrors are quieter
no more furtive the adventurous dawn;
you are, in the moonlight, that panther
who is given to us spotted from afar.
By an indecipherable work of a divine
decree, we seek you in vain;
more remote than the Ganges and West,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
from eternity that is already forgotten,
the love of the apprehensive hand.
You are in another time. You are the owner
of a closed ambience like a dream.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

"Coveted, prohibited" by Jaime Sabines


Coveted, prohibited
close to me, one step away, sorceress.
Offering yourself with your eyes to those who pass,
looking at you, mature, overflowing,
asking for your body to be their tomb.
malignant young, virgin
ignited, closed
I'm watching and loving you,
Your blood in turmoil,
your head spinning and climbing,
your horizontal body on grapes and smoke.
You're perfect, desired.
I love you and your mother when you are together.
She is still beautiful and has
what you do not know.
I can't decide who I prefer
when she fixes your dress
and let you go in search for love.


"Art" by Julián del Casal


When life, as immense burden,
Weighs about the tired spirit
And before the last God drifts burned
The latter grain of fragrant incense;

When we taste, with intense eagerness,
From all bitter poisoned fruit
And boredom, with masked face,
Confronts us on the vast road;

The great soul, lonely and pure
Despised by the petty reality,
Finds in art ignored bliss,

As the halcyon, in cold obscure night,
Seeking asylum in the mossy rock
Inundating the blue sea of silver waves.




Monday, February 4, 2013

"Pupa" by José Asunción Silva


When the girl, still sick
went out one morning
and walked with hesitating steps
the neighboring mountain,
she brought between a bouquet of wild flowers
hidden a chrysalis,
placed in her room, close to
the little white bed...
.................................................................
A few days later, at the moment
when she expired,
and everybody saw her, with their eyes
clouded by tears,
at the time of her death, we felt
the faint sound of wings
and we saw escape, flying away through
the old window
opening onto the garden, a small
golden butterfly...
.................................................................
I looked for the insect's prison,
now empty, with a quick view;
As I saw it, I watched the dead girl's
withered and pale forehead,
and I thought if upon leaving her sad jail
the winged butterfly,
would find light and immense space,
the campestral emanations,
as they leave the prison that holds them
what would their souls find?

Friday, February 1, 2013

"Oblivion" by Idea Vilariño 


When a soft mouth sleeping mouth kisses
as dying then,
sometimes when it reaches beyond the lips
and the eyelids fall full of desire
quietly consenting like the air,
the skin with its silky warmth asks for nights
and the kissed mouth
in its ineffable pleasure asks for nights, too.

Ah, silent nights, of soft dark moons,
long nights, sumptuous, crossed by pigeons
in an air made out of hands, love, given tenderness,
nights like ships...

It is then, in high passion, when the one who kisses
knows ah, too much, without respite, and sees that now
the world becomes a distant miracle
opening deep summers on lips,
abdicated by his conscience,
that he is finally forgotten in a kiss
and a passionate wind undresses his temples,
it is then, kissing, that eyelids descend,
and the air shudders with a hint of life,
and what is not air
also quivers, the ardent beam of the hair,
the velvet of the voice now, and, sometimes,
the illusion populated by suspended deaths.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

"Shadow" by Ricardo Jaimes Freyre 


Oh, how cold is your hand! You laugh?? Why are you laughing?
Your teeth collide. There's something strange in your eyes. Your looks
cut like daggers. It hurts your laughter,
I dread the cold of your stark hand:

Let me escape! The painful night has us already surrounded
with the fright of its shadows ... There is an abyss at my feet.
There is a clamor at the bottom of the abyss. Darkness
gathers on the flanks of the mountain cleft.

Oh, this is not your hand! Why does the cold of this hand
penetrates me right to my bones? Why does a scythe
shines over my forehead ...? Can't you hear that vague beat,
coming smooth and soft, like the echo of distant music?
Oh, how sad is that rhythm that sighs in my ears
and leads my eyes to the bitterness of my tears!
Oh, how sad is that rhythm! Let me mourn. Oh, let me
kneel! Maybe my lips know a prayer.

I am cold. I am afraid. Those shadows moving
are ghosts intertwining at the brink...
Do not drag me... I'm frightened... I fear the abyss.
Let me flee... The flesh is already separating from my bones...

Oh, that spectrum comes towards me with outstretched arms,
absorbing with his eyes my scorched pupils!
My hands are stiff now, my eyes are dry
and the wail of the chasm calls, cold and dreary.
Lets go then. Can you see how the chain of ghosts
pushes detached links to the bottom of the top?
Come on now. Take me. I feel the beat of my veins
adjust to the rhythm of the distant music;
sweet and sad rhythm, swaying in the darkness
harmonizing with my weights the caress of his wings,
like a skiff
swinging in
the waves.
Gently ... Slowly
by the soft
fugitives
movement
going extinct
on the beach.
undulating in the dark,
the ghosts chain in its obscure dance...
Lets enter now the depths of night and horror ...
Oh, the love! Oh, the happiness! Oh, the joy!

Oh, the hope!

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

"This is my love" by Jorge Debravo


This is my love, brothers, this effort
dense, mature, tall,
these fingers agonizing and this
bunch of enthusiasm.

I love you not asleep:
I love you fighting and working,
making deicides axes,
freeing.

I love what is revealed in you from gods
before fear and whip,
what sweats, living and guerrilla
at the bottom of the american bone
Being love, not more than flesh,
fighting, not more than a step,
fire, only a cry,
human, not more than tree. 


*Note: "american" refers to a sentiment of brotherhood between all spanish speaking people in latin america.

Friday, January 25, 2013

"Daughters of the Wind" by Alejandra Pizarnik


They have come.
Invading the blood.
Smelling of feathers,
of needs,
of crying.
But you feed the fear
and the loneliness
as if they were two small animals
lost in the wilderness.

They have come
to burn down the age of the dream.
A farewell is your life.
But you embrace yourself
like the snake mad of motion
only finding itself
because nobody is there.

You weep beneath your tears,
opening the coffer of your desires
and you are richer than the night.

But it feels so lonely
words commit suicide.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

"Drops of dust" by Dina Posada

 

deleted doors
slippery dates
liquid city
emptying into my void

impossible walls
covered
by shady vines

I pull the scab of the years
and reach my father
-closed landscape
book I never understood-
and my mother
-stubborn survivor of tenderness

in words
I populate a station
to abreviate the distance without exit

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

"My Love" by Eugenio Montejo


My love moves in another body on this street
I feel its footsteps under the rain,
walking, dreaming, as in me long ago...
There are echoes of my voice in its whispers,
I can recognize them.
It has the age once was mine,
a lamp that lights up on our encounter.
My love embellished with the sea of hours,
my love on the terrace of a cafe
with a white hibiscus in its hands,
dressed in the fashion of the new millennium.
My love will continue when I'm gone,
with another laughter and with other eyes,
like a flame that leaped between two candles
and stayed lighting up the blue of the soil.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

"I perceive the secret..." by Nezahualcóyotl


I perceive what is secret, what is hidden:
Oh you gentlemen!
So we are, we mortals,
Four by four, men,
We will have to leave,
We will have to die on earth...

No one will become jade,
Nor gold:
We'll be preserved as dust
We all will have to go
There, in the same way.
No one will remain,
Perishing together,
We will go, like that, to his home.

As a painting
We will be erased.
As a flower,
We will dry out
Here on earth.
Like the plumage vesture of the zacuán bird,
From being the beautiful rubber necked bird,
We will fade away
We'll go to his home.

Sadness came along
Turning those who live inside her
Into spins...
Meditate, gentlemen,
Eagles and Tigers,
Even if you were made of jade,
Even if you go beyond,
to the place of the fleshless...
We will have to disappear
No one will stay.

Monday, January 21, 2013

"Farewell" by Gabriel Zelaya


Maybe, when I die,
they will say, he was a poet.
And the world, always beautiful, will shine without awareness.

Maybe you won't remember
who I was, but these anonymous verses I budded
one day will echo in you

Perhaps there will be nothing left
of me, not a word,
nor one of these words I dream today in the morning.

But seen or unseen,
but said or unsaid,
I will be in your shadow, you beautifully alive ones oh!

I will keep following,
I will continue dying,
I will be, not really knowing how, part of this great concert.


Friday, January 18, 2013

"Chronicle of an ordinary pedestrian" by Harold Alva Viale


He lit the night
The route of turned off pedestrians between traffic
Shaken like a reflection multiplied in smell
The fury of an arrow stopped on his tongue
There is nobody
Only the shadow of his nightmares
Only the sadness of all that he appoints
As a high relief of terror
At the door of his palms
The certainty of death
Its skeleton
Approaching as the shot of God
Approaching like a spittle
On the walls of his own skull
The loneliness of showcases
The rancor of history
On the grim runway of his paces
Your street in his pupils
Your fear
There is nobody
Only this city
Only the cables connected like veins
In the fauces of anonymous suiciders
His breath on windows
His eyelids consumed by this surface
Of beings that do not assimilate
The sword in the throat
The tusk in the throat
The bullet in the throat.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

"Last Toast" by Nicanor Parra


Whether we like it or not
we have only three alternatives:
yesterday, today and tomorrow.

And not even three
because as the philosopher says
yesterday is yesterday
ours only in memories:
once the rose petals are plucked
it can not give us another petal.

The cards to play
are only two:
today and tomorrow.

And not even two
because it is a well established fact
the present does not exist
but insofar as that it is passed
and it has passed...
as youthfulness.

In short
we are left with only tomorrow:
I raise my glass
for that day that never comes
but which is all
of what you actually dispose.

Friday, January 11, 2013

"In Memoriam" by Lourdes Espínola


Albert Camus


Meursault with the sun in his eyes,
and humanity.
Confrontation,
dichotomy
everything from the prism faraway:
suicide and the remainder.
Impossibility,
indifference,
mutilation of fears, guilt, dreams:
rite
daily and precise.
The same ending, but not beyond,
and the day so radiant.

And again I can feel alive
the sleeping nerves
killed by age-old hands.
When will men learn
not to...? The flayed heart
and the waiting.

When
the marked date?
To sink into the mature
fresh knot of your mouth
and be born under
delayed tenderness.

"Nocturne" by Rubén Darío


to Mariano de Cavia

You, who auscultate the heart of the night,
who have heard in your persistent insomnia
the closing of a door, the sound of a distant car,
a vague echo, a slight noise ...

In moments of mysterious silence,
when from their prison the forgotten arise,
at the time of the dead, in the hour of rest,
you will know how to read these verses impregnated with bitterness...

I pour on them my pain as in a glass
of distant memories and dire misfortunes,
and the dismal nostalgia of my soul, drunk with flowers,
and the grief of my heart, sad with feasts.

And the regret of not being what I would have been,
the loss of the kingdom that was in me,
for a moment the thought I could not have been born,
And the dream my life is, since I came into being!

All this comes amid the deep silence
when night enfolds the earthly illusion,
and I feel like an echo of the heart of the world
penetrating and touching my own heart.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

"If my hands could pluck" by Federico García Lorca 

 

I pronounce your name
on dark nights,
when the stars come
to drink on the moon
and the branches of
hidden fronds sleep.
And I feel hollow
of passion and music.
Mad clock singing
dead old hours.

I pronounce your name,
on this dark night,
and your name sounds
more distant than ever.
Far more than all the stars
and more sorrowful than the gentle rain.

Will I ever love you as I did
then? What is my heart
guilty of?
If the fog is gone,
What other passion awaits me?
Will it be quiet and pure?
If only my fingers could
pluck the moon!


*Translator's note: 
I used "pluck" to translate 'deshojar', which means to take off the petals or leaves of a flower

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

"No abandonment" by Julia de Burgos


The darkness died in my eyes,
since I found your heart
on the window of my ailing face.

Oh bird of love,
trilling deep, as a whole and lone bugler
in the voice of my chest!
There is no abandonment ...
nor will there be ever fear on my smile.

Oh bird of love,
swimming heaven in my sadness!
Beyond your eyes
my twilights dream of bathing in your lights ...

Is the mystery blue?

Leaning out I contemplate my rescue,
which brings me back to life on your gleam ...


“Deity” by Amado Nervo


As the spark sleeps in the pebble
and the statue in the mud,
divinity sleeps in you.
Only in a constant and severe pain
by colliding, from the inert stone springs the
lightning of the deity.
Do not complain, therefore, of destination,
for what within you is divine
arises only thanks to fate.
Endure it, if possible, smiling,
the artist carves life through
the tough clashing of the chisel.

What do you care about bad times,
if every hour puts a pen more beautiful
on your nascent wings?
You will see the condor in full height,
You will see the finished sculpture,
you'll see, soul, you'll see...

Monday, January 7, 2013

"Tactic and strategy" by Mario Benedetti


My tactic is
to look at you
to learn as you are
to love you as you are
My tactic is
to talk to you
and listen to you
building with words
an indestructible bridge
My tactic is
to stay in your memory
I do not know how
nor do I know
under what pretext
but to stay in you
My tactic is
to be frank
and to know you are honest
we won't sell each other
simulations
so, between the two
there will be no curtain
nor chasms.
However
my strategy is
deeper and more
simple
my strategy is
that one day
I do not know how
nor under
what pretext
you will finally
need me.

Friday, January 4, 2013

"When everbody leaves" by Jorge Teillier

 

When everyone goes to other planets
I'll stay in the abandoned city
drinking a last glass of beer
then going back to the town I always return to
like the drunk to the tavern
and the child to ride
on a broken rocker.
There I will have nothing to do,
but to put fireflies into my pockets
or walk on the banks of rusty rails
or sit on the gnawed counter of a store
so I can talk to former classmates.

As a spider walks
the same threads of its web,
I will leisurely
walk through the streets
invaded by weeds,
watching the pigeon lofts
breaking down,
up to my house
where I will lock myself in, listening
albums of a singer of 1930
without never caring to look
the infinite paths
set by the rockets in space.


"Sand castles" by Gioconda Belli

 

Why didn’t you say you were building
that sandcastle?

It would have been so lovely
to enter through its little door
wander the salty corridors
waiting on shell paintings,
speaking to you from the balcony
with the mouth full of white and transparent foam
like my words,
these light words I say to you,
with no more than the weight
of the air between my teeth.

It is so beautiful to contemplate the sea.

The sea would have been so lovely
from our sand castle
licking time
with the vast and deep
tenderness of water,
rambling about the stories they told us
when, as children, we were a single pore
open to nature.

Now the water took your sandcastle
at high tide.

It carried away the towers,
the pits,
the little door we would have crossed
at low tide,
when reality is afar
and there are sand castles
on the beach.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

"Reality and Desire" by Olga Orozco


-To Luis Cernuda-

Reality, yes, reality,
that lightning of the invisible
revealing in us the loneliness of God.

It is this heaven, fleeing.
It is this territory adorned by bubbles of death.
It is this long table drifting away
where the diners persist, dressed by the prestige of not being present.

To each his cup
to measure the wine that ends when thirst begins.
To each his plate
to enclose the hunger, extinguished without being ever satiated.
And for every two, division of bread:
the miracle reversed, communion only in the impossible.
And in the middle of love,
between one body and the other, the fall,
something that resembles the grim beat of wings returning from
[eternity,
to the pulse of an underground goodbye..

Reality, yes, reality:
a closed seal on all doors of desire.


"Bolero" by Julio Cortázar


How vain is it to imagine
I could give you all, love and joy,
itineraries, music, toys.
It is like that, certainly:
everything I have, I give it to you, true,
but everything I have is not enough for you
as everything you have
is not enough for me.


So we will never be
the perfect match, the postcard,
if we are unable to accept

solely in arithmetic
two comes from one plus one.

 

Laying around, a piece of paper
that only says:

You were always my mirror,
What I mean is, I had to look at you to see me.

And this fragment:


The slow machine of heartbreak

the gears of reflux
bodies leaving the pillows,

the sheets, the kisses

and standing before the mirror questioning

each to himself
no longer facing each other
no longer naked for the other
I no longer love you,
my love.