Your Childhood in Menton



                                                 Yes, your childhood: already fable of                                                               fountains.

                                                                                        Jorge Guillen


Yes, your childhood:  already fable of fountains.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Your elusive solitude in hotels
and your pure mask of another sign.
It’s the childhood of the sea and your silence
where wise glass shattered.
It’s your rigid ignorance where my torso
was limited by fire.
Norm of love I gave you, man of Apollo,
cry of the alienated nightingale,
but, pasture in ruins, you grow thin
in brief indecisive dreams.
Thought opposed, yesterday’s light,
indexes and signals of chance.
Your waist of sand without calm
attends only tracks that don’t rise.
But I have to search in corners
your tepid soul without you who isn’t understood,
with the pain of Apollo detained
where I’ve broken the mask you wear.
There, lion, there, fury of the sky,
I will leave you to graze in my cheeks;
there, blue horse of my madness,
pulse of nebula and the minute hand.
I have to search for scorpion rocks
and the dresses of your mother girl,
cry of midnight and cloth torn
that quits the moon of the dead man’s temple.
Yes, your childhood:  already fable of fountains.
Strange soul of my hollow of veins,
I have to search out the small one without roots.
Love of forever, love, love of never!
Oh, yes! I love. Love, love!  Let me be.
Don’t cover my mouth those who look for
ears of corn in Saturn by the snow
or that castrate animals in the sky,
clinic and jungle of anatomy.
Love, love, love. Childhood of the sea.
Your tepid soul without you who isn’t understood.
Love, love, flight of the doe
by the chest without end of its whiteness.
And your childhood, love, and your childhood.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Not you, nor I, nor the air, nor the leaves.
Yes, your childhood: already fable of fountains.


Federico Garcia Lorca

           
                        1910

                 (Intermission)





Those eyes of mine of nineteen-ten
didn’t see the burial of the dead,
nor the fiesta of ash cried over by the dawn,
nor the heart that trembles abandoned like a horse at sea.

Those eyes of mine of nineteen-ten
saw the white wall where the girls urinated,
the snout of the bull, the poisonous mushroom
and the incomprehensible moon that illumined in the corners
dried bits of lemon under the tough blackness of bottles.

Those eyes of mine in the pony’s neck,
in the pierced breast of Santa Rosa sleeping,
in the rooftops of love, with moans and fresh hands,
in a garden where cats were eating frogs.

Attic where old dust brings together statues and moss.
Boxes that keep the silence of devoured crab.
In the land where dream stumbles on its reality.
There my little eyes.

Don’t ask me anything.  I’ve seen that things
when they look for their course encounter its void.
There is a pain of hollows in the air without people
and in my eyes dressed creatures -- without nudity!


Federico Garcia Lorca

              Around the Block



Murdered by the sky.
Amid forms that edge toward the serpent
and forms that search out the crystal,
I will let my hair grow.

With the tree of stumps that doesn’t sing
and the child with the white face of an egg.

With the little animals of broken head
and the tattered water of dry feet.

With everyone who is tired deafmute
and the butterfly drowned in the inkwell.

Stumbling with my face distinct every day.
Murdered by the sky!


Federico Garcia Lorca

                      Office and Accusation




Under multiplications
there’s a drop of duck’s blood;
under divisions
there’s a drop of sailor’s blood;
under sums, a river of tender blood.
A river that comes singing
through the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and is silver, cement or breeze
in the false dawn of New York.
Mountains exist.  I know it.
And eyeglasses for wisdom.
I know it.  But I haven’t come to see the sky.
I’ve come to see the turgid blood,
the blood that carries machines to waterfalls
and the spirit to the cobra’s tongue.
Every day in New York they kill
four million ducks,
five million pigs,
two thousand doves for the pleasure of those dying,
a million cows,
a million lambs
and two million roosters
that leave the skies shattered to bits.

It’s better to cry sharpening the knife
or to kill dogs in an hallucinatory hunt,
than to resist in the dawn
the interminable trains of milk,
the interminable trains of blood
and the trains of roses handcuffed
by merchants of perfume.
The ducks and the doves
and the pigs and the lambs
place their drops of blood
under multiplications,
and the terrible howls of the crushed cows
fill the valley with pain
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.

I denounce all the people
who ignore the other half
the irredeemable half
that raises its mountains of cement
where the hearts of the little
animals beat who forget
and where we all will fall
in the ultimate fiesta of drills.

I spit in your face.
The other half hears me
devouring, urinating, flying in their purity
like children of porters
who carry fragile sticks
to the hollows where
the antennae of insects rust.
It isn’t hell, it’s the street.
It isn’t death.  It’s the fruit market.
There’s a world of broken rivers
and unreachable distances
in the paw of that cat broken by an automobile
and I hear the song of the earthworm
in the heart of many girls.
Rust, ferment, trembling earth.
Earth yourself who swims through the numbers
of the office.
What shall I do?  Command landscapes?
Command loves that later are photographs,
that later are pieces of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, no; I denounce.
I denounce the conspiracy
of these deserted offices
that don’t radiate agony,
that sweep away programs of the jungle
and I offer myself to be eaten by the crushed cows
whose cries fill the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.


Federico Garcia Lorca

                 Theme of Fire and Sea




Only fire and the sea can watch each other
without end.  Not even the sky with its clouds.
Only your face, only the sea and fire.
Flames, waves, and your eyes.

You will be of fire and sea, eyes dark.
You will be of wave and flame, hair black.
You will know the outcome of the bonfire.
You will know the secret of the foam.

Crowned with blue like the wave.
Sharp and astral like the flame.
Only your interminable face.
Like fire and the sea.  Like death.

Eduardo Carranza

             To a Breaker of Horses



                               I



Four elements of war
   form the savage horse.
To break a colt is to command the force
   and the weight and the degree:
It is to knock down the vertical of fire
   and to praise the horizontal of water;
To put a brake on the air,
   two wings in the earth.
Strong breaker who harmonizes and plays
   the horse’s four strings!
(Four sounds in war
   form the savage colt.)
And he who raises a musician’s hands
   and puts them
   over the crate of fury
Can witness Harmony
   recently born
   in a honeycomb of tears.
Because breaking a colt
   is like tuning a guitar.


                                  II


Breaker of horses and friend who places
   no boundaries on friendship,
And man given to silence
   as to a precious wine!
Why will you come to me with the taste
   of ancient days,
Of ancient days open and closed
   like flowers?  

Do you come to reclaim the birth
   of a promised tribute,
   breaker of horses?

(Strings that I gave to the dead rekindle:
They recover in my hand the dangerous
   insomnia of music.)


                           III



Simple like metal, man’s metal,
   with the pure sound
   of a man and of a metal;
Dark and humbled,
   but visible still in the gold
   of an original nobility that lasts
   over your forehead;
Man without science, written
   from head to feet with laws
   and numbers, in the manner
   of faithful clay;
And wise in the degree
   of your faithfulness;
And so you come, friend without boundaries,
   and so we see you in the South:
And you harbor a moderate prudence
   in your kidneys.
And benevolence,
   like a flower of salt, in your glance
   you open for us, breaker.


                      IV

Edified late!
The immense curve of a celestial animal
   gives us the earth:
We are two men and a breaker of horses,
   placed in a musical trade.
Man given to silence as to a precious wine,
   you walk on ahead now:
In your forehead the noble custom of war
   has drawn a sign,
And the wisdom in your words
   unmoved by the wind.


                       V


What dark form trembles and resolves
   in front of us?
What choleric sheaf recovers
   your hand, breaker?
(Four sounds in war
   form the savage colt.)
We are two men and a breaker of horses,
   placed in a musical trade.
And the horse is handsome:  his flashing skin
   like night;
With the pulse of the sea, with the gracious
   turbulence of the sea;
Friend in the origin, and delivered to us
   in the purest day of its origin;
Made of movement, battle,
   and fatigue:  our sign.

The horse is handsome like a wind
   that would make itself visible;
But breaking the wind is more handsome still,
   And the breaker knows it!
And so we see him in the South:  rider
   of river and flame;
Seated in the storm
   of an animal that rises like fire,
   and disperses like living water;
His musical fingers affirmed
   in the sonorous crate
As he puts his attention on Harmony
    that is born of war, flower of war.



                          VI




And so we see him in the South.  And when
   vanquisher and without glory
He had stamped in the hot metal
   of the beast his seal and our arms,
Friend without shores!, we have seen him
   regress to silence,
Dark and humbled,
   but still visible the gold
   of an ancient royalty that doesn’t know
   how to die over his forehead.
His name:  Breaker of Horses, of the South.
Breaker of horses,
   there is no other praise.



Leopoldo Marechal

                         Love Nocturne



He who hears nothing in this pool of shadows
I don’t know how my arms won’t wound
in your breathing I follow the anguish of your crime
and you fall in the net that sleep spreads out for you
You keep the name of your accomplice in your eyes
but I encounter your eyelids tougher than silence
and before sharing it I would kill the pleasure
of submitting you to sleep with eyes closed
I suffer sensing the joy with which your body searches
the body that defeats you more than sleep
and I share the fever of your hands
with my hands of ice
and the trembling of your temples with my lost pulse
and the cast of my muscles with the skin of yours
that shadow corrupts with incurable leprosy
Already I know which is the sex of your mouth
and what guards the avarice of your armpit
and I curse the murmur that inundates the labyrinth of your ear
over the cushion of foam
over the hard page of snow
It is not the blood that flees from me as the arrow
flees from the bow
but the rage circulating through my arteries
yellow with fire in the middle of night
and all the words in the prison of the mouth
and a thirst that in a mirror’s water
quenches its thirst with an identical thirst
Of that night I awaken to this naked
large and cruel night that is no longer night
joined with your body more dead than dead
that isn’t your body now but its hollow
because the absence of your sleep has killed death
and my cold is so great that with a new heat
it opens my eyes where the shadow is harder
and clearer and lighter than light itself
and rekindles in me what hasn’t been
and is an unexpected pain and colder and full of flame
not being but the statue that awakens
in the bedroom of a world in which everything has died.


Xavier Villaurrutia