Translation Trashbin - 29. five Luis Cernuda love poems

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five Luis Cernuda love poems

I. Si el hombre pudiera decir lo que ama

If we could be but allowed to voice what we love,

If we could be but allowed to lift up our love for heaven to behold,

Like a cloud may be within the light of the sky;

If like decaying walls standing in the way,

To blot out the truth, we could be but toppled over,

leaving standing the truth of our love,

The truth of ourselves which cannot

Be spoken of as fame, riches or ambition,

But only love, or rather, yearning.

I could be the one who leads by example;

The one whose words, whose eyes, whose hands,

Proclaim before men the truth long shunned,

The integrity of his rightful love.

Release, I only know the release of being a captive from the one

Whose name I never hear without a feverish chill;

The one for whom this beggarly world is set aside,

The one for whom both day and night are enough for me,

And my temporal body and immaculate soul

Rise upon your temporal body and immaculate soul

Like errant driftwood the flooding tide shakes loose and lifts up

Freely, with the freedom of love,

The only release that exalts me,

The only release in which I die.

Thus, you explain my existence:

Having never known you, I would not live;

Having died without knowing you, I do not perish

Because then I’d never have had the chance to be.

II. Yo fui

I traveled there.

Smoldering column of neck, the moon’s prime springtime,

Shimm’ring sea of gold, eyes grown large.

I reached for what I had in mind;

Reasoning like sluggish sleep must do with the dawn,

With desires he paints in our teenage hearts and days.

I sang out, I ascended high

And I went to the light one day,

Drawn up by the smoldering wick.

Like a blast of wind strong enough

To penetrate and cast out shadows,

I rocked back, into black,

Into the world’s unquenchable self.

I’ve been there.

III. Con tal vehemencia el viento

With such force of arms

Does the wind come off of the sea,

Its elemental sound contages

The tranquility of the night.

It’s only in your bed, alone, you hear

Him adamant on the windowpanes,

Beseeching, moaning, calling for you

As if he has no one else to call his own.

But he is not the one who keeps you awake,

For another powerful element holds you

Locked away in the prison of your body,

And remembers, his is an un-trapped air.

IV. La Vida

It’s like when the sun finally creeps upon

Some shadowy, far corner of earth,

Dispelling its impoverishment

As his light spills over with green laughter.

That’s how your presence comes upon

The shaded dinge of my quiet existence,

To stretch as you exalt it, and to give

Splendor, joy and beauty to my life.

But, as you also dress yourself

In the sun’s raiment and nurture things

All around me, your shadow casts from me

Shades of loneliness, old age and death.

V. He venido para ver semblantes

I’ve come to see the outward face of things

Be as loving as brooms of old switches;

I’ve come to see the façades of shadows

That have been smirking at me from afar.

I’ve come to see rows marking out the soil,

Or standing upright like indifferent men;

I’ve come to see rapacious belongings,

The things here, as sleep-induced and troubled.

I’ve come to see the rich life of the seas

Lay dormant on a small Italian boat;

I’ve come to see openings shut to me

By Findings, Courts, Powers over the privates

Of a glowing comprehension, fractured.

I have come to slowly recognize death

With his funny little butterfly net;

I have slowly come to wait for you too,

My arms deployed a little in the air;

I’ve arrived where we are and don’t know how –

Just one day, my eyes opened, and I’d come.

This is why I wish to hail so many

Nicer aspects with no limiting fear:

Of my dark baby-blue amigos,

Of the variable colors of the days –

The freedom of the color of my eyes –

The young boys so buoyant and light as silk,

Interment stories as dull as their stones,

And Certainty, that insect nestled in

The ever-shifting flywheels of the light.

So, fare thee well, my sweet unseen lovers,

I’m sorry I cannot sleep in your arms;

I seemed only to come here for kisses,

And might again for your lips; stay on guard.

~