Rubén Darío

translated by Danilo López

Leda
 

The swan in the shadows resembles snow;
His beak is amber, a glow of translucent dawn;
The soft dusk so swiftly passes
Its light blushes on candid wings.

Soon after, on the waves of blue hued lake,
After the sunrise has lost all flush,
The wings spread and the arched neck,
The swan is silver, bathed by the sun.

Such it is, when the silken wings inflates,
Olympian bird wounded with love,
Raping Leda on sonorous roiling waters,
Its beak searching her flower of lips.

The beauty exhales naked, defeated
And while her lament goes away with the wind,
From the green forest of thick canopies
Pan’s eyes are watching disturbed.

1892

I’m in pursuit of a form that my style cannot find
Button of thoughts seeking to be the rose,
Announcing itself as a kiss that on my lips comes to be
Like the impossible embrace of Milo’s Venus

Green palms adorn the green pistils
The stars have predicted to me the Goddess’ vision
And on my soul the light rests as the moon’s
Bird rests upon a tranquil lake

And I don’t find but the fugitive word,
The melodic invitation flowing from the flute
And the vessel of dream sailing the space

And under the window of my Sleeping Beauty
The continuous cry of the fountain’s flow
And the great white swan’s neck questioning me.

1900

 Race

Aspergills and swords
Have been precise,
Ones sprinkling the water
The others spilling the wine
Of blood. Like so the centuries
Have nourished the race.

Together they sustain the brood
Of saints and the offspring
Of landlords, with
Those who have the mark of
Being descendants of African slaves,
Or of proud Indians,
Like the great Nicarao, who offered
A bridge of canoes to his chief friend
To cross the lake
Of Managua. That is epic, that is lyric.

Autumn Song in Spring

To Gregorio Martinez Sierra

Youth, divine treasure,
You left me, to never return again!
When I want to cry, I can’t
And sometimes, I cry without wanting it.

Plural has been the light-blue
Story of my heart.
She was a sweet girl on this
World of grief and affliction.

Her gaze was pure as dusk;
Her smile like a flower’s.
Her hair was dark
Made of night and pain.

I was as timid as a child.
She, naturally, was
For my love made of ermine,
Herodias and Salome…

Youth, divine treasure,
You left me, to never return again!
When I want to cry, I can’t
And sometimes, I cry without wanting it.

And more consoling and more
Flattering and expressive,
The other was more sensitive
As I never dreamed to find.

To her continuous kindness
A violent passion added.
In a peplos of pure gauze
A Bacchante was draped…

In her arms she took my reverie
And sang to it as to a newborn…
And she killed it, sad and small,
Without light, without faith…

Youth, divine treasure,
You left me, to never return again!
When I want to cry, I can’t
And sometimes, I cry without wanting it.

Another one decided that my lips
Were the coffer of her passion;
And that she would madly chew
With her teeth, my heart

Fixing on a love of excesses
The aim of her will,
While embrace and kiss became
The synthesis of eternity;

And from our easy flesh
To imagine an eternal garden
Not realizing that spring
And flesh also have an end…

Youth, divine treasure,
You left me, to never return again!
When I want to cry, I can’t
And sometimes, I cry without wanting it.

And the rest! In so many climates
And so many lands are always
If not excuses to my rhymes
Then ghosts in my heart.

In vain I looked for the princess
Who was sad of waiting.
Life is hard. Bitter and heavy.
There is no princess left to sing!

But despite time’s stubbornness
My thirst for love has no end;
With my gray hair, I approach
The roses in the garden…

Youth, divine treasure,
You left me, to never return again!
When I want to cry, I can’t
And sometimes, I cry without wanting it.

1905

To Roosevelt

It is through the Bible’s voice, or Walt Whitman’s
Verse, that I should get to you, Hunter!
Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
With a dash of Washington and four parts of Nemrod!

You are the United States,
You are the future invader
Of innocent America which has indigenous blood,
Which still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks in Spanish.

You are an arrogant and strong exemplar of your race;
You are cultivated, you are skilled; you oppose Tolstoy.
And taming horses or killing tigers,
You are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar.
(You are a professor of energy,
As today’s crazies would say)

You believe that life is fire,
That progress is eruption;
Where you put a bullet
You put the future too.

No.

The United States are potent and great.
When they shudder there is a deep tremor
That runs through the enormous Andean vertebrae.
If you holler, it is like the roar of a lion.
Hugo already told Grant: “The stars are yours”.
(The Argentinean sun almost shines, rising
And the star of Chile ascends…) you are rich.

You add the cult of Hercules to that of Mammon;
And illuminating the way of easy conquests,
Liberty raises her torch in New York.

Yet our America, who had poets
Since the ancient times of Nezahualcotl,
And which has guarded the footprints of the great Bacchus,
And which has learned the Panic alphabet;
Which consulted the stars, and knew Atlantis,
Which name reaches us sounding in Plato,
Which since the most remote days in its life
Feeds on light, and fire, and perfume, and love,
The America of great Moctezuma, the Inca,
The fragrant America of Christopher Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
The America where the noble Cuatemoc said:
“I am not in bed of roses”; that America
Which trembles in hurricanes and lives on Love;
Oh men of Saxon eyes and barbarian soul, lives.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates; and is the sun’s daughter.
Be careful. Spanish America lives!,
A thousand cubs of the Spaniard lion are roaming free.
You would have to be, Roosevelt, God Himself,
The terrible rifleman and the Great Hunter,
To ensnare us in your iron claws.

And, you may have it all, but you lack one thing: God!

1904

Walt Whitman

In his iron country, the great old man lives,
Beautiful as a patriarch, serene as a saint.
He has, in the Olympian wrinkles of his brow
Something that commands and defeats with noble enchantment.

his soul is like a mirror of the infinite;
his tired shoulders deserve a mantle;
and with an harp carved from an ancient oak
his chant sings like a prophet.

A priest, breathing divine breath,
Announcing the future, a better time.
Saying to the eagle: “Fly! And to the sailor: Row!”

And to the robust worker “Toil!”,
So goes the poet his way
With the proud visage of an emperor!

1890

Fatality

To Rene Perez

Blessed be the tree which is almost sensitive
And the stone even more so since it does not feel at all,
For there is no greater pain than the pain of being alive,
and larger distress than conscientious life.

To be and know nothing, to be without certainty,
And the fear of having been and a future terror…
And the sure horror of being dead tomorrow,
And to suffer in life, and in the shadows and for

What we ignore and only suspect,
And the flesh tempting with its fresh vines,
And the grave awaiting with its funeral flowers,
And to not know where we are going to,
Nor where we came from!

1905

© Danilo López