Who we write for; who we write from. I came across a photocopied poem taped to the mirror in the restroom of a bar in Tribeca, where C. and I stopped off one late Sunday afternoon years ago, which I later learned was written by Juan Ramón Jiménez. The Spanish, that is; as for the translation, I don’t know for certain, though I think it may be Robert Bly’s.
Yo no soy yo.
Soy e te
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo;
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces, olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que pardona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedara en pie cuando yo muera.
I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see.
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And at other times I forget.
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
The one who will remain standing when I die.
I am sure that the indents will come out all wrong on this, but I am already running behind and will have to make this a fix for another time. Project Gutenberg has Platero Y Yo (Spanish). Read about The Universal Andalusian and Self here.
2 Comments
That’s beautiful.
Sometimes I think I should learn spanish just for the poetry - I’m with Vera, this is really beautiful.
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[...] Which could be taken as a pun, perhaps. The Guardian reports that a Spanish publisher has decided it is time to publish the erotic musings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, which has outraged an order of nuns who’ve asked for his poems to be silenced. Jiménez, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1956, two years before he died, is believed to have become involved with at least three nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Rosary congregation. The three worked at a nursing home run by the order in Madrid, where the young poet spent two years at the beginning of the last century. He later described the period between 1901 and 1903 when, on doctor’s orders, he was cared for by the nuns, as the “happiest of my life”. [...]