We present this work in honor of the poet’s 150th birthday.

 

That I love you, without rival, you knew it
and the Lord knows it; never flirt
the erratic grass to the friendly forest
how your being joined my sad soul

And in my memory your life persists
with the sweet murmur of a song
already the nostalgia of your love mitigates
my mourning that resists oblivion.

Diaphanous spring that does not run out,
you live in me and in my austere aridity
your freshness mixes drop by drop.

You went to my desert the palm tree,
To my bitter skin the seagull,
And you will only die when I die!

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

 

Tequila is a clean flame that clambers up the walls
and shoots over tiled roofs, relief to despair.
Tequila isn’t for sailors
because it blurs the navigational instruments
and dismisses the wind’s tacit orders.
But tequila, on the other hand, enraptures those returning by train
and those driving the train, because it stays faithful
and blind in its loyalty to the rails’ parallel delirium
and to hurried greetings in the stations
where the train pauses to testify to
its inscrutable destination, errant, subject to the inevitable laws.
There are trees under whose shadow it is wonderful to drink it
with the parsimony of those who preach in wind
and other trees where tequila can’t stand the shade
that dims its powers and in whose branches it stirs up
a flower blue as the warnings on bottles of poison.
When tequila waves its fringed, serrated flag,
the battle halts and armies return
the order they intended to impose.
Often two squires accompany it: salt and lime.
But it is always ready to start the conversation
without any more help than its lustrous clarity.
From the start, tequila doesn’t recognize borders.
But there are propitious climates
just as certain hours suggest it, knowing full well: to fix
the time when night arrives at its stores,
in the splendor of an afternoon without obligations,
in the highest pitch of doubt and hesitation.
It is then when tequila offers us its consoling lesson,
its infallible joy, its unreserved indulgence.
Also, there are foods that call for its presence:
those springing from the ground from which it, too, was born.
Inconceivable if they didn’t bond with millenary certainty.
To break that pact would be a grave breach with dogma
prescribed to allay the rough job of living.
If “gin smiles like a dead girl,”
tequila spies on us with the green eyes of a prudent sentry.
Tequila has no history, no anecdote
confirming its birth. It is so from the beginning
because it is the gift of the gods
and, usually, when they promise something they aren’t telling tales.
That is the office of mortals, children of panic and habit.
Such is tequila and so it will be
keeping us company
all the way to the silence from which no one returns.
Praise be, then, until the end of our days
and praise the daily effort toward denying that end.

Translation by Forrest Gander

We present this work in honor of Colombian Independence Day.

 

Death could not beat me.
I battled and lived. The
restless body against the soul,
to the white flight of the day.

In the ruins of Troy I wrote:
“Everything is death or love”
and since then I had no
rest. I said in Rome:

“There are no gods, just time”
and since then I had no
redemption. I silenced myself in Spain,
since the voice of rage defied
forgetfulness with my marrow,
my humors, my blood; and
since then the fire
has not stopped.

May the foreign land
serve as a resting place
for the hero. May fresh grass
sing like a bee of the dust
by his eyelids. I do not surrender:
I want to live in war every day,
as if it were the last one.

My heart battles against the sea.

Translation by Dina Moscovici

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 135th birthday.

 

Simple singer of a great discontent,
Among the shrubs the canopy keeps hidden,
Troubling the foliage with soft lament,
Nibbling myrtle, sour grape pips – wood pigeon!

Sings coo-roo-roo, glimpsing day’s first ascent
And later evening’s brief reflected vision,
Sees from the gúaimaro’s¹ overspreading tent
Silent peace fill the slopes, that tree’s dominion.

Half-open the wings iridescent in the light,
Solitude – poor soul! – saddens its delight,
And it fluffs up its head feathers, a light hood.

To the maternal heartbeat of domains it holds
In its own entrails, it croons to mountains, folds
Them in sleep; light drowns in a dark wood.

Translation by Ranald Barnicot and Felipe Botero Quintana

We present this work in honor of the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death.

 

Blue… blue… blue was the sky.
You aroused the gentle breeze of summer.
The velvet of the prairie had started
to brown where the river formed a pool.

At a distance, the smoke of a chimney,
like the untouched veil of a bride,
rose until it lost itself in the void
in an ondulant and silent flight.

Suddenly you said: “My love is
pure and gentle, somewhat like that river
that rolls yonder, over that far terrain”

and you looked at me, quiet, serene,
with your soul peeking out of your pupil.
And your soul was as blue as the sky.

Translation by José Wan Díaz

We present this work in honor of the 160th anniversary of the poet’s death.

 

Unhappy who seeks in appearance
bliss and ephemeral praise,
and changes his mind with the change
of the versatile public conscience!

The present is your only providence;
yields to the blowing of the wind that throws him
to good without faith and evil without hope;
that in erring with the world is his science.

And happy the independent male
who, free from worldly bondage,
aspires, between pain and sorrow,

to the eternal truth, not to the present one,
knowing that the world and its truths
they are only vanity of vanities!