En la grieta acecha (Spanish Edition)

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From Mexico then, and the bean-and-potato tortilla meals of our Spanish orphanage, I went to the pastoral hills and lawns of Middlebury and the eloquent, expansive princes of contemporary Spanish poetry. That summer in Vermont the American diaspora of Spanish literature had congregated. These were my years of first acquaintance and immersion in that extraordinary rebirth of poetry in Spain in our centuryand in its oral history by the Spanish poets of exile. Each evening Jaime's father, Pedro Salinas, remembered, as he did in his books, the poets of his generation.

I recorded his memories in a notebook. In Greece in , where I was then teaching, Louis MacNeice talked about Machado in Barcelonaa tired, disheartened, glorious man chain-smoking, the ashes falling much of the time on his black suit. I went to Soria in and was still able to speak to a gentleman who had attended Machado's wedding there in ; and in Baeza I was given a now often-reproduced picture of Antonio Machado sitting with his fellow teachers at the instituto, where he is grave and distinguished in part by the dust, rather than shine, on his shoes.

In I drove from Madrid to Segovia with the poet Francisco Brines, and we spent a fine morning and afternoon with Machado's former landlady at the house where he had lived from to Machado's rooming house, on the Street of Abandoned Children, overlooks a little church where much of the dismembered body of Saint John of the Cross lies buried. The landlady told us of Machado's habit of writing through the night, sitting at a small table with a charcoal brazier under it, the warmth held in by a blanket drooping down from the table over his knees and down to the floor.

There he would sit, writing draft after draft of new poems, filling the wastepaper basket, and blackening the wood floor with his cigarette ashes. Later in the morning after he was up or gone to school, his housekeeper, cook, and landlady would dutifully empty the basket and throw out all the tossedaway poems. Although his protector could not read or write, she spoke Spanish, as Brines remarked, with the dignity of an empress. She regretted not only throwing out the poems but even rubbing the burn marks off the floor, which she said she did for years and would not have done had she known that her house was to become a national museum.

Machado's handsome, humpbacked landlady had her own wit and profundity that came out in a torrent of anecdotes. The following year, , I spent many hours in Madrid with Luis Rosales in whose house Lorca was hiding when the paramilitary thugs came in and took him away. His recollections have been essential in piecing together those last awful days in Granada. In the part on Lorca, I note the few differences of memory that distinguish what I then recorded and what Ian Gibson did some years later.

She was in another town that Sunday, but I did spend some hours with Miguel's brother-in-law. He had been imprisoned with Miguel in Alicante, smuggled his last writings recorded on toilet paper out of the prison, and carried the poet's tubercular corpse out of the hospital section to its burial. As for Jorge Luis Borges, the friendship was long and at least for me, crucial in my life. Then it was on other continents. He came to Indiana University in and in spent a month in Bloomington. We traveled together in Argentina and America. My last conversation with Borges, the year before he died, was in Beijing.

I had arranged for him to visit China I was there for a year teaching , but at the last moment his doctor would not let him make the trip. Our telephone words between Beijing and Buenos Aires were like any other wonderful conversation with Borges, except that in this last one, he talked about Lao-tzu, the Tao, and The Dream of the Red Chamber.

Of course he knew the Chinese classics and wanted to come to China. How could he not want to come to China? Did I think he was mad? I was a lucky person to have known Borges. He often talked about his habit, by which he meant his persistence in living his literary habits, and his destiny, which was to follow his obsession with the word. He granted me both.

Almost half the poems in the last two decades of Borges's life were sonnets, in part because once blindness took over, he could compose and keep them in his head until he found a scribe to dictate them to. Returning now from the poets to their work, I wish to say a few words more on the sonnet form. Not only people, events, and the reading and study of Spanish poetry have been the preparation for this book, but the sonnet itself has been preparing its own way. It keeps waking up in the work of Borges and Dylan Thomas, in Lorca and Richard Wilbur, in Neruda and David Wojahn, when many might have thought that Baudelaire and Wordsworth, or possibly Yeats, had written the last ones we would read as vibrant, original poetry.

The older sonnets, lost or neglected, also have a waylike dead writersof resurfacing. So we have John Donne's seventeenth-century "Holy Sonnets" coming up to help form what Sonia Raiziss has called "the metaphysical passion" in contemporary American poetry; there are Gerard Manley Hopkins's unpublished nineteenth-century "Terrible Sonnets," which like Melville's forgotten Billy Budd manuscript entered the canon in our time. This collection of sonnets, with its informational remarks and meditations on the poets and their poetry, is offered with the hope of making six poets who wrote in Spanish over the past four centuries a part of our reading experience in English today.

The persons and institutions listed below kindly granted permission to reprint the following: After working its way through the Sicilian court, the sonnet became a favored form of Dante and Petrarch. The popular advent of the sonnet in Spain coincided with a revolution in Spanish poetry in the early sixteenth century. Thereafter, the Renaissance in Western Europe was coincidental with the flourishing sonnet. In England the sonnet was transformed. Introduced in its Italian form, Edmund Spenserwho thought himself of an earlier centuryaltered the Petrarchan rhyme pattern of abba abba cdecde to abab bcbc cdcd ee, and William Shakespearewho was the agewrote sonnets in abab cdcd efef gg.

So the Spanish sonnet, a literary vagabond in courtly dress, began in the court of the Sicilian Frederic II, went up to Rome and Florence, wandered west to Spain, north again to England, and finally, seven centuries after its Italian birth, with its picaresque wits and form intact, dropped down just above the Antarctic Circle to appear in the poems of the Argentine Anglophile, Borges.

Spanish poetry of the Renaissance and baroque age The Renaissance began in Spain during the period of the Catholic Kings. In , Isabela I ascended the throne of Castile. Castilian became the national language. Poetry in Galician-Portuguese and Catalan disappeared and was not heard again until the nineteenth century when it emerged as the reborn voice of regional nationalism.

Castilian became, moreover, a relatively standardized literary vehicle during this period as a result of two important events: In the same year, , the Spanish Jews who had not converted to Christianity Ithose Jews who had converted were called conversos were driven from their ancient homes into exile, the last Islamic kingdom of Granada fell before the armies of the Catholic Kings, and Columbus set sail for a new empire. The Spanish Inquisition and its flames had been established in to check on the sincerity of the conversos. While through conquest and national and cultural unification Spain was increasing hegemony and wealth, its very "purification" of religion and people within the country led to an ultimate poverty of cultural isolation and economic backwardness.

The expulsion in of those Jews from Granada who did not immediately become New Christians and in of the large Moorish population the moriscos or forced Islamic converts to Christianity, whose last rebellion took place in the Alpujarras mountains south of Granada turned the large, cosmopolitan city of Granada for the next four hundred years into a small, provincial city, a shabby relic of itself.

Yet in the dynamics of history the currents never all flow one way and by the time of Carlos V, Holy Roman Emperor , Spain had become the dominant power in the world and was at the height of its own political and cultural renaissance. In the arts it had entered the Siglo de oro, which means "golden age" or, literally and symptomatically, the "century of gold. In very general terms we may associate the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega with the Italians and that of the Spanish mystics with the philosophical seriousness of the north.

But this is at best a simplification, for certain philosophical tendencies, such as Neoplatonism, were rooted in both Italy and Flanders and affected Garcilaso as well as Juan de la Cruz. Nevertheless, they turned to Italy for their prosody and wrote their major poems in the lira, an Italian poetic form borrowed from Bernardo Tasso. The revolution in Spanish poetry that gave Spain the sonnet can be traced to a particular event in , which has the quality of a fairy tale.

Unquestionably a comparable change would have taken place without this stimulus, but the incident did occur, is documented, and deserves special attention. The Venetian was himself a fine example of a Renaissance gentleman: Accordingly, he composed canzoni, ottava rima, and sonetos sonnets. However, his intimate friend, Garcilaso de la Vega , who had a marvelous talent for words, tried the new forms and achieved a perfect harmony of form and idea.

He was not published in his lifetime. In that volume appeared the first printed sonnets written in the Spanish language. By sixteen more editions had appeared. Garcilaso's poetry was the foundation of the Italian Renaissance in Spain. His sonnets and his eclogues gave Spanish poetry the ideals of Petrarchan love and Virgilian pastoral imagery. Few poets in any language have mastered a poetic diction so serenely musical and natural. Pervading his poems is a painfully pure sensitivity to beauty and to love.

His world is pastoral, often mythological, but such artifice does not diminish the real grief and passions beneath the surface. In contrast to the Middle Ages when few echoes of pagan antiquity are heard, Garcilaso raised an angelic voice in a forest cathedral peopled only by mythical figures. Primarily concerned with love, he imitated, modeled, emulated, and disguised his work on immediate Italian precursors. Garcilaso's Laura was called Elisa, and in the manner of Petrarch, the poet placed her in the classical setting of Virgilian eclogue.

He also has an affinity with Theokritos, the first of the Greco-Roman pastoral poets, and his nature imagery recalls scenes from the Idylls. Both nature and love are imbued with beauty and melancholy, which, as in a dream, are perfectbut one awakes to find the rose withered in the cold wind. The carpe diem theme is universal, and no less tragic for its artifice. It fades, and when one looks again the rose is briar. Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets is heard in Garcilaso's famous sonnet While there is still the color of the rose and lily in your face, and your bright gaze in its sincerity can set ablaze a heart, and yet control the flame it shows; and while the vivid flying wind still blows and tangles up and knots the golden maze of your soft hairhanging in a white haze about your slender white neck and dark clothes, consume the sweet fruits of your happy spring before the sullen blast of time can chill the lovely hilltop in a glaze of ice.

The rose will wither in the snowy wind and cunning age will alter all at will, for time can be controlled by no device. His world is pure, yet the emotion, however distilled and dictated by convention, is genuine. He is a young man, apparently endowed with all good thingshandsome appearance, position, love, poetry; but his poems speak constantly of the frustration of all things, the cruelty of time, the slow poison that is life itself. In Garcilaso the beauty of grief was transformed into the perfection of art. The new poetry was not accepted immediately by everyone, and there was an angry split and rivalry between Italianists and traditionalists.

The traditionalists satirized the Garcilaso school for their self-pitying sorrows and utter lack of humor, their foreign origin, their distance from the common people and popular anonymous song and verse. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the conflict between traditionalists and Italianists, between those who wrote 1. All translations carry a book reference except for unpublished versions done by myself for the Introduction; sonnets or parts of sonnets that appear later in the translation sections also do not have a book reference.

The agon was gone because both sides triumphed. We find a splendid use of both the formal and popular modes in the same authors, a phenomenon unique to literature in Spanish. So Machado and Lorca wrote popular songs and ballads as well as sonnets, and Borges wrote his sonnets as well as his lyrics for the milonga, a fast version of the tango, in his case, documenting the lives of lowlife heroes and outlaws. An interlude of mystical elsewhereness The second half of the sixteenth century saw the end of imperial growth in Europe and the discovery of new lands in the Americas.

Conquistadores and colonists went to the New World and sent back tomatoes, maize, chocolate, tobacco, and golda meager and unhealthy compensation for the economic work force of Jews and Arabs that had been expelled. The diverse intellectual currents from northern and southern Europe, which had nourished Spain under Carlos V in the first half of the century, were now less vigorous. With all his military ventures against the Turks, French, and Protestants, Carlos emptied the Spanish treasury and filled it with debit notes to German and Genovese bankers.

Spain was bankrupt by the time Carlos retired to a small palace by the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura. He chose an almost magically wooded part of Spain, and the buildings today remain austerely elegant, but as the name Extremadura suggests, the emperor retired to a region at furthest remove from his Flemish origins. Under Felipe II , although the foreign debts grew, Spain drew into herself, into the new national isolation that was to deepen during the next three centuries.

The withdrawal is reflected in the brief interlude of mystical otherness by its meditative poets. But outside the monastery and its writer-saints, by the seventeeth century the nation was well into political and economic decline. Yet national power and the arts need not obey the same clock. While the nation faltered in corruption and debt and its European empire withered under three Felipes, the arts in Spain prospered. It was the baroque age, that turbulent period in Spain of violent contrasts and cultural warfare.

There was, however, that interlude between Renaissance belief and the brilliance, energy, and cynicism of baroque decadence: Theirs was a spiritual escape into meditation, the night of aridity, illuminative vision, ecstatic flights, and transcendental union.

Santa Teresa's parents, from Toledo, actually converted back to Judaism before because the slaughter and drowning of conversos in the Tagus River made it less dangerous to be a Jew than a converso. He translated three versions of the biblical Song of Songs shir hashirim into Spanish directly from Hebrew, as well as Proverbs and Job, and also wrote elaborate commentaries on the Hebrew text.

He was jailed by the Inquisition for nearly five years in Valladolid, accused of "Judaizing. After a conversation between Borges and myself on Whitman and Poe included as part ten of Borges at Eighty: The opposition to translating the Bible into a popularly comprehensible vernacular is particularly ironic since the approved Vulgata is Latin for "vernacular," referring to the quality of everyday vernacular Latin in Jerome's Latin Bible.

Here their envy and lies locked me behind the gate, yet glad the humble state of him withdrawn and wise, far from the evil world, in this delightful field, spending his life alone, with modest room and board, with God his sole reward and jealousies unknown. Though San Juan was imprisoned for only nine months in a monastery cell in Toledo, and by a competing order of the Carmelites over the serious matter of worldly wealth or poverty, of shoes versus bare feet ultimately resolved by the adoption of sandals , he probably wrote the most important poem of his life, if not of Spanish literature, "La noche oscura del alma" The dark night of the soul , while in his prison cell.

The poem, written in the voice of a woman, traces an escape from the cell to a rendezvous with the lover with whom she sleeps, an allegory for the soul's escape from the prison of worldly senses to mystical immersion in God. In the mystical process, he says in his Commentaries, in order to obtain spiritual union with God one must pass through three stages: His "simile," to use his word, for the union of soul with God is the climax of human sexual love.

In this he follows the mysticism of Hebrew and Arabic poets before him. The mystical experience is ineffable, like the experience of gazing directly at the sun, as Plato explains in the Allegory of the Cave. San Juan's poem works on the surface level of erotic narrationwhether or not one wishes to read into his Song of Songs lexicon the mystical dimension that has been traditionally imposed on the biblical sequence of songs: Blackly free from light, disguised and down a secret way, O happy gambling flight! On that happy nightin secret; no one saw me through the dark and I saw nothing then, no other light to mark the way but fire pounding my heart.

That flaming guided me more firmly than the noonday sun, and waiting there was he I knew so well, who shone where nobody appeared to come. O night that was my guide! O night more friendly than the dawn! O tender night that tied love and the loved one, loved one in the lover fused as one! On my flowering breasts which I had saved for him alone, he slept and I caressed and fondled him with love, and cedars fanned the air above.

Wind from the castle wall while my fingers played in his hair: I stayed, forgot my being, and on my love I leaned my face. I left my being, leaving my cares to fade among the lilies far away. John of the Cross 39 The two Spanish mystical poets wrote no sonnetsor none that have come down to us.

Vetusta Morla:La Grieta Lyrics

Fray Luis's Neoplatonism was directed toward a celestial God, not toward a remote lady; and imbued as he was with both Greco-Latin and Hebraic-Christian traditions, he managed to reconcile the formal perfection and concision of Horace and Virgil with a soaring personal mysticism. Like the English meditative poets, he moved tranquilly through an inner universe. Music was his wayof Pythagoras, mathematician-philosopher, and Francisco Salinas, his blind organist friend in Salamanca: The air becomes serene and robed in beauty and an unknown light, Salinas, when the unseen deep music soars in flight, governed by your hand that is wise and right.

As San Juan chose the allegory of human love, Fray Luis moved into the geometry of the night heavens to seek God in the sounding harmony of its celestial bodies. The categories were of course not that clear and each poet strays into the other camp, but there is validity to the general distinctions.

While in the early Renaissance the ideals of clarity and equilibrium prevailed in poetry as in the visual arts, in the baroque period geometrically simple planes were broken up into intricate, embellished masses. Imitation of nature was replaced by artifice. In addition they peppered their verse with exotic geographies and mythological allusions.

Nothing About Me

Many of their poems are metric word games that can be deciphered only by a prose paraphrase. More often than not the prose paraphrase is of little circumstance. As in the case of many of Pound's Cantos, the inscrutable meaning is not of great import and in Pound's political and economic diatribes only of negative import. In fiction the same holds true of the least-read masterpiece of our century, Finnegan's Wake. The message is the beauty of the language, the extravagant images, the colorful and audacious diction, which in its time extended both the musical and linguistic possibilities of the Spanish language.

It is poetry of a beauty related only to art and to literature and its mythologies; it is occasionally poetry of the grotesque. There are no verses that will get the author into prison. His cold metals and liquids and colors come through in his well-known sonnet beginning "O bright honor of the liquid element. O bright honor of the liquid element, fresh tiny brook of luminescent silver, across the fields of grass your sloping water slowly and gracefully makes its descent!

When Eros looks at you, painting a tableau of her for whom I freeze or turn to flame, he shows the snow and scarlet of her face in the suave peaceful gesture of your flow. Besides the traditional reasons for marginalizing Quevedo as a poethis satires were too violent, his conceptual darknesses too dark, his inventive, neologistic tongue and shrewd ear unappreciated by limited criticsEmilia Navarro de Kelley has suggested another fascinating reason for Quevedo's lower status earlier in the century: In the case of Quevedo, the advance [of his reputation] has been slower and more thorny, which is easy to understand for several reasons.

It was the love and metaphysical poet, the religious and tormented one, who remained almost completely ignored or, at least, relegated to a secondary place. Kelley 9 In other words his very reputation as a stylist and author of two prose masterpieces detracted critics from his originality as a poet. Quevedo was too powerful and grave for that youthful renaissance in Spanish literature.

The center of the violent opposition was the conceptista Francisco de Quevedo. He was the Parnassian and symbolist Verlaine of his time, with much greater range, strength, and fantasy, utterly devoid of poesy and self-pitying sentimentality. But the analogy of the art for art's sake "ivory tower" holds. Objects are depicted not directly but by complex analogy, created in perfection, as arabesque forms. Hence a bird is "a flying zither. Marvell's gallows humor is relentless: And time and time again, there is a crossover of means and tone.

But the main lines of difference and combat remain clear. Quevedo fulminates against his rival, whom he mocks as a Jew he wasn't , just as in other insult and burlesque poems he cruelly and brutally ridicules lying priests, fornicating monks, murderous doctors, and torturer dentists or shits on the emblem of the royal king and mocks his aids.

A whore is any man who trusts a whore. A whore is one who hungers juicily for whores. Whorish the cash he pays to score and guarantee their whorish company. Whorish the taste, whorish the happiness of moments with a whore. And as for shady illusions, whores are those who won't confess that you are also a grand whore, my lady.

The term was originally coined to describe the playwright and lyric and epic poet Lope de Vega because of Lope's extravagantly enormous production. Quevedo was also immensely prolific and versatile but with the major difference of uniform quality. Borrowing, alluding, inventingas the most original of authors have doneQuevedo construes his own literary genre.

As a poet Quevedo is a giant figure of the European seventeenth century. Movingly stoic, profoundly metaphysical, exquisitely amorous or obscenely erotic, his work is at times morosely and harshly nihilistic, and no sooner said, it is hilariously and cruelly burlesque. Like Swift, Dostoyevski, and Kafka, he is one of the tormented spirits and visionaries of world literature and also one of the funniest writers ever to pick up a sharp, merciless pen. Jorge Luis Borges, calling him "the first artificer of Spanish letters," wrote that "like Joyce, like Goethe, like Shakespeare, like Dante, Francisco de Quevedo is like no other writer and is more than a man; he is an extensive and complex literature" ''Quevedo" Francisco de Quevedo I am a man well born in the provinces.

Abundance and years I always deal with in such a way that afterwards the abundance is greater, the years less. I have been bad, along many roads, and now having left off being bad I am not good, since I have given up the badness of the tired man, and not of the repentant. Today, around the corner are the houses of Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Francisco was brought up at court, and all his life he had a clear vision of the palace's brilliance, gaiety, conspiracy, and corruption. Historians are in accord that by the time of his king, Felipe III, who came to the throne at the age of twenty in , there was spectacular poverty throughout the land while moneys at the top went to the monarch's high-pensioned favorites and to luxurious embellishment for palace ceremonies.

Despite Olivares's attempts to make reforms, Spain declined, the European empire fell apart, the treasury was a record of debts, and the good offices of the government and Church were a catalogue of greed and abuse. The national plight was not absent from Quevedo's writing. Little is recorded of Quevedo's childhood. We do know that his legs were deformed, and he was very myopic as a result of which in later life he wore pince-nez eyeglasses in Spanish quevedos.

In portraits the poet was painted with metal-rimmed glasses set on his nose. As a young man he was also an expert swordsman and in confusing paradox, something of a gallant. Then he went to Valladolid for theology. Presumably as a bit of proud modesty about his own mistreatment of the more difficult tongues, he is said to have commented, "If the languages weren't dead one would have to kill them.

By his satiric poems were bringing a precocious and prolific poet early fame. His early reputation as a poet, including "Poderoso caballero es Don Dinero" A powerful gentleman is Don Money , was enhanced when eighteen of his poems were included in Pedro de Espinosa's anthology, Flores de poetas ilustres In this same year part one of Don Quijote was published. Cervantes's magnanimous epic of world literature, with its Whitmanian vastness, changed Spanish and world letters.

The insolently stubborn knight of the imagination was pure creative lunacy.

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Quevedo's rogue-hero Pablos, in the tradition of Lazarillo de Tormes, is the obverse mirror of Quijote's nobility. Poet and diplomat, glory and troubles When a year later in Felipe III moved his court from its brief stay in Valladolid back to Madrid, Quevedo followed. The author was already amazingly productive. And in the literary capital he became the friend of writers and attended their tertulias. Already from Valladolid, Quevedo had corresponded in Greek and Latin with the Belgian humanist Justus Lipsius, who in turn praised his erudition.

He was also on good terms with important people at the court. There was said to be a feud between the two gentleman that lasted for years, carried out by mutual lampoons about each other. After Francisco de Quevedo was also entangled for two decades in disputes concerning the estate at Torre de Juan Abad near Villanueva de los Infantes , which he had inherited, along with village property, from his mother. The legal battles obliged him to keep up his ties with this pastoral setting by way of extended residences there.

It became a refuge, reflected in the poems, as it was later to be the site of his first imprisonment when his patron and friend, the duke of Osuna, fell from power and was thrown into prison to die there. Quevedo's diplomatic career began in earnest when Osuna invited him to Italy to be his aid.

Quevedo became the duke's advisor, confidant, and agent. In addition to diplomatic tasks, the poet had countless amorous adventures. Dangerous ones, his biographers say. Quevedo was not separated from his worlds. He loved his books, carried them with him in his pockets like modern paperbacks, and spent his spare hours punishing his already myopic eyes with voluminously wide reading. But just as he was a bookworm, he was both streetwise and a lover of his refuge in nature. In a period where rhetoric, convention, and linguistic complexity might replace the warm and cold visible terrains, he was there.

In all ways, all places, he went to the fields. He went to Nice, Genoa, and Milan on secret assignments. One major mission occurred in the autumn of The duke sent his poet-friend to Madrid to deliver , ducats of Sicilian tax funds to the king. He also had the sensitive mission of convincing the king's advisors to make Osuna the viceroy of Naples.

In his letters to the duke, Quevedo described the corrupt ministers of the court and how he distributed bribes shrewdly to gain the appointment. On the way he had an audience with Pope Paul V in Rome. It has been assumed that his mission before the pope was to seek the papal assistance for Osuna's plan to destroy the power of the city-state of Venice and bring it under Spanish hegemony. When the poet reached Madrid he was himself treated like a viceroy.

For all his activities for the crown, the king presented him with the cloak of the Order of Santiago, making him a member and providing him with a regular yearly stipend. As for what happened next, there are several versions of a legend that has been repeated in many ordinary histories and biographies.

The most colorful one of all is that Quevedo himself went to Venice disguised as a beggar in order to carry messages to the participants. One day in , there was a dramatic spectacle of many foreigners displayed hanging in the Plaza of San Marco. Some constables found Quevedo and wanted to kill him, but he talked them out of it, confusing them by speaking in perfect Venetian dialect. And the next day the city burned Quevedo in effigy. All these constantly repeated tales are false. Quevedo was in Spain, not Italy, when the failed revolt took place. Had he been there, however remarkable his language talents, the poet could not have picked up the Venetian dialect without a very long stay in the city.

The king was not pleased with Osuna's failure, embarrassing as it was and hard to explain to his Italian subjects. Although Quevedo tried to defend him in Madridand the poet too had lost eminencehe was not able to do so. Osuna lost his viceroyalty and was thrown into prison where he died in After six months he was banished to his estate at Torre de Juan Abad, on an extended leave of absence from the city and public life, very beneficial to his literary pen.

I won't keep quiet though you move your finger, now touching your mouth or now your forehead; you counsel silence or you threaten fear. Will one always regret what one says? Or will no one ever say what one feels? The next years were filled with writing and publication. Not only did he accompany the king on a tour of Andalusia, but Quevedo hosted the king at his estate at Torre de Juan Abad.

In he became secretary to the king, an honorary office. One of the controversies of the day was whether Santa Teresa, canonized in , should share the patronage of Spain with Santiago. Santiago, one of the twelve Apostles and perhaps brother of Jesus, supposedly lay buried in a tomb in a monastery in Santiago de Compostela.

During the battle of Clavijo in the ninth century against the Moors, Santiago is said to have come out of the tomb on a white horse to lead the troops against the heathens; his shout "Santiago Matamoros! As a knight of the Order of Santiago, Quevedo was passionately in favor of retaining Santiago as the sole patron saint of Spain. His enemies induced Olivares to require him again to withdraw to Torre de Juan Abad where he wrote his Memorial for the Patronage of Santiago.

But Olivares and the king also favored Santiago, and Quevedo's writings were evidently very helpful to them. As a reward for his efforts, Olivares offered the poet an ambassadorship in Genoa, but after his Naples-Sicily adventures with Osuna, he had had enough of political life in Italy and declined the offer.

The misogynist marries As for his relations with women, they were as ambiguous as most aspects of his life. Was he a misogynist, a cynic, or a hopelessly intoxicated lover? In his poems he is certainly all three, and I would say those attitudes reflect more than literary poses; and given his diverse character and the extreme diversity of his writings, I see consistency in his contradictions. There is never a hint of sentimentality and romantic bathos.

Even in his love poems, Quevedo, while passionately candid, is made of crystal and iron. And so there is always an arcade of strong self-contradiction in his many voices. Finally, however, his friends the duke of Medinaceli and the countess of Olivares persuaded him to marry, and apparently they joined in some matchmaking. The separation was definitive.

Quevedo's political fortunes were peaceful during most of these years, despite the Santiago episode out of which he came through vindicated and rewarded. But in everything fell apart. We still do not know the true reasons why Quevedo was arrested. A persistent story explains that one morning King Felipe sat down to eat breakfast and under his breakfast setting was a satiric poem, criticizing the realm and urging him to change his policies. Quevedo was accused of being the poem's author, which is extremely unlikely, even though there is no question that his satire extended to the monarchy itself.

A line from a famous poem, probably from his youth, reads: Campanas de amanecer en Granada. Os sienten todas las muchachas que lloran a la tierna Solea enlutada. Las muchachas de Andalucia la alta y la baja. Las ninas de Espana, de pie menudo y temblorosas faldas, que han llenado de luces las encrucijadas. I loved her so much! Down this little path. Nail-holes in my hands. Dawn Cordoba bells at daybreak. Dawn bells in Granada. All the girls weeping to the tender, grieving soled recognize you. The girls of High Andalusia and Low. Cordoba bells at daybreak, Poenui del Cante Jondo jOh campanas de Cordoba en la madrugada, y oh campanas de amanecer en Granada!

Arqueros Los arqueros oscuros a Sevilla se acercan. Anchos sombreros grises, largas capas lentas. Vienen de los remotos paises de la pena.

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Y van a un laberinto. Amor, cristal y piedra. Noche Cirio, candil, farol y luciernaga. La constelacion de la saeta. Ventanitas de oro tiemblan, y en la aurora se mecen cruces superpuestas. Poem of the Cante Jondo and dawn bells in Granada! Bowmen The dark bowmen close in on Seville. They come from far countries of pain. And head for a labyrinth. Night Lamp, candle, firefly, lantern. Little windows of gold tremble, and in the dawn the sway of cross upon cross. Poema del Cante Jondo Cirio, candil, farol y luciernaga.

Sevilla Sevilla es una torre llena de arqueros finos. Una ciudad que acecha largos ritmos. Como tallos de parra encendidos. Bajo el arco del cielo, sobre su llano limpio, dispara la constante saeta de su rio. Y loca de horizonte, mezcla en su vino lo amargo de Don Juan y lo perfecto de Dionisio. Poem of the Cante Jondo Lamp, candle, firefly, lantern.

Seville Seville is a tower full of fine bowmen. Seville for wounds Cordoba for death. A city that snares slow rhythms and twists them like labyrinths like vine-shoots, blazing. Always Seville for wounds! Mas cerca, ya parecen astronomos. Paso Virgen con mirinaque, Virgen de la Soledad, abierta como un inmenso tulipan. En tu barco de luces vas por la alta marea de la ciudad, entre saetas turbias y estrellas de cristal. Virgen con mirinaque, tu vas por el rio de la calle, jhasta el mar! Saeta Cristo moreno pasa de brio de Judea a clavel de Espana.

Poem of the Cante Jondo 7i Procession Down alleyways come strange unicorns. From what field what mythic wood? Closer to they seem like astronomers. Virgin of Solitude, open like a gigantic tulip. In your boat of lights you move on the high tide of the city among smoky saetas and stars of glass. Virgin with crinoline, you move down the river of the street and out to the sea!

Saeta Dark Christ passes from lily of Judaea to carnation of Spain. Cielo limpio y oscuro, tierra tostada, y cauces donde corre muy lenta el agua. Cristo moreno, con las guedejas quemadas, los pomulos salientes y las pupilas blancas. Balcon La Lola canta saetas. Los toreritos la rodean, y el barberillo, desde su puerta, sigue los ritmos con la cabeza. Entre la albahaca y la hierbabuena, la Lola canta saetas. La Lola aquella, que se miraba tanto en la alberca. Madrugada Pero como el amor los saeteros estan ciegos.

Poem of the Cante Jondo See where he comes! Clean dark sky, Sun-browned earth, and riverbeds whose water creeps by. Dark Christ, scorched locks of hair high cheekbones and white pupils. See where he goes! Balcony Lola sings saetas. Pretend toreros circle round, and from his doorway the little barber nods his head in rhythm.

Among the basil and mint, Lola sings saetas. Lola, she who gazed at herself for so long in the pool. La quilla de la luna rompe nubes moradas y las aljabas se llenan de roclo. Poem of the Cattle Jondo Saetas, burning lily streaking green night. The keel of the moon breaks mulberry clouds and quivers fill with dew. Poeta Alta va la luna. Bajo corre el viento. Mis largas miradas, exploran el cielo.

Luna sobre el agua. Luna bajo el viento. Mis cortas miradas exploran el suelo. Las voces de dos ninas venian. Sin esfuerzo, de la luna del agua, me fui a la del cielo. Un gran brazo moreno con pulseras de agua. Sobre un cristal azul jugaba al rio mi alma. Los instantes heridos por el reloj. Poet The moon rides high. The wind runs below. My sweeping gaze explores the sky.

Moon below the wind. My close gaze explores the ground. A great dark arm wearing bracelets of water. On blue crystal my soul played at rivers. Moments wounded by the clock Canciones 3 Asomo la cabeza por mi ventana, y veo como quiere cortarla la cuchilla del viento. En esta guillotina invisible, yo he puesto las cabezas sin ojos de todos mis deseos. Y un olor de limon lleno el instante inmenso, mientras se convertia en flor de gasa el viento. Esta fuera del estanque, sobre el suelo amortajada. De la cabeza a sus muslos un pez la cruza, llamandola.

El estanque tiene suelta su cabellera de algas y al aire sus grises tetas estremecidas de ranas. Yo luego pondre a su lado dos pequenas calabazas para que se tenga a flote, jay! On this unseen guillotine. And the lemon scent filled the immense moment while the wind became a bloom of gauze. From her head to her thighs a fish crosses, calling her name. The pond has shaken out her seaweed hair, her grey bared teats trembling with frogs. Yo quiero ser de plata. Hijo, tendras mucho frio.

Yo quiero ser de agua. Bordame en tu almohada. Cancion de jinete Cordoba. Jaca negra, luna grande, y aceitunas en mi alforja. Aunque sepa los caminos yo nunca llegare a Cordoba. Por el llano, por el viento, jaca negra, luna roja. La muerte me esta mirando desde las torres de Cordoba. Songs Foolish Song Mama, I want to turn into silver. Mama, I want to turn into water. Mama, sew me into your pillow. This time yes, and straightaway!

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Black pony, large moon, olives in my saddlebag. Through the wind, across the plain, black pony, red moon. Death is watching me from the towers of Cordoba. Such a long road! Canciones jAy, que la muerte me espera, antes de llegar a Cordoba! Por tu amor me duele el aire, el corazon y el sombrero. Verlaine La cancion, que nunca dire, se ha dormido en mis labios. La cancion, que nunca dire. Sobre las madreselvas habia una luciernaga, y la luna picaba con un rayo en el agua. Entonces yo sone, la cancion, que nunca dire. Cordoba, alone and far.

What it costs me to love you as I do! Air hurts me, heart, hat, loving you. A firefly was on the honeysuckle and a moonbeam stabbed the water. Canciones Cancion llena de labios y de cauces lejanos. Cancion llena de horas perdidas en la sombra. Cancion de estrella viva sobre un perpetuo dia. Baco Verde rumor intacto. La higuera me tiende sus brazos. Como una pantera, su sombra, acecha mi lirica sombra. La luna cuenta los perros. Se equivoca y empieza de nuevo. Ayer, manana, negro y verde, rondas mi cerco de laureles.

Y la higuera me grita y avanza terrible y multiplicada. Juan Ramon Jimenez En el bianco infinito, nieve, nardo y salina, perdio su fantasia. El color bianco, anda, sobre una muda alfombra de plumas de paloma. Song filled with hours counted olf in the shade. Song of the star alive above perpetual day. Bacchus Green murmur, intact.

The fig tree spreads out its arms to me. Like a panther, it shadows my lyrical shadow. The moon counts dogs, gets lost and starts again. Yesterday, tomorrow, black and green, you circle my laurel wreath. The fig tree shouts at me, advancing, fearsome multiplicity. Juan Ramon Jimenez In the infinite white, snow, salt-flat, spikenard, his imagination went. On then, colour white, across a soundless carpet of pigeon feathers. Pero tiembla por dentro. En el bianco infinito, jque pura y larga herida dejo su fantasia!

En el bianco infinito. Venus Asi te vi La joven muerta en la concha de la cama, desnuda de flor y brisa surgia en la luz perenne. Quedaba el mundo, lirio de algodon y sombra, asomado a los cristales viendo el transito infinito. La joven muerta, surcaba el amor por dentro. Entre la espuma de las sabanas se perdia su cabellera. Debussy Mi sombra va silenciosa por el agua de la acequia. Por mi sombra estan las ranas privadas de las estrellas. La sombra manda a mi cuerpo reflejos de cosas quietas.

But inside he trembles. In the infinite white, the pure white wound his imagination left! In the infinite white. Venus I saw you thus The young woman, dead, in the shell of the bed, stripped of breeze and flowers rose into undimmed light. The world remained, a lily of cotton and shade, through window panes watching the infinite transit. The young woman, dead, proffered love from within. Her hair vanished in the foam of sheets. Debussy My shadow moves silently down the coursing water. My shadow deprives the frogs of stars.

The shadow sends my body reflections of still things. Canciones Mi sombra va como inmenso cinife color violeta. Cien grillos quieren dorar la luz de la canavera. Una luz nace en mi pecho, reflejado, de la acequia. En lo hondo hay una rosa y en la rosa hay otro rio. Se me han caido los ojos dentro del agua.

Cuando se perdio en el agua, comprendi.

Al oido de una muchacha No quise. No quise decirte nada. Vi en tus ojos dos arbolitos locos. De brisa, de risa y de oro. A hundred crickets try to gild the light of the reeds. A new glow in my breast, reflected from the water. Look at that yellow bird! My eyes have disappeared into the water.

When he was lost in the water I understood. In your eyes I saw two mad little trees. Of air, of laughter, of gold. La luna asoma Cuando sale la luna se pierden las campanas y aparecen las sendas impenetrables. Cuando sale la luna, el mar cubre la tierra y el corazon se siente isla en el infinito. Nadie come naranjas bajo la luna llena.

Es preciso comer, fruta verde y helada. Cuando sale la luna de cien rostros iguales, la moneda de plata solloza en el bolsillo. Murio al amanecer Noche de cuatro lunas y un solo arbol, con una sola sombra y un solo pajaro. Busco en mi carne las huellas de tus labios. El manantial besa al viento sin tocarlo. Songs 91 They swayed. The Moon Appears When the moon rises bells are lost and impenetrable paths appear. When the moon rises, sea covers land and the heart feels like an island in infinity.

No one eats oranges beneath a full moon. Ice-cold green fruit is right. When the moon rises, with the same hundred faces, silver coins sob in purses. He Died at Dawn Night of four moons and a single tree with a single shadow and a single bird. I search my flesh for the mark of your lips.

The fountain kisses the wind without touching it. Canciones Llevo el No que me diste, en la palma de la mano, como un limon de cera casi bianco.

Noche de cuatro lunas y un solo arbol. En la punta de una aguja, esta mi amor jgirando! Primer aniversario La nina va por mi frente. Carne tuya me parece, rojo brio, junco fresco. Morena de luna llena. Segundo aniversario La luna clava en el mar un largo cuerno de luz.

Unicornio gris y verde, estremecido pero extatico. El cielo flota sobre el aire como una inmensa flor de loto. Night of four moons and a single tree. First Anniversary The girl passes across my brow. What use to me, I ask, are paper, verse, ink? To me your flesh is red lily, cool reed. Dark girl of the full moon. What do you want of my desire? Second Anniversary The moon nails to the sea a large horn of light. Green and grey unicorn, shuddering yet ecstatic. Sky floating on the air like an enormous lotus flower. You alone patrolling the last station of night! Canciones Lucia Martinez Lucia Martinez.

Umbria de seda roja. Tus muslos como la tarde van de la luz a la sombra. Los azabaches reconditos oscurecen tus magnolias. Aqui estoy, Lucia Martinez. Vengo a consumir tu boca y arrastrarte del cabello en madrugada de conchas. Porque quiero, y porque puedo. La soltera en misa Bajo el moises del incienso, adormecida. Ojos de toro te miraban. Con ese traje de profunda seda, no te muevas, Virginia.

Da los negros melones de tus pechos al rumor de la misa. Malestar y noche Abejaruco. En tus arboles oscuros. Noche de cielo balbuciente y aire tartamudo. Songs 95 Lucia Martinez Lucia Martinez. Shadow of red silk. Your thighs like evening move from light to shade. Hidden jet darkens your magnolias.

I am here, Lucia Martinez, here to consume your mouth and drag you by the hair into the seashell dawn. Because I want to, because I can. The Spinster at Mass Beneath the cradle of incense, asleep. Eyes of bulls watched you. In that dress of deep silk, Virginia, do not move. Offer your dark melon breasts to the murmur of the Mass. Malaise and Night Bee-eater in your dark trees. Night of babbling sky and stuttering air. Los astros de plomo giran sobre un pie. Dolor de sien oprimida con guirnalda de minutos. Los tres borrachos can tan desnudos. Pespunte de seda virgen tu cancion. Uco uco uco uco.

Desposorio Tirad ese anillo al agua. La sombra apoya sus dedos sobre mi espalda. Tengo mas de cien anos. Tirad ese anillo al agua. Leaden astral bodies spin on one foot. Bee-eater in your dark trees. Aching temple clamped by a garland of minutes. The three nude drunks sing. Back-stitch of pure silk, your song. Bee-eater Ooco, ooco, ooco, ooco. Betrothal Throw this ring to the water. The shade places fingers on my back. I am more than a hundred years old. Throw this ring to the water.

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Canciones Despedida Si muero, dejad el balcon abierto. El nino come naranjas. Desde mi balcon lo veo. El segador siega el trigo. Desde mi balcon lo siento. En el instituto y en la universidad La primera vez no te conod. Dime si el aire te lo dice. Mananita fria yo me puse triste, y luego me entraron ganas de reirme. Ahora entre los dos se alarga impasible, un mes, como un biombo de dias grises. Songs 99 Parting If I die leave the balcony open. The boy eats oranges. From my balcony I see him. The reaper cuts the wheat. From my balcony I hear him.

If I die, leave the balcony open! The second time I did. Tell me if the air tells you so. One sharp morning I grew sad and was seized by the impulse to laugh. But you knew me. Yes I knew you. Now a month stretches between us two, no feeling, like a screen of grey days. Madrigalillo Cuatro granados tiene tu huerto. Toma mi corazon nuevo. Cuatro cipreses tendra tu huerto. Toma mi corazon viejo. Preludio Las alamedas se van, pero dejan su reflejo. Las alamedas se van, pero nos dejan el viento. El viento esta amortajado a lo largo bajo el cielo. Pero ha dejado flotando sobre los rios, sus ecos. El mundo de las luciernagas ha invadido mis recuerdos.

Light Madrigal Four pomegranate trees in your orchard. Take my new heart. Take my old heart. Neither heart nor orchard! Prelude The avenues of poplar go but leave their reflection. The avenues of poplar go but leave us the wind. The shrouded wind lies full length beneath the sky. The world of fireflies has invaded my memories. De otro modo La hoguera pone al campo de la tarde, unas astas de ciervo enfurecido. Todo el valle se tiende; por sus lomos, caracolea el vientecillo. El aire cristaliza bajo el humo. Ojo de gato triste y amarillo.

Yo en mis ojos paseo por las ramas. Las ramas se pasean por el rio. Llegan mis cosas esenciales. Son estribillos de estribillos. Entre los juncos y la baja-tarde, jque raro que me llame Federico! Cancion de noviembre y abril El cielo nublado pone mis ojos blancos. Yo, para darles vida, les acerco una flor amarilla. Siguen yertos y blancos. Entre mis hombros vuela mi alma dorada y plena. El cielo de abril pone mis ojos de anil.

Another Way On the evening land the bonfire lays the antlers of a maddened stag. The valley spreads out. A gambolling breeze skips among its folds. Air crystallizes under the smoke. The branches drift down river. Things vital to me appear. Among the reeds and the falling day, how strange my name should be Federico! Song of November and April The cloudy sky blanks out my eyes. To restore them, I place a yellow flower next to them.

They remain lifeless, blank. Between my shoulders my full and golden soul takes wing. The April sky turns my eyes indigo. Canciones Yo, para darles alma, les acerco una rosa blanca. No consigo infundir lo bianco en el anil. Entre mis hombros vuela mi alma impasible y ciega. Cancion del naranjo seco A Carmen Morales Lenador. Librame del suplicio de verme sin toronjas.

He also gave the Sandinistas the royalties of some of his last books and helped financially the families of political prisoners. When the seven-year ban on his entry into Argentina was lifted, he visited his home country and Nicaragua in In he acquired French citizenship.

He died of leukemia in Paris on February 12, Se arrepiente, y no mata. El creador organiza un universo. Dos palabras tan dulces que la luna que andaba. Tan dulces dos palabras. Tan dulces y tan bellas. Oh, mis dedos quisieran. Alfonsina Storni — Dos Palabras. The Sound and the Fury is a dramatic presentation of the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family of Yoknapatawpha County, in northern Mississippi.

Divided into four sections, the history is narrated by three Compson brothers—Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason—followed by a section by an omniscient narrator. Section One is seen through the sensitivities of Benjamin Benjy , Compson, on April 7, , when Benjy is thirty-three years old.

The youngest of the Compson children, Benjy was christened Maury in honor of his uncle, but by the time he reached the age of five, it became apparent that he was retarded. The eight scenes that comprise the Benjy section jump about in time, from one of his earliest memories when, in fact, he was still called Maury and extend to the present Because of his impaired mental facilities, Benjy is literal, simplistic, and sensual. This section of the novel centers on his impressions of his sister Candace Caddy , the only one in his family who was truly solicitous of him, and arguably one of the most significant characters in the novel.

The Compson children are ignorant of the death of their grandmother. While Caddy does this, her brothers stand below, gazing up at her muddy underwear, which were soiled earlier when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate. Just as Benjy did, Quentin reflects on Caddy, her emerging sexuality, and the mortification he experiences at the implications of her unwed pregnancy. In many ways, Quentin represents pre—Civil War views of honor, Southern womanhood, and virginity.

The flashbacks dramatize just how ineffectual Quentin is in his dealings with his family, his Harvard studies, and his belief that the Compsons can return to their earlier days of Southern tradition. Unlike his brothers, Jason is much more focused on the present, offering fewer flashbacks—though he does have a few, and he refers frequently to events in the past. Also present in this section is another ironic comparison: Among the surprises and revelations in this section: Banished from the family home, she has taken up residence in a neighboring county and has been sending money to her daughter.

Jason gives his mother the forgeries, which Mrs. Meanwhile, Jason cashes the actual checks and pockets the money, giving little or none of it to his niece. Section Four has an omniscient or authorial viewpoint. The time is the present, which, in terms of the novel, is Easter Sunday, April 8,

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