José Asunción Silva

“ The gaze lost in space
Like in the beautiful whole
That of he who contemplates her charms.
There is infinite light that reflects
In the blue of her divine eyes
Like that of clean sapphire in glass. ”

“ Life does have bits of calm;
Not everything in existence is a wound
From which blood gushes forth.
Fighting has a shadow; and dying
passions, fugitive tenderness,
everything loved that on passing is forgotten
is a source of distressing disappointments. ”

“ That sleep forever in the sepulchre
And that we have not seen for so long.
They come down over the things of life
the shadows of the eternal
And souls set out on their journey
to the land of memory. ”

“ He cured himself with bromine and with the ether
capsules of Clertán.
Later, disillusioned with his life,
the subtle philosopher,
He read Leopardi and Schopenhauer
and in a moment of spite,
He cured himself for good with the capsules
of lead from a gun. ”

“ Through the gloomy air an unseen hand throws
A dark, opaque veil of lethal melancholy,
And there is not anyone who, deep-down, is not calmed and recovered
When they see the gray clouds of the sombre atmosphere,
And when they hear above
Sad and dark
The sleepy accents
Also extremely sad and uncertain
With which the bells sound
The mournful bells that speak to the living
About the dead! ”

“ Not a single beam of sunlight filters through.
Woman, totally pasionate woman, chaste
Lit with the light of the ideal...
Radiant with virtue and beauty
Like in my soul I came to dream,
In her dreams of open tenderness
Will she find it thus?
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content. ”

“ And as if in a succession neverending
Everything is born on Earth and everything dies,
In the ideal world of the spirits
Similar laws reign eternally:
They sprout over the tombs of the dead
The flowers, messengers of happiness ”

“ In search of you in pairs from another world
With homesickness they find themselves alone
Over the waters of the gigantic sea
Among the purest and deepest sky
In the infinite rocking of the waves. ”

“ And made six mice into horses,
"She gave her an enormous boquet of fresh magnolia,
Slippers made of glass, brilliant,
And at a single touch from her magic wand
The gray ashes became diamonds."
...................................................
With rapt attention the girls listenend to her,
Dolls sleep, on the white carpet
Almost abandoned, and in the room
The light fades, the shadows grow! ”

“ Is absolutely equal
To the Emperor of China:
The two are the same animal.
↑ The real was the currency in Spain until the middle of the 19th century, and thus would have been that of Colombia until the latter's independence in the beginning of the 19th century. The use of this term is also possibly a pun on the word's other meaning, "royal." ”