Ruben Dario



 Melancholy

to Domingo Bolívar


You with the light, give me my own.
It’s like I’m blind. I grope around in the darkness,
I’m stuck beneath tempests and storms,
blinded by dreams and crazy with harmony. 

That’s my curse, to dream. Poetry
is an iron straitjacket with thousands of spikes
that I wrap around my soul. Drops of melancholy
fall from the bloody spines. 

And this is how I roam this bitter world, blind and crazy;
sometimes it seems the road is almost endless,
and sometimes that it’s very short …

And in this hesitation between inspiration and agony
I’m loaded with burdens that I can hardly bear.
Don’t you hear the drops of my melancholy falling?

                            translation by Stuart Cooke


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