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

Ruben Dario

In Autumn

I know there are those who ask: Why does he not
sing with the same wild harmonies as before?
But they have not seen the labors of an hour
the work of a minute, the prodigies of a year.

I am an aged tree that, when I was growing.
uttered a vague, sweet sound when the breeze caressed me.
The time for youthful smiles has now passed by:
now, let the hurricane swirl my heart to song!

                                        translator unknown