Rafael Alberti

Blue

1
Blue arrived. And its time was painted.

2
How many blues did the Mediterranean give?

3
Venus, mother of the sea of the blues.

4
The blue of the Greeks
rests, like a god, on columns.

5
The delicate, medieval blue.

6
The Virgin brought her virginal blue:
blue Mary, blue Our Lady.

7
It fell to his palette. And brought
the most secret blue from the sky.
Kneeling, he painted his blues.
Angels christened him with blue.
They appointed him: Beato Blue Angelico.

8
There are celestial palettes like wings
descended from the white of clouds.

9
The blues of Italy,
the blues of Spain,
the blues of France . . .

10
Raphael had wings.
Perugino also had wings
in order to spread his blues around.

11
When they get color from you,
indigo blue, brushes are feathers.

12
Venice of golden Titian blue.

13
Rome of Poussin blues between the pines.

14
Tintoretto blues embitter me.

15
Sulphur alcohol phosphorous Greco blue.
Toxic verdigris blue Greco.

16
On the palette of Velasquez I have
another name: I am called Guadarrama.

17
When I wander through nacreous flesh,
I am called the merry blue vein of Rubens.

                                translated by Mark Strand

Rafael Alberti

Diez Liricografias. Buenos Aires: Galeria Bonino, 1954.

The Collegiate Angels

(Ninguno comprendíamos el secreto nocturno de las pizarras)

None of us understood the secret darkness of the blackboards

Nor why the armillary sphere seemed so remote when we looked.

We only knew a circumference can be other than round

That an eclipse of the moon confuses flowers,

And advances the timing of birds.

None of us understood a thing;

Nor why our fingers were made of India ink

And afternoon closed compasses for dawn to open books.

We only knew that a straight line, if required, can be curved or broken,

And wandering stars are children ignorant of arithmetic. 

                                                (translated by A. S. Klein)

Rafael Alberti

Letter Y (1972)

‘If I was born a farmhand’

                            (Si yo nací campesino)

If I was born a farmhand,

If I was born a sailor,

Why do I have to be here,

If it’s not where I want to be?

On the finest day, city

Which I have ever sought,

The finest day – silence! –

I’ll have disappeared.

Raul Zurita

Felipe Zurita

There will be nothing. You see then his eyes
wide open and soon the tufts of red hair that
stick to his face wet from sweat and saliva.
That's how he appears to you through the ice.
You know he's been crying and you notice
now the pull of his lips contracting as if he
still wants to say something. You also want
to say something. You remember the battered
table, the hole in the wall joint in the outskirts,
his screams on the telephone almost at dawn,
the taxi searching for the address a girl gave you
before he hung up. But since you didn't talk before,
you can't talk now. Or, at least, explain to him
that it doesn't matter and the trips to the
psychiatrist and your nightmarish fear of
addiction. You love him to death. You see him
through the glaciers.
You then look at the giant wall of ice and you
feel you were once there, perhaps hundreds,
thousands of years ago, and you curl up in a ball
as if wanting to save yourself from that memory.