Agustini’s El Cisne
I studied Delmira Agustini in a Modern Latin American Literature class. Her poetry is really intriguing. She used a lot of erotic imagery and expressed emotions that were suppressed in women at that time (early 1900s). Her ex-husband shot and killed her when she was 28 - and then turned the gun on himself.
Artists and their tortured lives, no?
Anyway, I haven’t been able to find the full translation of the poem that inspired the title URL of this Tumblr. It’s called El Cisne (The Swan). Here’s my attempt at translating it:
“Blue pupil of my park
In the sensitive mirror
Of a clear lake, very clear…
So clear that sometimes I believe
Upon its crystalline page
My thoughts are printed.
Flower of the air, flower of the water,
The soul of the lake is a swan
With two human pupils,
Formal and gentle as a prince;
Lily wings, rosy sculls …
A fiery beak, a sad
And proud neck, and the whiteness
And the softness of a swan …
The candid and solemn bird
Has a wicked charm;
— A carnation dressed in lily,
It transcends in flame and miracle …
His white wings disturb me
Like two warm arms;
No lips have ever burned
As his beak in my hands;
No head has ever fallen
So languorous into my lap;
His head is crowned
With a ruby of lust
And trails desire
In a rosy following…
I give him water in my hands
And he seems to drink fire
I seem to offer him
All the vase of my body…
I live so much in my dreams,
And so deep in my flesh,
That sometimes I wonder if the swan
With his two fleeting wings,
His strange human eyes
And burning red mouth,
Is only a swan in my lake
Or in my life as a lover…
On the bank of the clear lake
I ask him in silence
And the silence is a rose
Upon his mouth of fire…
But in his flesh he speaks to me
And in my flesh I understand him.
Sometimes I am all soul;
And sometimes I am all body.
Demoralizing his mouth in my rejection
Yet he remains, like death…
And on the crystalline page,
On the sensitive mirror
That sometimes
Reflects my thoughts,
The swan awakes, and reddens,
And I, pure, am scared!”
So there it is.
Link to the original Spanish: http://www.poemasde.net/el-cisne-delmira-agustini/
