Self-Portrait
My childhood is all memories of a patio in Seville,
A orchard in the light where lemons ripened every fall,
My life as a young man- some twenty years about Castille,
My adult life- a few events I'd rather not recall.
I've never gone Lothario or played at Casanova.
It's obvious from my slovenly apparel that I can't.
Still, I endured the arrow meted out to me by Cupid
And loved as much as women's hospitality could grant.
Though there are drops of Jacobinic blood in my pumped veins,
My verse has bubbled from a peaceful spring through all my days
And more so than good boys who follow all the holy rules,
I stand as a good man, and in the good sense of the phrase.
I give myself to beauty. In contemporary custom
I've cut some classic roses from the garden of Ronsard
But I have no love for the fads of Modernistic makeup
And do not flock with birds that sing in high-flown avant-garde.
I've had it with the balladry of hollow lovelorn tenors,
The cricket-choirs and tweety-birds who warble at the moon.
I quiet down to try and tell true voices from their echos,
And out of all the voices heard I listen for just one.
A classic or romantic? Couldn't tell you. But I'd rather
Leave all my verse exactly as a fighter leaves his blade
Famed for the manly hand that held and brandished it in battle
And not the learnèd smithy's anvil where the steel was made.
I hold a conversation with a man who's always with me.
(Whoever banters with himself may one day hear God's mind.)
All my soliloquies are conversations with this fellow
Who taught me all I need to be a lover of mankind.
And in the end, I owe you nothing. You owe me for writing.
I go about my work with care, and what I earn I keep
To buy the suit that keeps me clothed, the roof that keeps me sheltered,
The bread that keeps the life in me, the bed on which I sleep.
And when I reach the day of the last voyage, come that moment
The ship of no return is set to cast the anchor free,
You'll find me boarded with the crew, with barely any luggage
My body bare beneath the sun like children of the sea.
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
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