Roque Dalton

Translations of:

Victor Jara

Jose Emilio Pacheco

Jaime Sabines

Cintio Vitier

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Karl Marx

From the noble eyes of a shining lion from the depths of your beards
from the dusty humidity in the poorly lit libraries
from the milky arms of Jenny of Westfalia
from the eddying of misery in the lingering and cold exiles
from the rages in those Rhine newsrooms filled with smoke
from fever like a little world of light in the endless nights
you corrected the tired labor of God
you oh the greatest to blame for hope
oh responsible amongst the responsible
for the happiness that keeps on walking.

The Dead

There was a time
when I knew quite a lot about the dead.
If I stood before night
on the final streets that my desolation
could support,
I could clearly hear their voices
calling me from the natal fog
and reminding me stubbornly
of the future handle on
the unmanageable ice of the lost bodies.

I knew the dead turned
agitating their terrible hair of crystal,
suits of ivy soldiers,
eager to utilize the saint of brutality
they had managed to hold onto in life.

God was a misunderstood dead.
Life was
learning to die.

Now,
after new hymns, new seas of tears,
after new eyes present since the numbers
since the steady bonfires, cruel and persistent,
since the taciturn houses
where the husbands loved their nude women
since the hospital cadaver
sturdy and tough friend for my question,
since the bloody winter bled before its time,
since the churches grow and grow
above the initials of the slave,
I
know
the
dead
lower
their
flag
and as the poor children of oblivion
have left us life to construct,
the pastoral, pirate, or cosmic life,
clean of its ancient obstacles
(shaded or particularly silent)
and their serious images
and their secret clamor tucked in the trees.
The Dead are dead.
They remain behind.
The Dead.