A nation that does not support and encourage its theater is - if not dead - dying; just as a theater that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine color of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself theater; but only a place for amusement.
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
Fire is fed by fire. The same small flame destroys Two stalks of wheat at once.
The snow is falling on the deserted field of my life, and my hopes, which roam far, are afraid of becoming frozen or lost.
The mirror is the mother dew, the book of desiccated twilights, echo become flesh.
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.
Everything's a fan. Brother, open up your arms. God is the pivot.
Old women can see through walls.
The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.
At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.
What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
My head is full of fire and grief and my tongue runs wild, pierced with shards of glass.
The duende....Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child's saliva, crushed grass, and medusa's veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.
I sing your restless longing for the statue, your fear of the feelings that await you in the street. I sing the small sea siren who sings to you, riding her bicycle of corals and conches. But above all I sing a common thought that joins us in the dark and golden hours. The light that blinds our eyes is not art. Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.
Seville is a tower full of fine archers.... Under the arch of the sky, across the clear plain, she shoots the constant arrow of her river.
The Little Mute Boy The little boy was looking for his voice. (The king of the crickets had it.) In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. I do not want it for speaking with; I will make a ring of it so that he may wear my silence on his little finger In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. (The captive voice, far away, put on a cricket's clothes.) Translated by William S. Merwin
Never let me lose the marvel of your statue-like eyes, or the accent the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek at night. I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair. If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master, never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.
In our eyes the roads are endless. Two are crossroads of the shadow.
Those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.
...I am the immense shadow of my tears
Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.
Devoutly the teachers point out huge fumigated domes; but beneath the statues there's no love, no love beneath the eyes set in crystal. Love is there, in flesh ripped by thirst, in the tiny hut struggling against the flood; love is there, in ditches where snakes of hunger wrestle, in the sad sea that rocks dead gulls, and in the darkest stinging kiss under pillows.
What matters most has an ultimate metallic quality of death. The chasuble and the wagon wheel, the razor and the prickly beards of shepherds, the bare moon, a fly, humid cupboards, rubble piles, the images of saints covered in lace, quicklime, and the wounding edges of the rooflines and watchtowers.
I've often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.
The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.
The moon carries the masks of meningitis into bedrooms, fills the wombs of pregnant women with cold water and, as soon as I'm not careful, throws handfuls of grass on my shoulders.
But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.
The one thing life has taught me is that most people spend their lives bottled up inside their houses doing the things they hate.
My poetry is a game. My life is a game. But I am not a game.
Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.
The world is a shoulder of dark meat (black flesh of an old mule). And the light is on the other side.
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.
There's no doubt that I really have a feeling for the theater. These past few days it has occurred to me to do a comedy whose chief characters are photographic enlargements. Those people we see in doorways. Newlyweds, sergeants, dead girls, an anonymous crowd full of mustaches and wrinkles. It should be terrible. If I focus it well, it will possess pathos without consolation. In the midst of those people I will place an authentic fairy.
I'll always be happy if they'd leave me alone in that delightful and unknown furthest corner, apart from struggles, putrefactions and nonsense; the ultimate corner of sugar and toast, where the mermaids catch the branches of the willows and the heart opens to a flute's sharpness.
Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.
The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along.
All one's personality is embedded in gloves and hats after they've been good and used. Show me a glove and I'll tell you the character of its owner.
Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river.
Relish the fresh landscape of my wound, break rushes and delicate rivulets, drink blood poured on honeyed thigh.
Pero yo ya no soy yo Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But now I am no longer I, nor is my house any longer my house.
The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world.
To see you naked is to recall the Earth.
Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.
Death laid its eggs in the wound
I'm afraid to be on this shore a trunk without limbs, and what I most regret is not to have flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my suffering.
Even money, which shines so much, spits sometimes.
The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.
Hail, mute devil! You are the most intense animal. An eternal mystic of the fleshly inferno.
The bride, the white bride today a maiden, tomorrow a wife.
The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
Men like to pleasure us, girl. They like to undo our plaits and give us water to drink from their own mouths. That's what makes the world go round.
As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.
Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.
While the poet wrestles with the horses on his brain and the sculptor wounds his eyes on the hard spark of alabaster, the dancer battles the air around her, air that threatens at any moment to destroy her harmony or to open huge open empty spaces where her rhythm will be annihilated.
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea.
Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death, but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit, nor in the air, nor in our lives, nor on these terraces of billowing smoke. The genuine pain that keeps everything awake is a tiny, infinite burn on the innocent eyes of other systems.
The groom is like a flower of gold. When he walks, blossoms at his feet unfold.
I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
If I told you the whole story it would never end...What's happened to me has happened to a thousand woman.
In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.
At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A frail of lime ready prepared at five in the afternoon. The rest was death, and death alone
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
What you wouldn't have suspected lives & trembles in the air. Those treasures of the day you keep just out of reach. These come & go in truckloads but no one stops to see them.
Ditty of First Desire In the green morning I wanted to be a heart. A heart. And in the ripe evening I wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale. (Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.) In the vivid morning I wanted to be myself. A heart. And at the evening's end I wanted to be my voice. A nightingale. Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.
A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.
What's the furthest corner? Because that's where I want to be, alone with the only thing that I love.
Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verde ramas. Green I love you green. Green Wind. Green branches.
The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.
Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars and all roses are as white as my pain.
My God, I have come with the seeds of questions. I planted them, and they never flowered.
The terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.
Love is the kiss in the quiet nest while the leaves are trembling, mirrored in the water.
New York is a meeting place for every race in the world, but the Chinese, Armenians, Russians, and Germans remain foreigners. So does everyone except the blacks. There is no doubt but that the blacks exercise great influence in North America, and, no matter what anyone says, they are the most delicate, spiritual element in that world.
Oh honey, there's nothing new on this earth when it comes to what men and women do in the dark. First love is when you learn. So you've learned that love can open you up like spring sun on a wee primrose. Good. Remember that. You know how to love.
With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.
Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.
Green how I love you green. Green wind. Green boughs. The ship on the sea And the horse on the mountain.
I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.
The day hunger disappears, the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever seen.
We're all like the little sailor. From the harbors we hear the strains of accordions and the murky soapy noises of the docks, from the mountains we receive the dish of silence that the shepherds eat, but we don't hear more than our own distances. And what distances without end and without doors and without mountains!
I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.
Night of Sleepless Love The night above. We two. Full moon. I started to weep, you laughed. Your scorn was a god, my laments moments and doves in a chain. The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand. Dawn married us on the bed, our mouths to the frozen spout of unstaunched blood. The sun came through the shuttered balcony and the coral of life opened its branches over my shrouded heart.
I'm satisfied. I am progressively making my life and my name in the surest and purest manner. If I catch on in the theater, as I think I will, all the doors will gladly open wide for me.
The dancer's trembling heart must bring everything into harmony, from the tips of her shoes to the flutter of her eyelashes, from the ruffles of her dress to the incessant play of her fingers.
Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.
Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.
The day we stop resisting our instincts, we'll have learned how to live.
We're all curious about what might hurt us.
Moon like a large stainedglass window that breaks on the ocean.
My tongue is pierced with glass.
Adam & Eve. The serpent cracked the mirror in a thousand pieces, & the apple was his rock.
I have often lost myself in the sea, ears full of newly cut flowers, tongue full of love and agony.
I put my head out of my window and see how much the wind’s knife wants to slice it off. On this unseen guillotine, I’ve placed the eyeless head of all my desires.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand.
Damned, damned be the rich! May not even their fingernails be left!... I'm sure that they are going to Hell head-first.
A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world.
Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair
Ever since I got married I've been thinking night and day about whose fault it was, and every time I think about it, out comes a new fault to eat up the old one; but always there's a fault left.
Understand one single day fully, so you can love every night.
Little black horse. Where are you taking your dead rider?
Death, lonely death, Beneath the withered leaves.
In the garden I will die. In the rosebush they will kill me.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
Every step we take on earth brings us to a new world.
If blue is dream what then innocence? What awaits the heart if Love bears no arrows?
The weeping of the guitar begins. The goblets of dawn are smashed. The weeping of the guitar begins. Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it. It weeps monotonously as water weeps as the wind weeps over snowfields. Impossible to silence it. It weeps for distant things. Hot southern sands yearning for white camellias. Weeps arrow without target evening without morning and the first dead bird on the branch. Oh, guitar! Heart mortally wounded by five swords.
Variación / Variations El remanso de aire bajo la rama del eco. El remanso del agua bajo fronda de luceros. El remanso de tu boca bajo espesura de besos. * The still waters of the air under the bough of the echo. The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp
