Verses to the Moon

^{translated from the Spanish by William George Williams}

Oh moon, who now look over the roof
of the church, in the tropical calm
to be saluted by him who has been out all night,
to be barked at by the dogs of the suburbs,

Oh moon who in your silence have laughed at
all things! In your sidereal silence 
when, keeping carefully in the shadow, the
municipal judge steals from some den.

But you offer, saturnine traveler,
with what eloquence in mute space
consolation to him whose life is broken,

while there sing to you from a drunken brawl
long-haired, neurasthenic bards,
and lousy creatures who play dominos.

Versos a la luna

¡Oh, luna, que hoy te asomas al tejado
de la iglesia, en la calma tropical,
para que te salude un trasnochado
y te ladren los perros de arrabal!

¡Oh, luna! . . . ¡En tu silencio te has burlado
de todo! . . . En tu silencio sideral,
viste anoche robar en despoblado
. . . ¡y el ladrón era un Juez municipal!

Mas tú ofreces, viajera saturnina,
con qué elocuencia en los espacios mudos,
consuelo al que la vida laceró,

mientras te cantan, en cualquier cantina,
neurasténicos bardos melenudos
y piojosos, que juegan dominó. . .

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 2, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Verses to the Moon” appeared as “Versos a la luna” in Luis Carlos López’s collection Por el atajo (J. V. Mogollón e Ciá., 1920). Roughly four years prior, an English translation of the poem by William George Williams was published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse vol. 3, no. 2, (August 1916), a themed issue of the magazine dedicated to Spanish American poetry. The original version of the poem is a variation upon a Petrarchan sonnet, whereas Williams’s translation preserves only its stanzination, foregoing the rhyme scheme in favor of free verse. In “Situating Latin America within U.S. Modernism: Others’s Spanish American Avant-Garde,” published in Revues modernistes, revues engagées (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), scholar Gabriele Hayden argues that the poem “undercuts the romanticism of its title by offering a ‘low’ scene. A modernista poet might well write a sonnet directed to the moon, but that sonnet would be filled with exotic references and obscure literary allusions; instead, López here undercuts a modernismo idealism with ironic references to the verisimilar and the low: corrupt judges, drunken brawls, and ‘lousy creatures who play dominoes.’”