Vas Doloris

^{translated from the Spanish by William George Williams}

              ^{To Luis G. Monge}

I come from the remote borders
of the land of oblivion. My songs
will not sound beneath your balconies,
I am the singer of the broken sanctuaries.

Artist, dreamer, sensitive and tender,
my music is a voice of affirmation . . .
I am like a winter twilight
in love’s garden.

I love the fire of the sun. My delights are
the flaming rose, the bleeding pink,
and I love the white swans on the lakes
and the blue clouds in the wind. 

I love the sad—for life is Pain—
I love your black half-opened eyes
fixed in an unknown direction
where dead loves are forgotten.

I know full well that love is sleep . . .
and my soul sleepless. You are not
to blame for my sorrow. You are a dream . . .
I call you when I wake and you do not come!

You can come only as does death,
silent and fatal. You are anxiety,
no matter, come; my heart is strong . . .
Shed your petals in my hands, faded rose. 

I knew in my dreams that love is good
and today, impenitent, a rebel against love,
I weep upon the lilies of your breast
and kiss you on the forehead.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Vas Doloris” by Juan Julián Lastra, also known as Julián del Casal, was translated by William George Williams and appeared in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, Vol. 3, No. 2 (August 1916), a themed issue dedicated to Spanish American poetry. In “Neoplatonism and Modernity in Julián del Casal,” author and scholar of Spanish American modernism Priscilla Pearsall noted that “[Del Casal’s] radical esthetic of modernity is undermined by his insistence upon an outmoded esthetic which he had already replaced. As a result, [Del] Casal’s writings represent a crisis point at the beginning of Modernism, for an idealized, essentially Romantic vision of literature is both adhered to and rejected in the face of a belief that modern poetry can only be a mirror image of the poet himself. At the deepest level this ambivalence toward the function of literature reminds us that Modernism began in a period characterized by that which modern art was felt to reflect best—the conflict  and fragmentation at the center of the modern self.”