Gerardo Diego (1896-1987)
Diego, Gerardo. Antología poética. Ed. Francisco Javier Doez de Revenga. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2007.
Spanish poet discovered by utter chance today in a Barcelona bookstore. He’s not a consummate twentieth-century master like Lorca, but he is immediately appealing in a whole gamut of forms, from ebullient interbellum surrealism to resigned late lyricism. This sonnet, from the 1941 collection Alondra de verdad (The True Lark), seems to be one of his best known.
Insomnio
Tú y tu desnudo sueño. No lo sabes.
Duermes. No. No lo sabes. Yo en desvelo,
y tú, inocente, duermes bajo el cielo.
Tú por tu sueño y por el mar las naves.
En cárceles de espacio, aéreas llaves
te me encierran, recluyen, roban. Hielo,
cristal de aire en mil hojas. No. No hay vuelo
que alce hasta ti las alas de mis aves.
Saber que duermes tú, cierta, segura
—cauce fiel de abandono, línea pura—,
tan cerca de mis brazos maniatados.
Qué pavoroso esclavitud de isleño,
yo insomne, loco, en los acantilados,
las naves por el mar, tú por tu sueño.
Version: Insomnia (for R.D.)
You and your naked dream. You don’t know it.
You sleep. No. You don’t know it. Sleepless I,
while you sleep on, innocent, beneath the sky.
You in your dream, on the ocean the ships.
In prisons of space, aerial keys
lock me, confine me, rob me of you. Ice,
airy thousand-leaved crystal. No. No flight
will lift my birds to you, raise up their wings.
Knowing you sleep, defined, secure
—faithful dry riverbed, line drawn pure—,
so close to my arms, my manacled wrists.
So awful an exile, surrounded by sea,
insomniac I, mad, on the cliffs,
the ships on the ocean, you in your dream.
