A
arachiron
Guest
Does anyone speak Spanish fluently or well enough?
This is one of my favorite poems translated from its original Spanish to English. I would love to know how the poet originally intended it to be. Unfortunately, I've tried but gave up translating it back because of my poor Spanish.
TO THE FOOT FROM ITS CHILD
By Pablo Neruda
The child's foot is not yet aware its a foot,
And wants to be a butterfly or an apple.
But later, stones and glass shards,
Streets, ladders,
And the paths in the rough earth
Go on teaching the foot it cannot fly,
Cannot be a fruit swollen on the branch.
Then, the child's foot
Was defeated, fell
In the battle,
Was a prisoner
Condemned to live in a shoe.
Bit by bit, in the dark,
It grew to know the world in its own way,
Out of touch with its fellows, enclosed,
Feeling out life like a blind man.
These soft nails
Of quartz, bunched together,
Grew hard, and changed themselves
Into opaque substance, hard as horn,
And the tiny, petaled toes of the child
Grew bunched and out of trim,
Took on the form of eyeless reptiles
With triangular heads, like worms.
Later, they grew callused
And were covered
With the faint volcanoes of death,
A coarsening hard to accept.
But this blind thing walked
Without respite, never stopping
For hour after hour,
The one foot, the other,
Now the man's
Now the woman's,
Up above,
Down below,
Through fields, mines,
Markets and ministries,
Backward,
Far afield, inward,
Forward,
This foot toiled in its shoe,
Scarcely takin gtime
To bare itself in love or sleep;
It walked, they walked,
Until the whole man chose to stop.
And then it descended
To earth, and knew nothing,
For there, everything everywhere was dark.
It did not know it had ceased to be a foot,
Or if they were burying it so that it might fly,
Or so that it might become
An apple.
This is one of my favorite poems translated from its original Spanish to English. I would love to know how the poet originally intended it to be. Unfortunately, I've tried but gave up translating it back because of my poor Spanish.
TO THE FOOT FROM ITS CHILD
By Pablo Neruda
The child's foot is not yet aware its a foot,
And wants to be a butterfly or an apple.
But later, stones and glass shards,
Streets, ladders,
And the paths in the rough earth
Go on teaching the foot it cannot fly,
Cannot be a fruit swollen on the branch.
Then, the child's foot
Was defeated, fell
In the battle,
Was a prisoner
Condemned to live in a shoe.
Bit by bit, in the dark,
It grew to know the world in its own way,
Out of touch with its fellows, enclosed,
Feeling out life like a blind man.
These soft nails
Of quartz, bunched together,
Grew hard, and changed themselves
Into opaque substance, hard as horn,
And the tiny, petaled toes of the child
Grew bunched and out of trim,
Took on the form of eyeless reptiles
With triangular heads, like worms.
Later, they grew callused
And were covered
With the faint volcanoes of death,
A coarsening hard to accept.
But this blind thing walked
Without respite, never stopping
For hour after hour,
The one foot, the other,
Now the man's
Now the woman's,
Up above,
Down below,
Through fields, mines,
Markets and ministries,
Backward,
Far afield, inward,
Forward,
This foot toiled in its shoe,
Scarcely takin gtime
To bare itself in love or sleep;
It walked, they walked,
Until the whole man chose to stop.
And then it descended
To earth, and knew nothing,
For there, everything everywhere was dark.
It did not know it had ceased to be a foot,
Or if they were burying it so that it might fly,
Or so that it might become
An apple.