Another translation effort.

The Nightmare
by Luis Alberto de Cuenca

Javier has decided to kill himself.
He chooses to do it far away from his house,
where the furniture doesn’t recognize him
and the walls don’t talk to him about Marta.
He travels to disaster on the highway
which draws things out too much. He knows
that he won’t make the return trip and never
will have to repeat that torment.
The gasoline runs out, and his car
stops a kilometer away from Burgos.
He travels on foot to the city and steers himself
to the same hotel in which we put ourselves up in,
Alicia and me. I remember his arrival:
his pallidness; the hands, stiff with cold,
which squeezed my own in the door
of the elevator; the journey to his room.
He is in the room, he eagerly
drinks the poison, the potion
that will rescue him from Martha’s
contempt, from the love that destroys him.
After a while, dusk. Alicia goes down
to have a drink and I stay
alone in the darkness, half asleep.
And I dream that Javier is killing himself,
and that I arrive at his bedchamber and he
greets me with gunshots and says
I’m sending myself to hell,
and I call a waiter
who Javier hits, and things go like that,
and it seems like he’s going to continue
destroying himself  as he intended,
but the poison corses through his veins
and Javier’s conscious becomes cloudy,
and he drops the pistol, and falls to the floor,
and vomits out his life in a final spasm
all over the carpet of the hallway.
Then Alicia comes in and wakes me up
with the sweet, big kisses of a drunk,
and she takes off my clothes and asks me
why I look so shocked,
and I don’t say anything, and we make love
hard, like in Ampurias, in August
of ‘80, and my fears are shipwrecked
in the sea of her teeth and her fingernails.

Related posts:

1. Rita, by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
2. La Malcasada, by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
3. El Desayuno (Breakfast), by Luis Alberto de Cuenca

I was waiting for a meeting in the library and happened across this poem, which I couldn’t resist doing a quick translation of.

Rita
by Luis Alberto de Cuenca

Rita, what are you going to do on Sunday? Are there Sundays
where you live? Are there social engagements? Do people arrive late?
I don’t know why I overwhelm you with useless questions,
why I keep thinking you can answer me.
I know that you’d like to have a voice
instead of silence, and escape from the grave
to tell me things about the land of the dead.
But you can’t, Rita, and I shouldn’t dream of you
on a night in August as lively as tonight.
One must keep up appearances. In any case, Sundays
are the worst days to leave the house.

Related posts:

1. The Nightmare, by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
2. La Malcasada, by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
3. El Desayuno (Breakfast), by Luis Alberto de Cuenca

From Studs Terkel’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

In one of my books, I wrote about Hitler’s last words. As he’s down there in the bunker and the Russians are right up above him, and if they catch him they’re going to put him in a cage and show him around and humiliate him, piss on him. So he’s definitely gonna have to kill himself. The whole question is what his last words should be. There are other witnesses to hear his last words. Goebbels is there, and Martin Bormann, to hear what this great man’s last words are. And Hitler says, “I regret nothing.” Goebbels points out to him that this is in fact a song by Edith Piaf. People are going to see the similarity. She was called “the little sparrow.” His last words are going to be the same thing the little sparrow says. Finally he says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.” And he blows his brains out. What are you gonna do?

That’s what Secular Humanism will do to you.