Why do this?

My father, José Luis Villamizar Melo, passed away in my home town of Cúcuta, Colombia, in August last year. The law and economics were Dad's profession, but literature, history and academia his passion. He wrote and published several books, articles and book chapters. The thing is that so many people have missed out on his work, particularly on his beautiful poetry, which he wrote in Spanish prior to the world wide web. So I thought, what a better way to keep Dad's legacy alive than to bring his writing beyond his world and share it with mine. That is why I am translating over 250 of my Dad's poems to English and publishing them here, one a day, Monday to Friday during 2011 (Dad, a family man, always believed that you shouldn't work on weekends).



Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The window and the star (La ventana y la estrella)

From my Dad’s book The window and the star (La ventana y la estrella).  I REALLY struggled with this one, having to completely reorganise the first paragraph and try my best at interpreting the last one.

The window and the star (La ventana y la estrella)

A lunar night through which this silence of mine ascends,
travelling without a trace
from my window to the cloud,
shadow of the cloud on its way to the star.

A soft and luminous sadness
perfumed with moon, a sweet sadness
that at the same time tastes bitter, a joyful
sensation of poetic nobility.

A little ash among the laugh,
silent ancestral voices,
vane gusts of wind that do not encourage
the ash of my laugh nor they light up my mornings.

A wait without boredom and without hurry
a helm well fitted and the buskin
celebrating with a drink the theoretical bitterness
on the verge of my taciturn verse.
at 5:00 PM

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