I've already started two threads on non-English language poetry, one of French Symbolism and the other on German Poetry. I really ought to set about reviving both of those with some new postings, but instead I thought I'd start a new thread.
My passion for poetry truly began when I first discovered and devoured the works of a number of fascinating poets who had not been imposed upon me or even introduced to me in any class I had taken in school. The first of these poets were the great French Symbolists: Baudelaire, Gautier, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery, etc... After these there were the Spanish poets.
I first came upon Spanish poetry in some depth some 10+ years ago while living in New York. Actually, it was New Jersey... Jersey City to be precise... but I lived right on the Hudson River... across from the New York Skyline and the World Trade Center while the Twin Towers were still standing and the real estate in Jersey City was actually affordable.
Jersey City had a great Hispanic population and the neighborhood I lived in was predominately Puerto Rican and Polish. Sunday we would would have breakfast at Tanya's... French Toast made with Challah bread and Russian tea, while Klezmer, polkas, and waltzes played... followed by folding sheets and shirts to Conga music at the laundromat across the street. Many of my closest artist friends were Hispanic... Mexican, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan... and a number of them shared a love of reading and of poetry. Through them I was first introduced to not only Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca... but also Juan Ramon Jimenez, Vicente Aleixandre, Jorge Guillén, Miguel Hernandez, Antonio Machado, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Rafael Alberti, and certainly most important: Jorge Luis Borges. I suspect that as a result of the large Hispanic population many of the local independent book stores carried a decent collection of Spanish poetry... in translation even. I was able to buy a few volumes including one by Neruda, one by Garcia Lorca, and couple more... but I was quite the starving artist at the time and extra cash was slim.
My passion for Spanish poetry, however, remained once i had returned to Ohio and as my financial outlook improved, so did the size of my collection of Spanish-language poetry in translation. I even began to explore the work of earlier writers: Luis de Góngora, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, The Poem of the Cid, and especially San Juan de la Cruz. I even began to explore the work of Arab Andalusian poets... as well as the great Spanish Hebrew poets of the medieval period (Abraham ibn Ezra, Moses ibn Ezra, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Yehuda Halevi, Shmuel haNagid). The art, music, and poetry of this Islamic-Spanish Renaissance has since held a special place in my affections. My passion for Spanish-language poetry remains with me today. At this moment I am reading a volume entitled Eyes to See Otherwise: Selected Poems by Homero Aridjis.
I throw this post out there for anyone to post any favorite Spanish-Language poets and poems. With several Latin-American members we may just get an interesting dialog going. I'll start myself with a favorite selection from Pablo Neruda who (to get that old dispute going) just may be the greatest poet of the last century. Neruda was clearly inspired by the French Symbolists (in this instance... the prose poem suggests especially Rimbaud... most obviously The Season in Hell) as well as Walt Whitman... but certainly took these influences to a far more Surrealist manner throwing out one fascinating (visual) image after the last:
The Night of the Soldier
I play the night of the soldier, the man without melancholy... I see myself with stupid and gay comrades, who smoke and spit and drink horribly, and who suddenly fall down deathly sick. Because where are the aunt, the bride, the mother-in-lay, the sister-in-law of the soldier? Perhaps they die of ostracism or malaria, they grow cold, yellow, and they emigrate to a star of ice, to a cool planet, to rest, at last, among girls and glacial fruits, and their corpses, their poor fiery corpses will go guarded by alabaster angels to sleep far from the flame and the ash.
Through each day that falls, with its twilight obligation to succumb; I walk, performing an unnecessary watch, and I pass among Mohammedan merchants, among people who adore the cow and the cobra, I pass, unadorable and common faced. The months are not unalterable, and at time it rains; from the heat of the sky falls an infusion as silent as sweat, and over the great vegetables, over the backs of fierce beasts, along a certain silence, these moist feathers interweave and lengthen. Waters of the night, tears of the monsoon wind, salt saliva fallen like the horse's spume, and slow to augment, poor in splash, astonished in flight...
Then from time to time, I visit girls with young eyes and hips, beings in whe hair shines a flower yellow as the lightning. They wear rings on each toe, and bracelets, and bangles on their ankles, and besides, colored necklaces, necklaces that I remove and examine, because I want to discover myself before an uninterrupted and compact body, and not to mitigate my kiss, I weight with my arms each new statue, and I drink its living remedy with masculine thirst and in silence. Stretched out, looking up at the fugitive creature, climbing up over her naked being to her smile; gigantic and triangular above, raised in the air by two global breasts, fixed before my eyes like two lamps with light of white oil and gentle energy. I commend myself to her dark star, to the warmth of her skin...
excerpted from The Night of the Soldier, Residence on Earth
tr. Donald D. Walsh
And then there's Gonzalo de Berceo's (c. late 12th/early 13th c.) The Praise of Spring translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
The Praise of Spring
I, GONZALO de Berceo, in the gentle summertide,
Wending upon a pilgrimage, came to a meadow's side;
All green was it and beautiful, with flowers far and wide,--
A pleasant spot, I ween, wherein the traveller might abide.
Flowers with the sweetest odors filled all the sunny air,
And not alone refreshed the sense, but stole the mind from every care;
On every side a fountain gushed, whose waters pure and fair,
Ice-cold beneath the summer sun, but warm in winter were.
There on the thick and shadowy trees, amid the foliage green,
Were the fig and the pomegranate, the pear and apple seen;
And other fruits of various kinds, the tufted leaves between,
None were unpleasant to the taste and none decayed, I ween.
The verdure of the meadow green, the odor of the flowers
The grateful shadows of the trees, tempered with fragrant showers,
Refreshed me in the burning heat of the sultry noontide hours;
Oh, one might live upon the balm and fragrance of those bowers!
Ne'er had I found on earth a spot that had such power to please,
Such shadows from the summer sun, such odors on the breeze;
I threw my mantle on the ground, that I might rest at ease,
And stretched upon the greensward lay in the shadow of the trees.
There soft reclining in the shade, all cares beside me flung,
I heard the soft and mellow notes that through the woodland rung;
Ear never listened to a strain, for instrument or tongue,
So mellow and harmonious as the songs above me sung.