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Rosalía Castro Hour After Hour translated from the Spanish by Michael Smith
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Hour after hour, day after day,
between earth and sky, which stay,
eternal watches –
life passes
like a hurtling torrent.Return to the flower its scent
after it withers;
from the waves that kiss the beach,
one by one expiring with their kisses,
pick up again their sounds, their moans,
and on bronze engrave their harmony.
Times that were, plaints and smiles,
black torments, sweet lies.
Ah, where have they left their trace,
my soul, where?
Rosalía de Castro (1837-1883) was born at Santiago de Compostela. She is one of the greatest protagonists of regionalism in Spanish literature, and her intimate studies of the Galician province brought her into early prominence. Her Cantares gallegos appeared in 1863; her En las orillas del Sar, in 1884. The first of these was written in gallego (Galician), the language of north-western Spain which has similarities to Portuguese, and her poetic activity in that language revolutionised it as a literary medium. In the second book, written in Castilian Spanish, she showed an experimental spirit, breaking with the dominant accepted metrical forms of her day and using imagery of an unusual kind. She has been situated by later poets, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, as a forerunner of Rubén Darío, the initiator of Hispanic modernismo. |
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