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Post by MoonyLuna on Dec 23, 2008 13:14:39 GMT -5
Ceremony Life is in the hands of God. Prepare for the final battle every time, no matter if you have to fight again. Pray solemnly and calmly, bestowing supreme importance on each formal phrase. You must make a ritual of dressing: your battle garb could become a shroud. As you pass by on your way to combat, salute your friends briefly, pulling down the visor of your helmet to make clear that you are going alone to see what chance holds for you and meet its gaze straight on. Life is in the hands of God. Ask only that He grant you victory and forgiveness for the blood and the audacity.
Horses Die in Battle Too Horses die in battle too. They do it slowly as the wounds they accumulate come from arrows that have missed their marks. They bleed to death, their suffering noble and calm. A look of superiority and distance claims their motionless eyes, while their ears must undergo the raging, disproportionate agony of men.
Your Eyes, the Ones that I See in the Battle Your eyes, the ones that I see in the battle, that stare at me as I am stained with blood, that, before accusing, have pardoned me. I don't know why they follow me, those eyes that are in all things, always keeping watch.
(Text of the poems in the original Spanish)
Copyright Julio Martínez Mesanza translated from the Spanish by Don Bogen
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Post by MoonyLuna on Dec 23, 2008 13:15:44 GMT -5
Featured Poet Julio Martínez Mesanza
Julio Martínez Mesanza is among the most prominent of a generation of Spanish poets to begin publishing in the 1980s. His books include Europa, Las trincheras, and Entre el muro y el foso, as well as an edition of new and selected poems in 2007.
Don Bogen
Don Bogen's fourth book of poetry An Algebra is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He is the author of three other books of poetry, most recently Luster. A former Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Spain, he teaches at the University of Cincinnati. In 2008 he received a Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute for his work on the selected poems of Julio Martínez Mesanza.
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