El villorio
Un tren detenido sobre el llano
En cada charco duermen estrellas sordas
Y el agua tiembla
Cortinaje al viento
La noche cuelga en la arboleda
En el campanario florecido
Una gotera viva
Desangra las estrellas
De cuando en cuando
Las horas maduras
Caen sobre la vida.
Vicente Huidobro
Hours
Jerkwater
town
A
train stopped on the plain
In
every pool sleep unhearing stars
And the water trembles
And the water trembles
Curtain
to the wind
Night
hangs in the copse.
In
the flowered bell tower
A
living trickle
Bleeds
the stars white.
From
time to time
The
ripe hours
Fall
upon life.
Tr.
EAC
E A. Costa 2 April, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua
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E A. Costa 2 April, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua
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N.B.:
A “jerkwater town” in English is a small or
insignificant
village where trains drawn by steam
locomotives
stopped to refill their boilers. These small
towns
and villages did not even merit a water tower
and
water had to be “jerked” in buckets from streams
or
ponds by the tracks. The expression fits the Spanish
“villorrio”
nicely, and in the poem even to its stopped train.
Huidobro was tutored by British and French governesses.
He also traveled to New York at least once in 1921,
though that visit was a few years after he published this
work in Poemas árticos. Did Huidobro perhaps know
the English expression?
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