Deep Song (Cante hondo) (1907)
by Antonio Machado, translated from Spanish by Wikisource
1873468Deep Song (Cante hondo)1907Antonio Machado

 
  I was absorbed in meditation, winding
the threads of weariness and sorrow,
when there came to my ear,
through my living room window, open
  to a hot summer night,
the wail of a sleepy copla,
riven by the darkened fluttering
of my land’s Magian music.
  And it was love, like a red flame...
-Nervous hand on the vibrating string
breathing its long golden sigh,
transforming itself into a stream of stars-.
  ...And it was death, the knife to the shoulder,
the long, grim, and skeletal footstep.
-As I dreamed it when I was young.-
  And in the guitar, resonant and tremulous,
the brusque hand, while striking, imitated
the resting of a coffin in earth.
   And that sigh was a lonely wail,
wiped out by dust and blown away by ash.


 This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.

Original:

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1939, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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Translation:

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed.

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