Of Cardboard Mankind is Made / De cartón el hombre se hizo
Original poem in Spanish by Sergio Fong, from the anthology Letras de Cartón, a collaborative publication from twenty cartonero publishers in eight countries.
Link to bilingual version/ versión bilingüe (PDF).
English translation by David Brendan O’Meara.
Of cardboard mankind is made
Cartonero is the name of the man
who walks among the entrails of the urban animal
through its despised innards
Crawling worm that sifts and winnows
through the garbage of the great capital and its outcast
human dregs
Who harvests the skin of the cartonero book
our daily bread
our spiritual food
so that we may create this hand-made instrument
that protects the scribblings of some crazy
that somehow transfers the essence of a creative soul
that carries within its pages the story of a sage
whose tome might nourish our lives
that calls us to natural beauty
that fills us with love and joy
that talks to us, that won’t shut up, that will not die
Once it was just packaging, a box, the case of a
cadaver
now it dances and disseminates
So that varnish and color might replicate its existence
so it might create a continent of dreams and visions
The book made of cardboard
with its corrugated cover that protects from the rain
and the cold, from every misfortune
like a snug lid wrapping the matter
the printed letter and the meaning of the word
so they might go forth and be seen by the eyes of another
who from it reads and weaves the verb that recreates us
and we are known as cartoneros
While God goes on picking from the streets
The cardboard of which we are made.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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