David Brendan O'Meara

This translation began as a crib to help me memorize these lines, which I find to be part of one of the most remarkable poems ever written.  As I began to live with these lines, slowly adding one per day to my rituals of memory, as the words became more and more a part of the rhythmic structure of my world (this is what always happens when I memorize a poem that turns out to be worth the effort), I found myself revising he crib sheet trying to make it capture at least a little bit of the strange beauty of the original. I sometimes wanted to clarify the often difficult syntax (now just what is the subject of this verb?) without losing the wild shifts of imagery, the impressionistic dream-logic wed to baroque cosmology.

My first choice arrived with the first word of the poem: pyramidal. The word is spelled exactly the same in Spanish and English, but the pronunciations are hugely different: in Spanish, with the strong stress on the final syllable, pyramiDAL is rich, sonorous and authoritative; in English, the word ends with a swallowing sound, as if the speaker has suddenly thought better of even trying to turn the word pyramid into an adjective. Instead, I chose pyramid-shaped, which at least demands a little bit of attention.

I did not attempt to capture the wonderfully irregular rhyme scheme of the original, nor the 11 syllable and 7 syllable lines, and instead arrived at something like a vision of William Blake with echoes of Milton’s Lycidas and the late poems of Donne.