Death Without End (Gorostiza in English)

Rival of Octavio Paz, this is a fragment of his major poem Muerte Sin Fin. SEMV likes him, and hated me for expressing a certain dismissal of his poetry. As penance for what I now recognize as a childish mistake, I present my version of the beginning of the work.

Death Without End

1

Full in myself, besieged in my skin
by an intangible god that suffocates me,
falsely announced perhaps
by a radiant atmosphere of lights
that hides my spilled consciousness,
my shattered wings into shards of air,
my blind and graceless plodding through the mud;
full in myself –glutted—I discover myself
in the bewildered image of water,
nothing but an unwithering stagger,
a collapse of fallen angels
into the intact delight of their own weight
that has nothing
but a blank face
half sunken already, like an agonizing laughter;
fallen into the tenuous muslin of the cloud
and in the ill omens of the singing sea
--more the aftertaste of salt or birth of cumulus
than the mere hurry of accosted sea-foam.

Sinceramente,

NMMP