RUBÉN DARIO
Translated by Tamas Panitz
Venus*
In the tranquil night, my nostalgias become better with suffering.
In their search for quiet they descend into the fresh hush of the garden.
In the obscure night Venus’ beautiful light trembles
encrusting ebony with golden and divine jasmine.
My soul is enamored with the decree from an oriental queen,
that waits on the roof of her lovely mouth as in a dressing room.
She who, raised upon shoulders, the profound expanses toured,
triumphant and luminous, leaning upon a palanquin.
Oh, Ruby Queen! –– my soul, he says he desires leave to quit
his chrysalis and fly to you, into the flaming kiss of your lips;
and float in the nimbus that pours upon your brow its pallid light,
and in sidereal ecstasy not leave you for a moment, for love.
The air of the night refreshed the humid atmosphere.
Venus, from the abyss, gave me back a saddened glance.
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Tamas Panitz is the author of several poetry books, including The Country Passing By (Model City 2022), and Toad’s Sanctuary (Ornithopter Press: 2021). Other books include Conversazione, interviews with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia: 2022), and The Selected Poems of Charles Tomás; trans. w/Carlos Lara (Schism: 2022). He now co-edits the journal NEW, which he co-founded. He is also the author of a pornographic novella, Mercury in Lemonade (New Smut Series: 2023). His paintings and stray poems can be found on instagram, @tamaspanitz.
Rubén Darío (18 January 1867 – 6 February 1916) does not fare well in the English speaking world. He probably isn’t very good in French either. He is sort of Parnassian, as many Spanish-language poetry admirers have rightfully pointed out, though he is at the same time so entirely South American that his modernism needed its own term: modernismo.
In the process of translating him I’ve grown fond of this blundering giant. He has a robust and ruddy charm to him. Unfortunately, that charm could hardly be conveyed by a timid and worshipful translator without a taste for mirth, and indeed his translators have appeared to be such. The poem translated here is from his book Azul.
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*It’s curious to note that Aubrey Beardsley began work on Venus & Tannhäuser in 1894, and dedicated that unfinished work to “Guilio Poldo Pezzoli, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church […] Nuncio to the Holy See, in Nicaragua and Patagonia […]” Though Beardsley’s dedication is ironic, and Guilio Poldo Pezzoli a fiction, he might nonetheless have had a soft spot for, if not a friendship with, the Nicaraguan and creator of Modernismo.