100 Refutations: Day 10 | InTranslation
100 Refutations: Day 10 | InTranslation
Gaspar Octavio Hernández (1893-1918) was born in Panama City and worked as a journalist while writing poetry until the age of twenty-five, when, according to Antologia de la Poesia Hispanoamericana, he died “painfully during a fit of Hemoptysis […] while editing the ‘Star of Panama.’” He was a dedicated editor, an ambitious poet, and a prolific writer, best known for “Canto a la Bandera,” “Melodías del Pasado,” “Cristo y la mujer de Sichar,” “La copa de amatista,” and “Iconografías.”
from the article:
Ego Sum
Neither mother of Pearl’s complexion, nor locks of gold Shall you see, like finery, adorning my frame; neither sapphire’s light, celestial and pure, trapped and shining, in the pit of my eyes
With the toasted skin of a sun-tanned moor, with the dark eyes of fatal blackness, from Ancón to dark green skirts I was born before a sonorous Pacific sea.
I am a son of sea…because in my soul There are, like upon waves, nights of calm, and indefinable, nameless rages
an urgency to fight with myself, when in recondite grief, I sink into the abyss thinking I am only sea, cut into the shape of a man