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JOSEP PALAU I FABRE (1917-2008)
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- THE SHOE
(Translation by Sam Abrams)
- I gave my heart to a fallen woman.
- It was rotting in my hands. Who would have wanted it?
- At trash dumps an old discarded shoe
- attracts us the same and seems a partly hidden treasure.
- All refined young girls that wander around me
- haven't had the strength to give me the comfort
- that an embrace gives, because men don't cry
- with their eyes, they cry with their sex and it's sad to cry alone.
- I want all my relatives and female friends to know:
- Josep Palau is no angel nor is he a role model.
- If they had a pretty image of me,
- now I offer them the naked truth.
- I want no more fiction in my life.
- That masquerade has lasted far too long.
- Since you are disgusted by my festering wound,
- I leave my shoe on the junk heap.
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- 21 March 1943
- POET-NARCISSUS
(Translation by Sam Abrams)
- Verse: be like me.
- I see myself in you if you see me.
- Are we one or two voices?
- Which, however, is whose.