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JOSEP CARNER (1884 - 1970)
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- THE OLDEST MAN IN THE VILLAGE
(Prose translation by Sam Abrams)
- No wind stirs the least wisp of hope, from every cloud descends nothing but disquiet, destiny sinks deep into adversity, perhaps the night will be night for a hundred years.
- Yet fate does not lessen my impatience for what I have wished for and blessed so much even though my frailty declares that the time is approaching for body and spirit to bid each other farewell.
- Perhaps I have exceeded my days and at some unfamiliar turn my end awaits me. Let me fall, unchanged,
- still honouring, on a straight road, with moist eyes and loving heart, a tattered piece of cloth, that was once a flag.
- AT THE GATE OF AN INN
(Translation by Enric Bou)
- The glare of the deserted street
- closes my eyes. Meanwhile a man
- chips gravel and it is his life
- he chips. A young woman holds court
- under a very dusty grapevine:
- she chases the turn of the hour with her deception
- I see someone sleeping with a rush basket
- under his head. A cap hides
- his sleepiness which is abridging his day.
- Temporal people! Me, the man from town,
- with different gestures and tongue,
- I sip, standing there, tedium, the only philter
- to lengthen our useless life.