(from the Spanish of Alfonsina Storni)
Rows of houses, houses in rows,
rows of houses,
squares, rectangles,
houses in rows --
souls also,
ideas arranged and filed,
and shoulders, right-angled.
My God, yesterday, a tear
dangled,
it too a square --
a rectangle.
Casas enfiladas, casas enfiladas,
casas enfiladas,
cuadrados, cuadrados, cuadrados,
casas enfiladas.
Las gentes ya tienen el alma cuadrada,
ideas en fila
y ángulo en la espalda;
yo misma he vertido
ayer una lágrima,
Dios mío, cuadrada.
(An original Spanish version can be found at: http://www.gavilan.edu/disted/html/2_02.html
; retrieved online, 2014.)
I first translated this from a book at the end of 8th grade but I only had a few half rhymes and did not have 'dangled' -- as I have now -- in the English version. I liked the poem then but did not really realize how great it was, how neat the plays on words; I just thought 'oh nice, simple word plays, I can do this, it's at my level, not too many words to look up'. Storni says that ideas are arranged in single file, in a line thus; but I decided that the false cognate, 'file', worked nicely in English.