Sounds of silence

Who are you? Who talks like you do, or writes about the world of nature as if it could speak? Do you really hear plants and birds and spring waters holding conversations? Nobody’s going to believe that story. Oh, right, when you go by, as if you had extraordinary powers, as if you knew secret languages, as if you could perceive beauty nobody else can see.

You are able to hear the world, but your special ability isn’t what you think, is it? You see and hear, but your skill isn’t able to overcome time, and your dreams will get you nowhere. You can’t seem to get it through your head that time doesn’t stand still.

Dicen que no hablan las plantas, ni las fuentes, ni los pájaros,

ni el onda con sus rumores, ni con su brillo los astros,

lo dicen, pero no es cierto, pues siempre cuando yo paso

de mí murmuran y exclaman:

Ahí va la loca soñando

con la eterna primavera de la vida y de los campos,

y ya bien pronto, bien pronto, tendrá los cabellos canos,

y ve temblando, p, que cubre la escarcha el prado.

Hay canas en mi cabeza, hay en los prados escarcha,

mas yo prosigo soñando, pobre, incurable sonámbula,

con la eterna primavera de mi vida que se apaga

y la perenne frescura de los campos y las almas,

aunque los unos se agostan y aunque las otras se abrasan.

Astros y fuentes y flores, no murmuréis de mis sueños,

sin ellos, ¿cómo admiraros ni cómo vivir sin ellos?

This is what you’re trying to say, but even you know you’re talking to yourself. I arranged your poem in simple English so you can understand what you’re actually saying. Listen to yourself!

They say plants don’t speak, nor do springs or birds, nor does the murmuring wave, nor the glimmering stars, they say it, but it’s not true, because whenever I pass by, they whisper about me and cry:

There goes the madwoman with her dreams about the eternal spring of life and the fields, and soon, very soon, her hair will be white, and trembling and stiff, she’ll see the frost covering the meadow.

There are gray hairs on my head, there’s frost on the meadow, but poor, incurable sleepwalker, I keep dreaming of my life’s eternal spring, it’s being snuffed out, and the perennial coolness of fields and soils, although some are burned and others baking.

Stars and springs and flowers, don’t talk of my dreams, without them, how can I admire you, without them, how can I live?

Who are you? You are real, but you’re also more than that. You are madness burst from your love, of your world. You are the crack where light gets in, recedes, then floods the room with blond joy that turns the color of morriña. Homesickness, nostalgia, you don’t seem willing to give up on that sadness. You are the person who cries over the nail in her heart more now that it has been released from its mortal sheath. It seems you enjoy suffering. Your poems seem to say that. Little complaints that your moaning doesn’t fix. Self-pity? Perhaps that’s your justification; I can’t for the life of me figure out what you’re really trying to do, why you’re sobbing, because you are making no sense.

But who are you and why weep over nonsense? Is it because you’re not what you tried to say in your poem? You’re not a plant-whisperer, you’re not even endowed with a communicative capacity that is unique. I’ll tell you what I think:

You are a delicately woven army of yous who follow and flank you. There is one of you on every corner, the walking living leaving exiling sighing. You look around, you fall in love because you were born into beauty, green, sewn and sown patches of patchwork community you all fit together. You cannot ignore the things you see and hear. You can’t help joining in and being a part of it. If you say nothing, it will all burst, the magnificence you swallow whole and clean will urge you to rage for the continuation of what you crave, the haunting that is eternal and fleeting, an addiction to breathing what enters you where it can so it can remind you of what is yours not to possess but to worship, as if you could risk it all by letting it ripple sway into the nothingness of the world beyond the good. You aren’t able to understand this and may not wish to drown in the insistence of understanding.

Perhaps it’s unfair to unleash all this criticism on you. After all, what have you done to deserve my judgment? I who have nothing but an unrepaired heart, stiff and bloodless, mute and deafened, reluctant to listen to any poem that might exist anywhere in the world. You who have the ability to look at what envelopes, silences, poisons, grows and loses its love to the despots with their devastation, the human sort, who revile what they cannot own, what cares nothing for them, demons that they are, incapable of thriving even on the gentlest lily pads or the scent of spikenard and soap brewed from the reason for being. You can’t begin to understand what I’m saying. You have always understood that the speech of weeds or heather, lichens and fireflies, is too much for the world to decipher.

Are you still here? How are you? What do you hope to achieve with so much listening and calling? I’m helpless as I stand here hoping to understand what you mean, fearing that I might come to comprehend what your questions - tossed out into a world you never comprehended - really mean. Your world of gratefulness that will last forever because if it does not, all the dampened pebbles will speak no longer and you will fall, victim to the beauty of Galician, bursting at the seams of your verses, created only because you agreed to perform the role.

You will never know the sound of these words, but still I will wait until the world shifts, or falls silent enough for Rosalía to beckon to it, alive or dead.