Portrait

My childhood memories are of a patio in Seville
and a sunny garden where lemon trees ripened;
twenty years of my youth were spent in the lands of Castile;
the story of my life has some things I'd rather not remember.

I've not been a womaniser like Mañara or Bradomín
- you all know about my hopeless dress sense -
instead I received the arrows assigned to me by Cupid
and loved the generous kindness they came from.

There are drops of Jacobin blood in my veins,
but my verse flows from a serene spring;
and, more than those who are slaves to doctrine,
I am, in the true sense of the word, a good man.

I adore beauty, and use a modern aesthetic style
to cut the old roses in the garden of Ronsard;
but I'm not a fan of the latest affectations,
nor am I one of those birds that finds new ways to sing.

I scorn the romantic ballads of vacuous tenors
and the chorus of crickets that sings to the moon.
I stopped distinguishing voices from echoes,
and only hear, among the voices, one.

Am I classical or romantic? I don't know. I wish
to leave my verse as a captain leaves his sword:
famous for the manly hand that wielded it,
rather than for the worthy blacksmith's expertise.

I talk to the man that always walks beside me
- no-one talks solely in the hope of talking to God one day;
my soliloquy is a chat with that good friend
who taught me the secret of doing good unto others.

Above all, I owe you nothing; you owe me for what I’ve written.
I go about my work, earning the money to pay
for the clothes that cover me and the house I live in,
the bread that feeds me and the bed where I sleep.

And when the day of the last journey arrives,
and the ship is leaving that never turns back,
you will find me onboard, travelling light,
almost naked, like the children of the sea.