Song Without a Body

by Emilio Prados

translated by Jennifer Barber

Once I dreamt of sleep;
another time, of death,
another, of being alive.

Now I believe that to dream
is to sleep alive in death
in order to
forget its name.

I have no rest:
the one who could wake me
isn’t here.

 

Emilio Prados (b. 1899, d. 1962), from Málaga, Spain, belongs to the generation of ’27 that included Lorca, Vincente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others. With Altolaguirre, Prados founded the literary magazine Litoral in 1926. Prados left Spain as a result of the Civil War, and spent the rest of his life in Mexico. His Poesías Completas, edited by Carlos Blanco Aguinaga and Antonio Carreira, was published by Visor Libros in Madrid in 1999.

Jennifer Barber’s recent poetry collection is Rigging the Wind (Kore Press, 2003). She is editor of the journal Salamander. (1/2005)