Poetry
Nocturno
Not translated into English
José Asunción Silva · 1894
Opening lines
Una noche,
una noche toda llena de perfumes, de murmullos y de música de alas,
una noche,
en que ardían en la sombra nupcial y húmeda, las luciérnagas fantásticas,
One night,
a night all full of perfumes, of murmurs and of the music of wings,
one night,
when in the nuptial and humid shadow the fantastic fireflies were burning,
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from es.wikisource.org
Synopsis
A night full of murmurs, perfumes and the music of wings. Two beings walk together across the plain, and on the sand of the path their shadows, long, join and become one. Then comes another time: the one who speaks walks alone, in the cold of the tombs, separated from her by the infinity of the dark. His shadow still stretches over the sand, but alone this time, and he watches it advance towards what it seeks.
Context
The text appeared in July 1894 in a weekly of Cartagena, where the author had stopped for a few days at the president's house on his way to take up a post as legation secretary in Caracas. The rhythm is what struck readers first: a Spanish poet saw in it the poem most representative of late romanticism and early modernism. The city's society made much of him, to the point that he received fifteen visits in one morning and that his verses were recited in front of him. The poem was taken up at once by a newspaper of the capital and by a Caracas review.
Who it is for
About sixty lines of verse, in Spanish. The text is meant to be read aloud: its scansion is its subject as much as the mourning, and it is what a translation loses first.
Prizes and reception
One of the most famous poems in the Spanish language, and one of the texts that open Spanish American modernismo.