La Verdadera Cara de los Ángeles
Wednesday, August 09, 2017
This woman had a face. I was completely amazed when I focused my camera on this image of her on my psychiatric couch. My grandmother would have said of her face, “Un cromo.”
I am not a poet and not more than a mediocre writer.
I cannot write anything here that would celebrate such a face.
And so I am placing here a poem by Julio Cortázar called The True Face of Angels. You would think that such a title would be
followed by beautiful words. That is not the case. Luckily there is no
translation into English of this poem about hunger and napalm. This link has
Cortázar narrating the poem. I sometimes wonder if poets and writers in English
have contributed to YouTube as much as the fans of this mostly un-translated Argentine
author.
La
verdadera cara de los ángeles
es que
hay napalm y hay niebla y hay tortura.
La cara
verdadera es el zapato entre la mierda, el lunes de mañana, el diario.
La
verdadera cara
cuelga
de perchas y liquidación de saldos.
De los
ángeles la cara verdadera
es un
álbum que cuesta 30 francos
y está
lleno de caras:
las
verdaderas caras de los ángeles.
La cara
de un negrito hambriento,
la cara
de un cholito mendigando,
un
vietnamita, un argentino, un español,
la cara
verde del hambre verdadera de los ángeles.
Por 30
francos la emoción en casa.
La cara
verdadera de los ángeles,
la cara
verdadera de los hombres,
la
verdadera cara de los ángeles.
