Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king? Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond Īnd like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.įor life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.īut how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? Bryant either failed to understand or ignored the opening word, ‘If,’ because he was not familiar with the poet’s history.” As Johnson’s rendering of the title suggests, the original poem was written shortly before the poet’s impending death: Plácido was executed on June 28, 1844, for his alleged participation in La Conspiración de la Escalera, a suspected slave revolt in Spanish Cuba which never materialized. The key to the poem is in the first word, and the first word is the Spanish conjunction Si (if). The American poet makes it a tender and loving farewell of a son who is about to die to a heart-broken mother but that is not the kind of a farewell that Plácido intended to write or did write. In the foreword to the anthology, Johnson writes, “It is curious to note how Bryant’s translation totally misses the intimate sense of the delicate subtility of the poem. In the appendix of James Weldon Johnson’s anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), an English translation appears that Johnson offers as an improvement upon William Cullen Bryant’s translation of the same sonnet, printed just beside it. “Plácido’s Farewell to His Mother” was first published under the Spanish title “Despedida a mi madre” in Poesias completas de Plácido (Libería Hispano-Americana de Mellado, Contreras y C, 1856). Que vertiera al nacer: ya el cuello inclino!

Y el triste fin de mi sangrienta historia, I gave at birth-And now the hour is here.

⁠A note scarce more than a burden-easing sigh, I calmly go to a death that is glory-filled,īreathes out to thee its last and dying note. Mother, should wake a single pang in thee, The closing of my span of years so brief, Written in the chapel of the Hospital de Santa Cristina on the night before his execution translated from the Spanish by James Weldon Johnson

En memoria de mi madre