Monterrey Sun, by Alfonso Reyes, translated by Samuel Beckett in 1936

No doubt: the sun

dogged me when a child.

It followed at my heels

like a Pekinese;

dishevely and soft,

luminous and gold:

the sun that sleepy dogs

the footsteps of the child.

It frisked from court to court,

in my bedroom weltered.

I even think they sometimes

shooed it with a broom.

And next morning there

it was with me again,

dishevely and soft,

luminous and gold,

the sun that sleepy dogs

the footsteps of the child.

(I was dubbed a knight

by the fire of May:

I was the Child-Errant

and the sun my squire.)

Indigo all the sky,

all the house of gold.

How it poured into me,

the sun, through my eyes!

A sea inside my skull,

go where I may,

and though the clouds be drawn,

oh what weight of sun

upon me, oh what hurt

within me of that cistern

of sun that journeys with me!

No shadow in my childhood

but was red with sun.

Every window as sun,

windows every room.

The corridors bent bows

of sun through the house.

On the trees the coals

and the oranges burned redhot,

and in the burning light

the orchard turned to gold.

The royal peacocks were

kinsmen of the sun.

The heron at every step

it took went aflame.

And me the sun stripped bare

the fiercer to cleave to me,

dishevely and soft,

luminous and gold,

the sun that sleepy dogs

the footsteps of the child.

When I with my stick

and bundle went from home,

to my heart I said:

Now bear the sun awhile!

It is a hoard--unending,

unending--that I squander.

I bear with me so

much sun that so much sun

already wearies me.

No shadow in my childhood

but was red with sun.

From “Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, a Bilingual Anthology,” edited by Stephen Tapscott. (University of Texas Press: $55 cloth, $24.95 paper, 448 pp.) Copyright 1996 Reprinted by permission. Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) was Mexico’s ambassador to Spain and one of the country’s leading essayists.