Skip to main content

Silvio Rodriguez - Playa Giron


Silvio Rodriguez (Photographer?)


Playa Giron


Compañeros poetas, tomando en cuenta
los últimos sucesos en la poesía, quisiera preguntar – me urge – ,
¿Qué tipo de adjetivos se deben usar para hacer
el poema de un barco, sin que se haga sentimental,
fuera de la vanguardia, o evidente panfleto,
si debo usar palabras como Flota Cubana de Pesca, y Playa Girón?

Compañeros de música, tomando en cuenta
esas politonales y audaces canciones, quisiera preguntar – me urge – ,
¿Qué tipo de armonía se debe usar para hacer
la canción de este barco con hombres de poca niñez,
hombres y solamente, hombres sobre cubierta?
Hombres negros y rojos y azules,
los hombres que pueblan el Playa Girón.

Compañeros de historia, tomando en cuenta
lo impacable que debe ser la verdad, quisiera preguntar – me urge tanto- ,
¿Qué debiera decir? ¿Qué fronteras debo respetar?
Si alguien roba comida y después da la vida, ¿Qué hacer?
¿Hasta dónde debemos practicar las verdades?
¿Hasta dónde sabemos?
Que escriban, pues, la historia, su historia, los hombres del Playa Girón.



Playa Giron


Brother poets, taking on board all
the recent developments in poetry, then I must ask - I have to; 

What kind of adjective does one use to write a poem about a boat, without being sentimental, too experimental, or preaching?
Do you think I should use words like like Cuban fishing fleet, or Playa Giron.

Brother musicians, listening to such audacious and polytonal songs, I'd just like to ask - I have to;
What kind of harmony should one use to write a song about a boat and its men, with childhoods cut short; 

just ordinary men, on its deck?
Black men, red men, and blue,
The men who live, on Playa Giron.

Brother historians, while understanding that truth is implacable, I'd just like to ask,- I really must;
What should I say? What limits should I establish
if someone steals food and then gives life? What should we do about that?
How far should we practice, these truths?
How much do we know?
Write then, if you can, the story of the men, of Playa Giron.



Silvio Rodriguez




Silvio's web page






And  "Hasta siempre Comandante Che Guevarra" 


another song by Silvio Rodriguez, covered by the Buena Vista Social Club.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...