The Poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

I've just finished first revisions on all 98 rimas. If you see any obvious blunders please email me.

There are a few earlier translations into English. The Renard and Allison each only contain 76 rimas. Croft-Cooke has 20, Woolsey has 32. Oddly, while I have been able to acquire four of the earliest translations, all the more recent ones are still eluding me!

• Owen Innsly, Love Songs & Other Poems, A. Williams & Co., 1882; reprinted New York : Grafton Press, 1902
• Mason Carnes, Poems of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, rendered into English verse, London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891
• Jules Renard, Rimas of Gustavo Becquer, Boston: Richard C. Badger, Gorham Pr. 1908; Gordon Press, ISBN 0849025257; Scholarly Press, 1976, ISBN 0403065143; also available as print-on-demand facsimile
• Young Allison, The infinite passion, being the celebrated Rimas and the Letters to an unknown woman of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Chicago: Walter M. Hill, 1924
• Rupert Croft-Cooke, Twenty Poems from the Spanish of Becquer, With an Introductory Note on his Life and Work, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927
• Arthur Wallace Woolsey, The witch of Trazmoz & other stories and poems. Translated from the Spanish of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Olympic, 1965
• David F. Altabé, Joan B. Altabé, Symphony of love: las Rimas; a translation, Long Beach, N.Y.: Regina Pub. House, 1974
• Susanne Dubroff, Flower on a Volcano, St. Paul: Ally Press, June 1980, ISBN 0915408228
• Bruce Phenix, The rimas of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Braunton: Merlin, 1985
• Henry W. Sullivan, The Poems of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer: A Metrical Linear Translation, Rock Hill, S.C.: Spanish Literature Pubns Co, October 2002

The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English by O. Classe says:

Seven of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Leyendas (1871) appeared in 1891 (Terrible Tales: Spanish; London; anonymous translator). In that same year, his Rimas (composed in 1876-80) were translated by M. Carnes (London: Kegan Paul). The last reprint of this collection was published in 1927. Many individual poems continued to be translated throughout the following decades (Owen Innsly was their most prolific translator).

It appears from some typescript papers in the Princeton University Library rare books collection that Arthur Symons may also have translated the Rimas.

A few individual poems have been translated in magazines or anthologies:

• Mary Ward, Macmillans Magazine, Feb 1883, p.316
• Poet Lore a Quarterly of World Literature, Volume XLV #2, Spring 1939
  Poet Lore a Quarterly of World Literature, Volume XLV #3-4, Summer-Autumn 1939 (contain some Becquer)
• Angel Flores (ed.), An Anthology of Spanish Poetry, Anchor Books, 1961
• Maria Fernandez de Laguna, Hispania. Spanish Poems Rendered into English Verse, London: Rankin Brothers Limited, 1964
• Helen Wohl Patterson, Antología bilingüe (español-inglés) de la poesía española moderna, Cultura Hispánica, 1965
• Eugenio Florit, Introduction to Spanish Poetry: A Dual-Language Book, New York: Dover, 1991
• Kate Farrell (ed.), Art and Wonder : An Illustrated Anthology of Visionary Poetry, New York, NY, U.S.A.: MMA/Bulfinch, 1996 (contains one by Becquer)

Some of the Rimas have been set to music:

• Eloisa D. De Silva, En El Baile. Recitado per Violino e per Pianoforte. Rimas de Gustavo A. Becquer. (Op.112). , Buenos Aires: Breyer
• Roberto Sierra, Rimas : for voice & piano, Bryn Mawr, PA: Subito Music, 1999 (score includes English translations)

Rimas

1. "I know a strange gigantic hymn"
2. "Bolt that flies / headlong, fired at random,"
3. "Strange jolt / that shakes up ideas,"
4. "Do not say that, treasure depleted,"
5. "Spirit without name, / indefinable essence,"
6. "Like a fresh breeze that dispels / a dark battlefield's bloody smells"
7. "In a dark corner of the salon,"
8. "When I watch the blue horizon / vanish in the distance"
9. "The breeze that softly moans kisses / the slender waves and they ripple playfully"
10. "The invisible atoms of the air / rub together and become aroused"
11. "- I am burning, I am brown, / I am the very symbol of passion;"
12. "Because they are young, your eyes / green like the sea, you despair;"
13. "Your eyes are blue, and when you laugh,"
14. "I saw you for an instant, and, floating before my eyes,"
15. "Floating veil of slight mist, / curly ribbon of white foam,"
16. "If when the bluebells rustle / on your balcony,"
17. "Today the earth and heavens smile on me;"
18. "Tired from dancing, / flushed with color, short of breath,"
19. "When your unhappy head / drops over your chest,"
20. "Know, if at times your red lips / are scorched by an invisible blast of air,"
21. "What is poetry? you ask while your blue / eyes rivet mine"
22. "How can it live, the rose that you have caught / next to your heart?"
23. "For a glance, the world, / for a smile, the heavens,"
24. "Two red tongues of fire / on the same trunk"
25. "When at night dream's / wings of tulle surround you,"
26. "It is not in my interest to confess it;"
27. "When you're awake, I shudder to glance:"
28. "When from a lost dark / shadow a voice murmurs"
29. "On your skirt rested / the open book,"
30. "There appeared in her eyes a tear"
31. "Our passion was a tragic farce"
32. "She passed by wrapped in her beauty,"
33. "It's a question of words and, unfortunately,"
34. "She travels quietly and her movements are / silent harmony;"
35. "I don't cherish your forgetfulness! Although there was a day,"
36. "If a history of our wrongs / were written in a book,"
37. "I will die before you: already buried"
38. "Sighs are air and go to the air!"
39. "That which a savage with clumsy hands"
40. "Her hand in my hand, / her eyes in my eyes,"
41. "You were the hurricane and I the tall / tower that defies its force:"
42. "When they informed me I felt the cold / of a steel blade in my entrails,"
43. "I pushed the lamp to one side, and sat / on the edge of the disheveled bed,"
44. "Like in an open book / I read in the depths of your eyes;"
45. "In the keystone of the ruined arch"
46. "Your breath is the breath of flowers,"
47. "I have been mystified by the deep abysses / of the earth and the sky"
48. "Sometimes I meet her in the world / and she passes close by me:"
49. "Why tell me? I know: she's fickle,"
50. "Of what little of life is left to me"
51. "Gigantic waves that break roaring / on remote and deserted beaches,"
52. "Dark swallows will return / to hang their nests on your balcony"
53. "When we return to evoke the / fugitive hours of the past,"
54. "Amid the discordant uproar of the orgy"
55. "Today like yesterday, tomorrow like today"
56. "You ask of this delicious nectar / that it not be bitter at the bottom of the keg?"
57. "I know what the object / of your sighs is;"
58. "On seeing my hours of fever / and insomnia pass slowly"
59. "She wounded me, hiding in the shadows,"
60. "Like one pulls a knife from a wound"
61. "This frame of skin and bones / parading a lunatic's head,"
62. "At first it's a blurry and flickering glow,"
63. "Like a swarm of irritated bees,"
64. "As a miser guards his treasure, / I guarded my pain;"
65. "The night came and I found no shelter, / and I was thirsty...!"
66. "From where do I come...? Seek the most horrible / and rugged of paths:"
67. "How beautiful to see the day / arise crowned with flames,"
68. "I don't know what I dreamed / this past night;"
69. "In a bright flash of lightning we are born"
70. "How many times at the foot of the mossy / wall that protects her,"
71. "I wasn't asleep; I wandered in the limbo"
72. "The waves have vague harmony, / the violets sweet scent,"
73. "They closed her eyes / which were still open,"
74. "Their clothes undone, / naked their swords"
75. "Is it true that when dream touches / our eyes with its pink fingers,"
76. "In the imposing nave / of the byzantine church,"
77. "Life is a dream, / but a fevered dream that's over at once;"
78. "The sun can cloud over eternally; / the sea can dry up in an instant;"
79. "My life is uncultivated land,"
80. "Patriarchs who were the seed / of the tree of faith in remote centuries:"
81. "You say you have a heart, but you only / say that because you feel it pound"
82. "Counterfeiting realities / from unreal shadows,"
83. "One woman has poisoned my soul, / another woman has poisoned my body;"
84. "TO CHASTITY / Your voice is the breath of flowers,"
85. "TO ELISA / So that you read them with your grey eyes,"
86. "Chopped-off flowers, withered leaves"
87. "The dawn is a shadow / of your smile,"
88. "Wandering through the world I shouted:"
89. "Phantom blacks, / shadowy clouds, / flee before the glimmer / of the divine light."
90. "I am a beam, the sweet breeze, / ardent tear, fresh smile,"
91. "Have you not sensed at night,"
92. "Resting my warm forehead / on the cold crystal of the windowpane,"
93. "If the clear current / of the nearby stream replicates your features"
94. "Were I moon, / were I breeze, / were I sun!"
95. "I took refuge, like a lost ship,"
96. "In order to find your face / I watched the sky"
97. "Those grumbles of the piano / given off at intervals,"
98. "Ship that furrows the seas,"

... my congratulations on the excellent work that you have done in translating Bécquer. I have read your translations with pleasure and profit; for a translator is the most succinct of critics and also the most profound, since he must use the same number of words as the author (or nearly the same number) not just to communicate the author's meaning, but to explicate it. Every decision the translator makes, what he includes and what he excludes, constitutes a critical judgment infinitely more bold than even the most extreme verdicts of the most extreme critics. Your own choices have been consistently sound and the results have yielded eloquent and graceful translations imbued with Becquer's romantic spirit.

        Manuel A. Tellechea, translator of Jose Marti's Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses)

Only in the second half of the [19th] century do we find such qualities as the emotional subtlety and heightened imagination that we associate with European Romanticism in general. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), once treated condescendingly as a naive, hopeless sentimental, has come to be seen as a key figure, in both his Rimas (Rhymes, 1870) and his Leyendas (Legends, between 1858 and 1864), in the development of imaginative and unforced expression. His definition of poetry as 'natural, breve, seca, que brota del alma como uno chispa eléctrica ...' (natural, short, dry, flying from the soul like an electric spark) captures exactly the nature of his direct, concentrated verse, which has a brevity and spontaneity reminiscent of popular poetry, and tends to eliminate all cause and circumstance. While some poems show a disconcerting ingenuousness, many others go through the whole gamut of Romantic attitudes: self-pity, recrimination, sarcasm, meditation on death, and escape into the dream or the unconscious. In the images he employs, all the senses are brought into play, light being particularly prominent; they have a measure of synaesthesia or fusion of the senses that anticipates symbolism, 'con palabras que fuesen a un tiempo / suspiros y risas, colores y notas' ('with words that were at once sighs and laughter, colours and notes', Rima 1, see Urrutia, p. 509). At times, too, we find an unexpected touch of objective analysis, as when he indicates faults on both sides in amorous situations. In these respects he seems surprisingly modern.

Other translations available on the web:
Guia K. Monti (7,9,14,15,21,23,24,30,52(he calls 53),55(56),63)
Monika Lekonda (20,21,23,24,30,31,35,38,41,49,52,59,78,81,83)