Truth’s told and checked and balanced, to which there’s no objection:
The talented, the challenged, both profit from instruction.
Mexico’s curved and conic, pours out its cornucopia
- The outline is ironic, the instinct’s true and proper -
On swelling lands expanded beyond the Rio Grande,
To serve our neighbours better with bounteous open hand.
We teem with geographic peculiarities,
And every day that passes sheds further light on these.
The Saxon is above us, the Latin is below:
No sinecure, they have us on constant sentry-go.
And look at the anomalies that here are reconciled:
A land of joins and jumbles, where everything’s embroiled!
Where passing clouds are wafted from sea to shining sea,
By Occident accosted and Orient equally,
It spreads its mass obliquely from point to counterpoint,
And sends out arms respective, embracing both conjoint.
All Europe and all Asia yield spellbound to the plan,
Through Baja California and through the Yucatan.
Such is the hieroglyphic this outline files away,
And history can confirm it, and literature display.
This is the X of Schicksal, the stubborn, fateful X,
Star-compass of the fo’c’sle, criss-crossing of the tracks!
The portrait of the planet has rhyme and reason to it:
The scientist can scan it; to dream it takes the poet.
This is overt poetic geography, outlining the physical, curving shape of Mexico, travelling from the Rio Grande in the north through Baja California right down to the Yucatan in the far south-east.
Translated by Timothy Adès, rhyming translator-poet