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Alianza y condena

Gift of Inebriation (1953). A song of irrational, youthful exaltation. Stemming from a conceptual enthusiasm about light and matter, and based on love, it conveys joy, lightness and clarity to the self, all of them akin to the platonic world view.

Don de la ebriedad, Madrid: Rialp, 1953, 63 p., (Adonais, 102), Premio Adonais 1953.

FURTHER EDITIONS
- Madrid, Torremozas, 1989, 61 p., (El vaso de Berceo, 3).
- Madrid, Rialp, 2000, 61 p., (Adonáis, 102), ed. facsímil.
- Zamora, Instituto de Estudios Zamoranos Florián de Ocampo, Seminario Permanente Claudio Rodríguez, 2009.
- Don de la ebriedad. Conjuros, edited by Luis García Jambrina, Madrid, Castalia, 1998, 193 p., (Clásicos Castalia, 239).


Clarity always comes from the sky;
it is a gift: it is not found among things
but very high up, and it occupies them
making that its own life and labours.
Thus day dawns; thus night
encloses the great dwelling of its shadows.
And this is a gift. Who makes beings
less created each time? What high vault
contains them in its love? It is already coming
and though still early, already it comes round
in the manner of your flights
and it hovers, and goes away and, still remote,
there is nothing so clear as its drives!
Oh, clarity thirsty for a form,
for a matter to dazzle it
burning itself on completing its work.
Like me, like everything that waits.
If you have taken all the light away
how am I to expect anything of the dawn?
And yet—this is a gift—my mouth waits,
and my soul waits, and you wait for me,
inebriate pursuit, clarity alone
deadly like the embrace of sickles,
yet an embrace till the end that never slackens.

Translated by Luis Ingelmo and Michael Smith, Collected Poems / Poesía Completa 1953-1991. Exeter. Shearsman Books, 2008.