Vertaling - Spaans-Engels - Pan de Gabriela Mistral

Bread
by Gabriela Mistral

They left a loaf of bread on the table,
white inside, brown crust,
its top broken into a scatter
of big snowy crumbs.

It seems new, a thing I've never seen,
yet it's all I've ever eaten,
but half-asleep, playing with its crumbs,
touch and smell are forgotten.

It smells like my mother suckling me.
It smells like my three valleys,
Aconcagua, Pa'tzcuaro, Elqui.
It smells like I feel when I'm singing.

There are no other smells in the farmhouse
and that's how it could call me.
Nobody else around the house,
only this loaf broken open on a plate
that knows me with its body
as I know it with mine.

Everywhere in the world its been eaten,
this same bread, its hundred brothers,
bread of Coquimbo, bread of Oaxaca,
bread of Santa Ana and Santiago.

When I was little, I knew it,
in the shape of a sun, a fish, a ring,
and my hand knew its inner warmth
like a plumy pigeon.

Then I forgot it till today,
when we two meet,
I with my body of an aged Sara,
it with the body of a five-year-old.