This continues my 100-YouTube-subscriber celebration. (As of right now, I have 128 subscribers; my YouTube channel mostly consists of my Sasha Reads playlist, plus a smattering of law-related songs.)
The poems I’ve read on YouTube so far have been, more or less, 2/3 in English, 1/6 in French, 1/6 in Russian, and last week’s was in German. This week, I’m doing a Spanish poem, “Romance de la luna, luna” (“Ballad of the Moon Moon”) by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), a poem that was published as part of his collection “Romancero gitano” (“Gypsy Ballads”) in 1928. (Translation here, and there are some musical arrangements here and here.)
La luna vino a la fragua
con su polisón de nardos.
El niño la mira, mira.
El niño la está mirando.
En el aire conmovido
mueve la luna sus brazos
y enseña, lúbrica y pura,
sus senos de duro estaño.
For the rest of my “Sasha Reads” playlist, click here. Past poems are:
- “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- “The Pulley” by George Herbert
- “Harmonie du soir” (“Evening Harmony”) by Charles Baudelaire (French)
- “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- “Clancy of the Overflow” by A.B. “Banjo” Paterson
- “Лотова жена” (“Lotova zhena”, “Lot’s wife”) by Anna Akhmatova (Russian)
- “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear
- “The Conqueror Worm” by Edgar Allan Poe
- “Les Djinns” (“The Jinns”) by Victor Hugo (French)
- “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” by Alan Seeger
- “When I Was One-and-Twenty” by A.E. Housman
- “Узник” (“Uznik”, “The Prisoner” or “The Captive”) by Aleksandr Pushkin (Russian)
- “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats
- “Je crains pas ça tellment” (“I’m not that scard about”) by Raymond Queneau (French)
- “The Naming of Cats” by T.S. Eliot
- “The reticent volcano keeps…” by Emily Dickinson
- “Она” (“Ona”, “She”) by Zinaida Gippius (Russian)
- “Would I Be Shrived?” by John D. Swain
- “Evolution” by Langdon Smith
- “Chanson d’automne” (“Autumn Song”) by Oscar Milosz (French)
- “love is more thicker than forget” by e.e. cummings
- “My Three Loves” by Henry S. Leigh
- “Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени” (“Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni”, “With my dreams I caught the departing shadows”) by Konstantin Balmont (Russian)
- “Dane-geld” by Rudyard Kipling
- “Rules and Regulations” by Lewis Carroll
- “Vers dorés” (“Golden Lines”) by Gérard de Nerval (French)
- “So That’s Who I Remind Me Of” by Ogden Nash
- “The Epic” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- “La chambre double” (“The Double Room”) by Charles Baudelaire (French)
- “Медный всадник” (“The Bronze Horseman”) by Aleksandr Pushkin (Russian)
- “Herbst” (“Autumn”) by Rainer Maria Rilke (German)
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