While briefly chilled, I want to tell
without vengeance and what’s more with joy
how from my bed in Buenos Aires
the police took me to prison.
It was late, we had just arrived from Chile,
and without saying anything to us
they plundered my friend’s papers,
they offended the house in which I slept,
My wife vented her disdain
but there were orders to be executed
and in a moving car we roved about
the tyrannous black night.
They it was not Peron, it was another,
a new tyrant for Argentina
and by his orders doors opened,
bolt after bolt was unlocked
in order to swallow me, the patios passed,
forty bars and the infirmary,
but still they took me up into a cell,
the most impenetrable and hidden:
only they did they feel protected
from the exhalations of my poetry.
I discovered through that broken night
that three thousand were imprisoned that day:
jail, penitentiary, and as if not enough,
boats were set adrift
filled with men and women,
the pride of Argentinean souls.
My tale comes only to this:
the rest is collective history:
I wanted to read it in newspapers,
in La Prensa (which is so informative),
yet Mr. Gainza Paz does not know
if Argentinean prisons are being filled.
He is the champion of our “free” press
but if communist journals are closed
this grandee acts dumb without reporting it,
his feet ache and he has eye trouble,
and if the workers go to jail
everybody knows it except Gainza,
everybody resorts to newspapers,
but “large” journals do not publish
anything about these stupid tales:
La Prensa is preoccupied
with the last divorce taking place
with motion picture asses in Hollywood
and while press syndicates cloister themselves
La Prensa and La Nacion are metaphysical.
Oh what silence from the fat press
when the people are beaten,
but if one of Batista’s jackals
is assassinated in Cuba
the presses of our poor America
confess and print their sensational stories,
they lift their hands to their temples,
it is then that they know and publish,
the Sip, Sop, Sep meets
to save the virgins in trouble
and running to their purse in New York
they hurriedly solicit
the constant inducement of money
for the “liberty” they patronize.
And these web-footed men
swarm over Latin America,
they kiss Chamudes in Santiago,
Judas Ravines waits for them in Lima
later enriched and enthused
by that liberty exhaled
from Washington where rock and roll plays,
they dance with Dubois and Gainza.
(Trans: Miguel Algarin)