Letter to Georgina Hübner
in the Sky over Lima

JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

 

 

The Peruvian consul tells me: “Georgina Hübner is dead . . .”

 

. . . Dead! Why? How? On what day?

What golden rays, departing from my life one eventide,

would have burnished the splendor of your hands,

so sweetly crossed upon your quiet breast

like two lavender lilies of love and sentiment?

 

. . . Now your back has felt the white casket,

your thighs are now forever shut,

and in the tender green of your new-dug grave

the sinking sun will set the hummingbirds aflame . . .

La Punta is much colder and lonelier now

than when you saw it, fleeing from the tomb,

those far-off afternoons when your phantom told me:

“So often have I thought of you, my dearest friend!”

 

And I of you, Georgina? I cannot say what you were like—

fair? demure? melancholy? I know only that my sorrow

is a woman, just like you, who is seated,

weeping, sobbing, beside my soul!

I know that my sorrow writes in that graceful hand

that soared across the sea from distant lands

to call me “friend” . . . or something more . . . perhaps . . . a part

of all that throbbed in your twenty-year-old heart!

 

You wrote: “Yesterday my cousin brought your book to me.”

Remember? Myself, gone pale: “A cousin? Who is he?”

 

I longed to enter your life, to offer you my hand,

noble as a flame, Georgina . . . In every ship

that sailed, my wild heart went out in search of you . . .

I thought I’d finally found you, pensive, in La Punta,

with a book in your hand, just as you’d told me,

dreaming among the flowers, casting a spell on my life!

 

Now the vessel I will take one evening, searching for you,

will never leave this port, nor cleave the seas,

it will travel into infinity, its prow pointing ever upward,

seeking, as an angel would, its celestial isle . . .

Oh, Georgina, Georgina! By heaven! My books

will wait for you above, and surely you’ll have read

a few verses aloud to God . . . You will tread the western skies

in which my fervent fancies are snuffed out . . .

and learn that all of this is meaningless—

that, save love, the rest is only words . . .

 

Love! Oh, love! Did you feel in the nights

the distant thrall of my ardent cries,

as I, in the stars, in the shadows, in the breezes,

wailing toward the south, called out to you: Georgina?

Did, perhaps, a gentle zephyr bearing

the ineffable perfume of my formless longing

pass by your ear? Did you hear something of me,

my dreams of your country estate, of kisses in the garden?

 

Oh, how the best of our lives is shattered!

We live . . . for what? To watch the days

with their funereal hue, no sky in the still waters . . .

to clutch our foreheads in our hands!

to weep, to long for what is ever distant,

and never to step across the threshold of dreams.

Oh, Georgina, Georgina! to think that you perished

one evening, one night . . . and I all unknowing!

 

The Peruvian consul tells me: “Georgina Hübner is dead . . .”

You are dead. You are, soulless, in Lima,

opening white roses beneath the earth.

 

And if our arms are destined never to intertwine,

then what heedless child, born of hatred and pain,

made the world, unwitting, while blowing soap bubbles?