Harold Lloyd, Estudiante (1929)
Harold Lloyd, Student
(from the 1929 book “I was a fool and what I have seen has made two fools of me!”)
(Poem at Play)
Do you have the umbrella?
Avez-vous le parapluie?
I don’t have the umbrella sir, no sir.
Non, monsieur, je n’ai pas le parapluie.
Alicia, I have the hippopotamus,
l’hippopotame for you.
Avez-vous le parapluie?
Oui.
Yes.
Si.
What, which, who dared, and whose.
If long lizards are my bosom brothers,
basically are the beetles friends of yours?
Were you to blame for the rain?
You never were cause, never the blame for rain.
Alicia, Alicia, I was, it was me.
I, who studied assiduously for you my sweet,
and for this. An unconscious fly, the nightingale of my spectacles
flowering.
29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22.
2𝝅𝚛, 𝚛𝝅2
and Nebuchadnezzar became a siring mule
and your soul and mine a real bird of Paradise.
And the fish weep silent tears in the Nile,
and the moon never sets for the dahlias of the Ganges.
Alicia,
why do you love me with that so sad crocodile air
and prolifically profound pain of quadratic equations?
Le printemps pleut sur Les Anges
Spring rains over the City of Angels
in that sad hour when police
ignore the suicide of isosceles triangles
plus the melancholy of an Englishman’s archlute and logarithm,
and the facial unibusquibusque you carry Alicia, which is to say,
you aren’t so very bad looking if one is looking at all and you are looking.
The moon is high and it is equal
to the indignity
of my love, multiplied by a factor of X
and to the wings of the evening that it dies to,
bending over a flower of acetylene fire, burning gas.
Of this, pure love of mine so delicately idiotic.
Quousque tandem abutere Catilina patientia nostra?
So sweet and deliberately foolish,
able to make the squaring of a circle cry
and obligate that dimwit D. Nequaqua Schmit
to unpack the rivers
of their stars by auction
and those beautiful blue eyes that open skyscrapers to me!
Alicia, Alicia, my love!
Alicia, Alicia, my goat!
Follow me on the air with a bicycle,
although coppers don’t know astronomy,
the police are secretive.
Although they ignore a sonnet
has two quatrains,
and two tercets.
Author: Rafael Alberti
Translator: Manny Grimaldi
16 thoughts on "Harold Lloyd, Estudiante (1929)"
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This is so wonderful! You were right. I do love it. And he asks the question I so often ponder:
Alicia, why do you love me with that so sad crocodile air
and prolifically profound pain of quadratic equations?
It’s a hoot!
The prolifically profound pain of quadratic equations got me too! And then he calls her a goat. Lots of interesting/unexpected images!
I almost translated it to The Greatest Of All Time but knew it would be dishonest,
Thank you!
esp. like this line.
‘ignore the suicide of isosceles triangles’
altho i wonder… can the rules of sonnetry really be ignored?
You CAN write a broken sonnet. Read frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss. They are amazing.
Alberti is god.
He is quickly becoming the Andalusian most suited to my temperament. This one was a laugh to peel away bit by bit.
Love it. Thank you for these translations.
Glad to be writing. Thank you.
you capture well Alberti’s Dada sensibility
Yes Gaby. He carried the Dada vibe like a garment, the book “Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos” definitely qualifies, and parts of “Cal y Canto”.
I always think of Shakespeare when I read Alberti when he’s like this.
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” –Polonius
Cosmic comedy here. That last stanza is perfection. As always, so is your translation.
I love the nerdy puzzles he squeezes in, and the completely made up “facial unibusquibusque”, which is to say, “you aren’t so very bad looking if one is looking at all and you are looking.” I had a field day interpreting that gobbledygook. Precisely, it means, as gibberish, following the Spanish “the facial one that looking I looked.” I played a bit as if Alicia were a vain one looking for lookers and the compliment he just gave her. I know it sounds crazy. But they were in Los Angeles – so it made sense.
This stanza captured me:
The moon is high and it is equal
to the indignity
of my love, multiplied by a factor of X
and to the wings of the evening that it dies to,
bending over a flower of acetylene fire, burning gas.
Thank you for doing these translations!
❤️