Jorge Manrique, Coplas por la muerte de su padre
1.
wages murder
the first caress
resplendent
in the portal
salt on
my cheek
dry timber
set ablaze
each night
robbed of all that I love
2.
the photograph
in evidence
as many
Hitlers as wanted
the lamp
the piano the lecture
having
replaced the map
wine breast
written down
3.
the diagram
of the village
constrains
one to anguish
the bird
flits into the dance
under a
Western-movie sky
there's
that echo for every shout
4.
we had
the dream of water
we didn't
come up for air
we could
see clearly
you said
strip me
you said
pull me close
5.
a bitter
draft from a broken cup
O countrymen
washed tall
naked in
sunlight in innocence
reclaimed
to the warm embrace
genocidal
recurrent thanksgiving
6.
"C'est
un homme
ou une
pierre
ou un arbre
qui va
commencer
le quatrième
chant."
7.
from the
rubble of information
from the
bottom of the raised glass
came this
one man speaking
"la belle
langue de mon siècle"
no more
Notes
Debord made the first French translation of Jorge Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre (Jorge Manrique, Stances sur la mort de son père, Editions Champ Libre: Paris 1980).
The text of the sixth stanza is taken verbatim from the fourth canto of Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont, a favorite writer of Debord's: "A man or a stone or a tree is going to begin the fourth canto."
The penultimate line of the seventh stanza is from Debord's Mémoires (privately printed in 1958; reprinted by Belles Lettres: Paris 1993), the last line of which reads: "Je voulais parler la belle langue de mon siècle." [I wanted to speak my century's beautiful language.] In his collage text, this was the only line that Debord himself authored.