Translations: Neruda's "Resurrecciones"

RESURRECTIONS

If someday I live again

nothing would change

because my failed birth

would play out again too.

and I’d come out with another brain

singing the same tune.

And that’s why, if it comes to pass,

if by some Hindu destiny

I find myself forced again to be born,

I don’t want to be an elephant,

or a rickety camel,

but a modest lobster,

A red speck in the sea.

I want to make the same mistakes

in the frigid water:

shaken by the waves like I was by time

and devoured by the fangs of the abyss,

Just as I was caught between the black teeth of literature.

To walk with copper antennas

along antarctic sands

lining the coast where I had loved and lived,

sliding with a shiver

between frightened seaweed,

surviving under the fish

my hard shell hiding

my complex structure,

Just as a I survived

under the sorrows of the earth.

— Pablo Neruda