Eugenio Montejo was a Venezuelan poet who passed away last year. I hold many of Montejo’s poems close to my heart and find myself coming back to them frequently.
I didn’t know or somehow overlooked the fact that one of his poems was quoted in the film ’21 Grams’ (2003).
Here is the scene from the movie and the entire poem.
| La tierra giró para acercarnos | The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer |
|---|---|
| (translation by Australian writer Peter Boyle) | |
| La tierra giró para acercarnos, giró sobre sí misma y en nosotros, hasta juntarnos por fin en este sueño, como fue escrito en el Simposio. Pasaron noches, nieves y solsticios; pasó el tiempo en minutos y milenios. Una carreta que iba para Nínive llegó a Nebraska. Un gallo cantó lejos del mundo, en la previda a menos mil de nuestros padres. La tierra giró musicalmente llevándonos a bordo; no cesó de girar un solo instante, como si tanto amor, tanto milagro sólo fuera un adagio hace mucho ya escrito entre las partituras del Simposio. |
The earth turned to bring us closer, it spun on itself and within us, and finally joined us together in this dream as written in the Symposium. Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices; time passed in minutes and millennia. An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh arrived in Nebraska. A rooster was singing some distance from the world, in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers. The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board; it didn’t stop turning a single moment as if so much love, so much that’s miraculous was only an adagio written long ago in the Symposium’s score. |
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