Such a great poem! A must read!

Here is my attempt to translate to English the great Jose Emilio Pacheco. The poem is "The Octopus." 

It's short, it's very direct and it's a masterpiece. If you speak Spanish, by all means ignore my translation and go straight to the Spanish version.

Pacheco received the Cervantes Prize (the most important literature prize besides the Nobel) and was easy the best Spanish-speaking poem of his generation. http://bibliotecaignoria.blogspot.com/2011/04/jose-emilio-pacheco-el-pulpo.html

The Octopus:

Dark god of the depths,

fern, fungus, hyacinth,

in between rocks that no one has seen, there, in the abyss,

where at dawn, against the fire of the Sun,

Night descends to the depths of the sea and the octopus sucks it’s shadowy ink with the suckers of his tentacles.

What nocturnal beauty is its splendor if it navigates in the most eclipsing, brackish mother water,

for it, crystalline and sweet.

But on the beach that the plastic garbage infested,

this carnal jewel from the viscous vertigo seems like a monster;

and they are killing,

they are clubbing, the defenseless stranded one.

Someone threw a harpoon, and the octopus breathes death through the second asphyxiation that constitutes its wound.

From its lips, pours no blood: the night it shoots forth and the sea goes into mourning and the Earth faints,

very slowly, as the octopus dies.

To read it in Spanish: http://bibliotecaignoria.blogspot.com/2011/04/jose-emilio-pacheco-el-pulpo.html