To write for simple men,
for tacky women,
for people who are mad for the crockery
of the great department stores,
for scholars who flatter and buy
the philosopher Wojtyła
or any other humanist on the back cover.
To write for pensioners who remind you every day
that they never studied,
as if they meant to tell you something — but what? —
for gentlemen who stop before a set of ruins
because they have heard one is supposed to stop,
who flatter a few verses because they see them printed
in a shop window
and read them upside down as if reading
a riddle that, of course,
they always end up solving
as lofty hermeneuts.
To write for the many, the majority, who walk
indifferent and for whom poetry is nothing
but an enigmatic imposture, affected
with rhymes and metaphors.
To write for them — for whom else? —
like one who throws stones into an abyss
whose bottom does not listen.
What a stupid task.
Perhaps it is no more than the testament
of one who has no possessions
and no descendants.
Raúl Sanz, in Anthology of the Discarded, p. 29