Translation:To Roosevelt

by Rubén Darío

It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman,
that we should reach you, Hunter!
Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with something of Washington and four of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
You are the future invader
of the naïve America who has Indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are clever, you oppose Tolstoy.
And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alexander Nebuchadnezzar.
(You're a Professor of Energy
as today's madmen say.)

You think that life is fire,
that progress is eruption;
that where you put your bullet
you put the future.
No.

The United States is strong and big.
When it shakes there is a deep tremor
that passes through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, the roar of the lion is heard.
Hugo said to Grant: The stars are yours.
(Barely shines, rising, the Argentine sun
and the Chilean star rises ...) You are rich.
Join Hercules' cult to Mammon's;
and lighting the path to easy conquest,
Liberty raises her torch in New York.

But our America, which had poets
from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl,
who has saved the footprints of the feet of great Bacchus
who the panic alphabet in one time learned;
who consulted the stars, who knew Atlantis,
whose name comes to resonate in Plato
who since the ancient times of her life
lives by light, fire, perfume, love,
the America of the great Montezuma, of the Inca,
the America redolent of Christopher Columbus
the Catholic America, the Spanish America,
The America where noble Cuahtemoc said:
"I'm not in a bed of roses"; that America
who trembles in hurricanes and lives by Love,
men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul, lives.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates; and is the daughter of the Sun.
Be careful. Live the Spanish America!
there are a thousand puppies loose from the Spanish Lion.
It would be necessary, Roosevelt, to be through God himself,
the terrible Rifleman and the strong Hunter,
order to keep us in your iron claws.

And, you may count it all, missing one thing: God!