“Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!”

“And from then on I bathed in the PoemOf the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elatedPiece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, deliriumAnd slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,The bitter redness of love ferments!”

“I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”

“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”

“But, true, I’ve wept too much! Dawns break hearts./ Every moon is brutal, every sun bitter.”

“One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”