Décima of a Liar from Los Santos in Melbourne*
Machine translation from the original, not yet reviewed by the author.
Original in Spanish
To Ricardito the Liar
It’s the honest truth I’m telling:in the blue sky of AustraliaI saw the sandal flyingthat the devil himself threw off.“Sandal” is a refined wordworthy of the finest poet,but it was more of a “flip-flop”that I saw go whizzing past—fluttering, I would say—in a prodigious pirouette
Across the firmament it flew,that diabolical footwear,leaving a sulfurous dustbehind its airborne motion.And if you don’t believe the windcarried off the loose flip-flopwrapped up in its whirlwind,go and ask a kangaroo!Because it’s true, I swear to you,that here the wind turns around
Notes
* The poem plays on two Spanish sayings for a place at the end of the world: donde el diablo perdió la chancleta (where the devil lost his flip-flop) and donde el viento da la vuelta (where the wind turns around). ↩