What Muna Lee has admirably conveyed are those other relationships, which are not completely dependent upon the sound and movement of the verse. With the original text before him, these can be recovered by the reader, even though his acquaintance with Spanish is slight. What the translation will do is to prevent his going astray in the interpretation of the metaphors, which provide the one difficulty in Carrera Andrade' s poetry, as they constitute its especial charm. The words Chimborazo and Cotopaxi are poetic, as I recognized when as a boy I succumbed to their vague enchantment. But their only association in my mind was with ignorance.
Poetry is something else again.
It is a form of speech which continues to surprise us by its precision. I have said that Carrera Andrade is a natural poet. This is, perhaps, only another way of saying that he is a poet who has never doubted his own nature. His first book of poems, Estanque Inefable , was published before he had finished at the University. It was natural that he should take their side, and that of workers everywhere.