To smile with the sad joy of the olive-tree

To smile with the sad joy of the olive-tree.
To wait. Never to tire of hoping for joy.
We smile. We gild the light of every day
with this sad joyful vanity of being alive.

Every day I feel freer and more a captive
of that full smile so clear and so shadowed.
Tempests blow over your frozen mouth
while over mine still blows a summer breeze.

A smile rises up over the abyss: grows
like a tremulous abyss, bravely winged.
A smile lifts warmly upwards in flight.

Diurnal, firm, it arrives, no fall, no darkening.
You defy all things, love: you scale them all.
In a smile you were both earth and heaven.

Miguel Hernández Translation by A. S. Kline