Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro, de García Lorca ✒️📃🇪🇸

Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro – Sonetos del amor oscuro – Federico García Lorca – 1936 – with translation into English and Italian by Enzo Martinelli

🇪🇸 Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro, de Federico García Lorca

¡Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro!
¡ay balido sin lanas! ¡ay herida!
¡ay aguja de hiel, camelia hundida!
¡ay corriente sin mar, ciudad sin muro!

¡Ay noche inmensa de perfil seguro,
montaña celestial de angustia erguida!
¡ay perro en corazón, voz perseguida!
¡silencio sin confín, lirio maduro!

Huye de mí, caliente voz de hielo,
no me quieras perder en la maleza 
donde sin fruto gimen carne y cielo.

Deja el duro marfil de mi cabeza,
apiádate de mí, ¡rompe mi duelo!
¡que soy amor, que soy naturaleza!

🇬🇧 Oh secret voice of dark love, by Federico García Lorca

Oh secret voice of dark love! 
Oh useless lament! Wounded! 
Oh gall needle, sunken camellia! 
Oh stream without sea, city without wall! 

Oh immense night with a sure profile, 
heavenly mountain of erect anguish! 
Oh raging heart, persecuted voice! 
Boundless silence, ripe lily! 

Run away from me, hot voice of ice, 
don't want to lose me in the undergrowth 
where flesh and heaven groan without fruit. 

Leave the hard ivory of my head, 
have mercy on me, break my duel! 
That I am love, that I am nature!

“Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro” belongs to Sonetos del amor oscuro (“Sonnets of Dark Love”), the eleven sonnets Lorca wrote in the final years before his death in 1936. Unlike the folkloric, Andalusian voice of Romancero Gitano, these poems turn inward: dense, classical in form, and charged with anguish over a love the poet could not openly name. The sequence remained largely unpublished in his lifetime and only reached readers in full decades later, adding to its air of confession withheld.

This particular sonnet opens with a cry to a “secret voice,” building through a chain of exclamations — wound, wall-less city, mountain of anguish — that pile up rather than resolve, mirroring the speaker’s inability to contain what he feels. The final tercets shift from lament to plea, asking the voice to relent, to show mercy, ending on the bare admission: “I am love, I am nature.” That closing turn is characteristic of the whole cycle — desire stripped of ornament, presented as something as undeniable as a law of nature, even as it remains “oscuro,” obscured.

Read alongside the rest of Dark Love Sonnets on this blog, it shows Lorca’s late style moving toward directness even as its subject stays hidden.

🇮🇹 Oh voce segreta dell’amor oscuro, di Federico García Lorca

Oh voce segreta dell'amore oscuro! 
Oh lamento inutile! Ferita! 
Oh ago del fiele, camelia annegata! 
Oh torrente senza mare, città senza mura! 

Oh notte immensa dal profilo certo, 
celeste montagna di eretta angoscia! 
Oh cuore infuriato, voce perseguitata! 
Silenzio sconfinato, giglio maturo! 

Fuggi da me, calda voce di ghiaccio, 
non cercare di perdermi nel sottobosco 
dove la carne e il cielo gemono senza frutto. 

Lascia il duro avorio della mia testa, 
abbi pietà di me, spezza il mio duello! 
Che sono l'amore, che sono la natura!