Immigrants
translated from the Spanish by Anthony Geist
White valleys
left behind:
they begin to turn into
rocks,
pine trees
and eagles.
Hundreds of years on the road.
On the way
my parents died.
On the way
my children will be born.
Los immigrantes
Valles blancos
han quedado atrás:
empiezan a transformarse
en rocas,
pinos
y águilas.
Cientos de años de viaje.
En el camino
han muerto mis padres.
En el camino
nacerán mis hijos.
Copyright © 2025 by David Cruz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 19, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Translating a poem requires you to account for each word, to find equivalents for the complex syntactic structures of the original, and to tread the fine line between the excessively literal and the excessively liberal—that is, to create a poem in the target language that is faithful to the original and is a poem in its own right. David Cruz’s ‘Immigrants’ is at once both intimate and universal in its representation of the tragedy of the journey through the borderland: ‘Hundreds of years on the road. / On the way / my parents died […] my children will be born.’”
—Anthony Geist
David Cruz
