Jaime Sabines: “Los Amorosos” and five more poems you should know by the Mexican author

Before almost closing himself in his ranch in southern Chiapas, Jaime Sabines achieved what was known in much of the Spanish-speaking world about his work and the way in which he was involved in Mexican political events, and, despite the fact that many of his texts are closely linked to the coordinates of his life, he was able to order his universe and make their feelings known.

Sabines being a poet of experience, the author mentioned in an interview with German Dehesa that his poetry has started from real moments. “Each poem I can tell you by whom I wrote it, or how and under what circumstances.”

“In poetry there is nothing but experiences. [...] I think that my poetry is nothing more than a long testimony of what I have lived”, he said in the same interview.

In each poet you can see a social code that reflects a symbol within his poetry, which also influences language and traditions, something that can be seen in the texts of Sabines. The poet mentioned in an interview, in the Reforma Cultural Magazine “El Ángel”, conducted by Pilar Jiménez, that “the readings and the same exercise of poetry make you a little more concrete and synthetic”.

And during his adolescence he had done nothing but study, without having read anything, although at the age of seventeen he had an opportunity to meet “unknown” authors.

His friend Francisco Rodríguez showed him the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca, whose impulse was more towards writing and recognition of poetry.

Beatriz Barrera Padilla points out that Sabines will no longer talk about his “poems to the brides”, referring to the first texts he had made when he was young.

Despite having been interested in poetry, he moved to Mexico City in 1945 where he began his medical studies, but he could not stand the inhuman environment of the faculty and despite the fact that his father wanted him to study his truncated vocation, Sabines mentioned.

“I don't think there is a contradiction between poetry and medicine. Studying the human body is similar to studying the soul. [...] The three years in medicine made me truly a poet”, highlighting Sabines's first purpose in poetry.

In 1950 he published his first publication entitled “El Horal”, which on a sleepless night he wrote sixty-four poems that compose the book. From there his publications begin to see the light and show part of his life in each of these texts.

Poems

Among the poems that Jaime Sabines wrote, we can locate those that have been liked by several people, among them are:

The Loving Ones

Lovers are silent.

Love is the finest silence,

the most trembling, the most unbearable.

The loving ones seek,

the loving ones are the ones who abandon,

they are the ones who change, the ones who forget.

I hope to heal from you

I hope to be cured of you in a few days.

I have to stop smoking you, drink you, think about you. It's possible.

Following the prescriptions of morality in turn.

I prescribe time, abstinence, loneliness.

You hurt me

Meekly, unbearably, you hurt me.

Take my head. Cut my neck.

Nothing is left of me after this love.

It's not that I die of love

It's not that I die of love, I die of you.

I die of you, love, of love of you,

of my urgency of my skin from you,

from my soul, from you and from my mouth

and how unbearable I am without you.

After all

After all - but after all -

it's just about sleeping together,

it's about meat,

of naked bodies,

lamp of death in the world.

You've got what I'm looking for

You've got what I'm looking for, what I want, what I love,

you have it.

The fist of my heart is pounding, calling.

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