Jorge Ismael Gandú, pseudonym of José Miguel Granda Granda (Celica, Loja Province of Ecuador, 1904 – Medellin, Colombia, Unknown) was an Ecuadorian poet and songwriter, renowned primarily for his significant contributions to the pasillo genre, a type of Latin American music. While his literary endeavors culminated in the publication of the poetry collection “Hontanar” in 1937, a work dedicated to his mother, wife, and homeland, it was his role as a lyricist for numerous pasillo songs that truly cemented his fame. Gandú’s ability to weave emotional depth into his lyrics resonated with composers and audiences alike, leading to collaborations with notable musicians such as Nicasio Safadi, who set Gandú’s poem “De corazón a corazón” to music.
Poem
SPIRITUAL COLLOQUY
by Jorge Ismael Gandú, published in "Hontanar" (1937)
Translated by Richard Gabela on April 5th, 2024
Mother, my dear mother,
All the world's pain is anointed
by this unpublished love, devoid of inventiveness.
Yours is the spiritual essence,
and the nameless joy I feel as a poet,
inspiring my dreams of transfiguring into a fountain of rhythms,
where they aspire to become beams of light and buds of harmony,
in the august dawn of your brow.
Something of yours, something of mine,
becomes eternal in the purity of the moment
when its virtue transcends
the unsatisfied longing for this thirst for the infinite,
like the enduring song of water
in its belief of ascension
and the rugged desire to return to the mountain.
Mother, my dear mother.
To sing to you, I have purified myself
in sunlit clearings and the breath of the breeze
that brings joy from afar through time.
I've savored the dewdrops left by birds,
to see if I could fulfill
this profound wish to find myself planted in you
and through you become a tree of cardinal trills.
Your son, my spirit,
has toiled on this song
amid the restlessness that radiates so many attempts
at escape or refuge;
in the emotion that crowds a sea of waiting
and sudden calls to the uncertain future;
in the ideal that opens a trunk of perspectives
beautiful, near too, but that sink shipwrecked
under the pain of all failures.
I've relished being a child
and suffered being a man for your deeply maternal love,
because this ancient ailment of living while dying
is a great sorrow of tearing the chest
and bowing the head
in an unequal and sordid fight,
that endangers enduring and threatens to rob us
of this small good of aspiring
and feeling that the future arrives whole and pure.
Mother, my dear mother.
With how much love my song flows
when I consider that in the paths of my life,
you are the light, the earth, the mountain air;
the complete landscape through which sings
the intuition of the eternal, the lyrical water of my soul.
Mountain soul like the ecological water
that supplies love and emanates peace from the entrails
of a region that is our birthland.
Lustral vision, pure image in its genesis,
I seek it in the heights of my being
to imbue myself with a deep sense
and better understand my realities.
From so much wandering, the desire to find peace has been born in me,
to persist in the virtue of a book,
son of mine in pain, work of my transcendent destiny
in the spirit of an offspring.
Mother, my dear mother.
I have long borne the delay of the futile,
but today my spirit accelerates its constant rhyming
in wild whirlwinds of childish joy.
My heart bleeds, yet in poetry, my blood becomes
like the water supplied by your Natural Spring.
I am a spring that overflows in rhythms
from the summit at dawn to the twilight of the sea.
I've been embarking on this song, trembling with imperfections,
amidst life's currents,
to cradle it in the serene blessing of your lap.
Selected Works
- “Hontanar” (1937). Read it for free here.