On Productivity and Poets

WHAT a productive day! Don't read that as a normal person might say it... I've just said it with a heavy sigh of disgust. I'm a oddity in that I DO NOT like productive days. They make me feel like I've been having no fun. I suppose that sometimes you can do productive things that are also fun. For instance, I'm sure that if I owned an eyebrow plucking business and I spent an entire day busily making over the eyebrows of the masses, I'd go to bed feeling productive AND satisfied. But today was all about doing the things I need to do even though I'd rather not do them: attend class, take notes and pay attention IN said classes, go to work after class (and actually stay instead of skipping out after half an hour to go watch Oprah), exercise, eat a sensible dinner, come back to the room and study for my four tests. All those things (to me) say "prison," where for someone else, the completion of them would be a wonderful sense of accomplishment. Yuck. let's talk about something else.
How about Spanish poetry... something I read most every night for my 436 class. It can be frusterating because poetry is hard enough to understand and interpret when you KNOW the ins and outs of a language. I'm still so unfamiliar with so many things about the Spanish language and culture that reading poems in Spanish can be VERY annoying. But when something DOES make sense... WOW! It seems so much more beautiful to me. I'm convinced time and time again that certain words could never be more beautiful if they were written in English.
My most recent favorite excerpts are below:
This first one is from Luis Rosales. His poem is called El Espejo (the mirror) and he spends the whole poem talking about how he tries to walk across a mirror to reach the girl he loves. It breaks when he steps on it, and he can see her face and her eyes in each shattered piece. Her image multiplies when it breaks, and the splintered glass makes him bleed. He ends it by saying:
porque te quiero tanto,
de tal modo,
que me sangran los ojos al mirarte
como si todo lo que nos une
fuese una despedida.

Which means:
because I love you so much,
in such a way,
that my eyes bleed to look at you
as though everything that would unite us
were a goodbye.

Mmmm... it really isn't the same in English. But maybe you get the idea. And here's one of my other favorites, from Octavio Paz's "Piedra de Sol"

Voy por tu talle
como por un rio.
Voy por tu cuerpo
como por un bosque,
como por un sendero en la montaña
que en un abismo brusco se termina

Which translates to:
I travel your length
like a river.
I travel your body
as through a forest.
As by a path in the mountains
that ends abruptly at a cliff.

I won't ruin the art by explaining these lovely words with my own. If you "just don't get it," you're probably not really trying.
And on that note... I'm out for now.