Goya’s Prints
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Goya’s Prints
i am no copyist
—Goya’s advertisement for his prints in El Diario de Madrid (1799)
The circus of the night with no color, mere shapes, sorties perpetrated in smoke, smiling satisfactions.
In one, reason has fallen asleep at his page and a hundred owls with bats’ wings pullulate:
That joyful girl bought from the crone by hideous laughter.
All folly, he said, “divine” rights, ignorance, superstition, interests. But there is no light.
The lady tearing a tooth for her sorceries from the hanging man— how shocked she appears. [End Page 23]
The saber chopping the crotch of the man splayed upside down by grinning French caps,
following the divinely consecrated emperor to secure Spain. The Spanish doubling it back.
Let there be no light. Mere shades of dark are we all, except for outrageous pain.
Our tragedies scratched on copper plate, burned with acid, inked in glee, spat like blood on the paper, glimpsed in smudge. [End Page 24]
Francis Blessington is a poet, critic, novelist, and translator. His latest book is a verse translation of Euripides’s Trojan Women, Helen, and Hecuba.
