This translation is getting harder, and it needs annotation as well. Here, however, is the third section. It could use comments. I started doing the translation because I was not sure I understood the original. I then found that in order to make the text marginally readable in English, I must also stray on purpose from the original a great deal. The combination of these two factors is dangerous.
All the streets were full of opticians’ shops. Eyes of great ground sloths looked out from the facades, terrible eyes outside the almond-shaped orbit which gives human eyes their intensity; but these eyes aspired to have their monstruosity pass unnoticed by imitating the blinking of Manueles, Eduarditos, Enriques. Glasses and smoked lenses sought out the window of the glove shop with its immense, dismembered hand, a poem in the air which resounds, bleeds, and bubbles like the head of the Baptist.
The happiness of the city had just drained itself out, like the joy of a child who has just failed his examinations. It had been happy, crowned with trills and decorated with reeds until just a few hours before, when the sadness which weakens the electric cables and raises the tiles from the porticos had invaded the streets, with its imperceptible murmuring from the deepest point of a mirror. I started to cry. For there is nothing more moving than to see new sadness upon joyful things, upon things still lacking in density, sadness which prevents happiness, full of coins with holes in them, from appearing at the core.
Sadness, recently arrived from the little paper books, had left its mark on “The Umbrella,” “The Automobile,” and “The Bicycle”; sadness of the Black and White of 1910; sadness of the trim embroidered on the petticoat, and sharp sadness of the phonograph’s great horns.
The opticians’ apprentices were cleaning lenses of all sizes with chamois and fine sheets of paper, producing the sound of a serpent pulling itself along.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 