Don’t Play it Safe

 

Don’t Play it Safe

 

by Mario Benedetti 

 

Translated by Louisa B. Popkin

 

   Don’t stand idle
   at the side of the road
   don’t hold off on happiness
   don’t love with half a heart
   don’t play it safe now
   or ever
        don’t play it safe
   don’t fill up with calm
   don’t take cover from the world
   in a quiet corner
   don’t let your eyelids come down
   like a weighty sentence
   don’t forget you have lips
   don’t sleep but to rest
   don’t ignore the blood in your veins
   don’t think you have no time
   but if
       in any case
   you can’t help it
   and hold off on happiness
   and love with half a heart
   and play it safe now
   and fill up with calm
   and take cover from the world
   in a quiet corner
   and let your eyelids come down
   like a weighty sentence
   and dry up without lips
   and sleep not to rest
   and ignore the blood in your veins
   and think you have no time
   and stand idle
   at the side of the road
   and play it safe
   in that case
   don’t hold on to me.

Mario Benedetti (1920 - 2009) is regarded as one of Latin America’s most important poets of the 20th century and one of Uruguay's most prolific writers. For a few years in the 1960s, the tiny South American country of Uruguay saw itself as the cradle of revolution in Latin America. Che Guevara was welcomed there as a hero during a brief visit; the home-grown guerrillas seemed to offer an urban alternative to peasant revolt; and many writer busily supplied the theory to back up revolutionary practice. Mario Benedetti, who died aged 88, was the poet of that moment, becoming famous throughout Latin America for the direct style of his verses of love, anger, and resistance.

 

There are a lot among us who play it safe and don't take a stand on issues that affect all of us. This is addressed to all such pusillanimous ones. As you can see , the whole of the second stanza of the poem is a warning to such escapists.