Menorcan Romance

"She was an enchanted island, lost in the midst of the sea...

The north wind, riding horseback on the crystal-clear waves, lashed her with stormy fury, carrying off in its great winds white sea-foam, full of salt and iodine...and of dreams of the moon.

Sometimes the wind would cease, tired of lashing her coastal cliffs, which would never yield, neither to the rage of the sea, nor to the fury of the winds...Ah, she was strong, very strong, that island earth.

So when the voice of the wind and the sea, with its echoes of eternity, grew silent, the isle would become the peaceful haven, with sweet murmurs of madrigals to ring the hours of day.

She was an enchanted island, lost in the midst of the sea...

Her people-stern and bronzed-lived their lives wedded to their tasks, knowing nothing of other lands, of other skies or other seas, because for them there was no other world beyond their own.

Their ancient monuments -the stones paled by antiquity- reached towards the sky in secular silence, spreading throughout the islan the feeling of nostalgia for all things passings which can never return.

Was that island but a dream, in sleep which would never be awakened? It was a memory, a rhyme, nothing more than a magic spell: she was the legendary soul of the winds and of the sea; she was History, which lives eternally and will never die.

Across all the ever-succeeding centuries that isolated remains firmer than ever. Should you one day visit her, remember when you do that she was once an enchanted island, lost in the midst of the sea..."

Love,

Henri

(Prose translation of the prelude to the lyrical story in verse, by Gumersindo Riera, "She was an Enchanted Island")