Up in the mountains (Arriba en la cordillera) - Patricio Manns (Chile)

What do you know about mountains,
if you were born so far?
You have to know the stone
crowning the glacier;
You must travel keeping quiet
through the shortcuts of the silence.
And cut through the borders
of the high mountain's lakes...
My father spend his life
among stones and hills!

The white widow in her horse...
The curse of the cowboy,
that night, pushed my old man
hearding somebody else's cattle.
Close to the Atacalco pass,
at the beginning of the winter.
They interrogated, beat him,
and he answered with silence.
The mountain guards
placed his cross at the wind.

Los Angeles, Santa Fe,
were names of the hell.
To our home arrived the law
looking for the cattle's thief.
My mother hid her face
when he didn't come back
from the mountain.
And high in the mountains
the night enters into his bones.
He, who was such a strong and lonely man,
brought the dead to his journey.

We crossed today
with such a good cattle;
Up in the mountains,
not even the wind saw us
coming through.
How proud he would be of me
if he ever gets to know it!
But only the wind knows
where my father got sleep
with his sorrow of poor man
and two bullets in the chest.