Written for SATB choir.
,i>Maybe we have time was commissioned by Conspirare and Craig Hella Johnson for their September 2007 concert series in Texas. It sets a poem of the same name by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), which was initially suggested to me by Craig Hella Johnson in an excellent translation by Alastair Reid. As Reid eloquently puts it, however, ‘English and Spanish move very differently, like streams that run in quite separate courses’. With this in mind I decided to look at Neruda’s original language and found a musicality there that no English translation could possibly capture. As Reid himself acknowledges, he can only offer his translation ‘as a homage to the original’.