A Good Judge is the Best Witness

A Good Judge is the Best Witness (A buen juez, mejor testigo) is a poem by José Zorrilla, written in octosyllabic verse. He included it in his volume Poesías (1838) and is inspired by the Toledo tradition of the Cristo de la Vega.
A Good Judge is the Best Witness starts in the outskirts of Toledo. Before a Christ nailed to a wood, the beautiful Inés de Vargas makes Diego Martínez swear that upon his return from Flanders, he will marry her. Three years go by and Diego does not return.
Several men return from Flanders, and among them Inés thinks she sees Diego, who does not recognize her.
Diego has been made captain by the king, his temper has gone to his head and he denies his promise of marriage.
The legend, first translated from Latin into Spanish in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de la Virgen, is rewritten by Zorrilla with admirable agility and dynamism.

A good judge is the best witness

Amid brown clouds
passing the white moon,
with fugitive glow,
the low earth does not illuminate.
The breeze with fresh wings
playful does not mumble,
and the weather vanes do not turn
between the cross and the dome.
Perhaps a pale ray of lightning
the opaque atmosphere crosses,
and the shadows in each other
confused are drawn.
The battlements of the towers
a moment they can be glimpsed,
like soldiers’ spears
stationed at altitude.
Reverberate the crystals
the tremulous turbid flame,
and an instant among the rocks
the hidden source.
The poplars of the vega
seem in the thicket
of huddled ghosts
and giant peat;
and once detached
drips heavy rain,
that does not awaken those who sleep,
nor whoever meditates, it does not importune.
Toledo lies in the dream
among the confused shadows.
and the Tagus at his feet passing by
with brown waves it lulls him.
The monotonous murmur
lost sound is heard,
as if through the deep streets
the foam boils from the sea.
How sweet it is to sleep in peace
when in the distance they whisper
the swaying poplars,
the waters that are falling!
Beautiful ghosts are dreamed
that sweeten the sleep of the sad,
and as long as the sad one dreams,
is not afflicted by his bitterness.
So calm and so gloomy
as the night that mourns
the corner where it ends
a hidden alley,
of a man who waits
the watchful figure,
and so in the shade he sails
that in the shadows is obfuscated.

Fragment of the work