Preguntas Hermosas - Beautiful Questions

This is quite extraordinary. If you are doing something else at the same time as reading this, then focus, please, for two minutes on this wonderful animation. Preguntas Hermosas is a story about a time that was shared between two people. It is told through a combination of Poema X by Pablo Neruda and Under the Harvest Moon by Carl Sandburg.  It unfolds in three parts; a fond remembrance, loss, and then finally acceptance.

The imagery is amazing, a woman silently explodes in to a mass of butterflies, a train makes its way underneath a carriage clock – just astonishingly beautiful animation by Süperfad, a collective of designers, directors, animators, and artists..  Plus, the poems are very well translated in to English if you do not understand Spanish.

I would like to add another language to the mix too – Welsh.  I think the closest word we have in the language to the effect that this sublime combination of words, images and music has is hiraeth.  It has no direct English translation.  It is a feeling tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia and wistfulness. Preguntas Hermosas made me full of hiraeth.