«Adelfos» is Manuel Machado's great self-portrait and one of the most personal voices of Spanish modernismo. The speaker paints himself as an Andalusian of Moorish and Roman blood, made of indolence and elegance, who lets everything pass him by: «My will died one moonlit night / when it was so beautiful not to think and not to want».
The most famous line says it all with a haughty laziness: «Que la vida se tome la pena de matarme, / ya que yo no me tomo la pena de vivir» — let life take the trouble of killing me, since I don't take the trouble of living. It is not sadness but elegant weariness, a giving-in to pleasure and forgetfulness with the grace of a tired young gentleman. It is the exact reverse of the moral gravity of his brother Antonio.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.