César Vallejo

“ One drinks breakfast... Humid cemetery
earth smells like beloved blood.
City of winter... The scathing crossing
of a cart that dragging seems
an emotion of chained-up fasting.
One would want to knock on all the doors,
and ask for I don’t know whom; and later
to watch the poor people, and, crying gently,
to hand out little pieces of fresh bread to all of them. ”

“ Who pulls the thread so much: who
without piety lowers our nerves,
threadbare strings, to the grave!
Love! And you too. Black stonings
are engendered in your mask and break it.
The grave is still
a woman’s sex that attracts man! ”

“ Oh, hand that limits, that breathes
behind all the doors, and that gives life
to all the clocks, yield and go on your way!
Over the gray spider of your frame,
another great Hand made of light bears the weight of
a bullet in the blue shape of a heart. ”

“ If I have sung much, I have cried more
for you, oh my sublime parable of love!
Stay in the brain,
and in the immense myth
of my heart!
It is the faith, the forge where I burned
the muddy iron of so many women ”

“ And the grave will be a great pupil,
in whose depths the anguish of love
survives and cries, as in a
chalice of sweet eternity and black dawn.
And the lips part for the kiss,
like something full that overflows and dies,
and, in an infuriating conjunction,
every mouth renounces for the other
a life of agonizing life. ”

“ Don’t pretend to be asleep,
remember your troubadour;
that I now understand... I understand
the human equation of your love.
In the mystical dulzaina, the stormy
gem is thundering and treacherous is
the witchery of your “yes.” ”

“ Lyricism of winter, murmur of funeral ribbons,
when the rushed parting now approaches;
prophesying voices in sad songs
that pray a farewell in the evening.
Vision of the burial of my hopes
in the very tomb of mortal injury.
Veronica charity of unknown regions,
where life is lost for the price of ether. ”

“ Old Osiris! I arrived at life’s
opposing wall.
And it seems to me that I’ve always
had this wall within reach.
I am the shade, the reverse: everything passes
beneath my steps of an eternal column. ”

“ Your body is the foaming scrap
of a rosy Jordan;
and it waves like a beatific lake
that would put to shame the evil viper!
Your arms make one thirst for the infinite,
with their chaste Hesperides of light,
as two white redemptive paths,
two dying cries from one cross. ”

“ Marked by his years as an orphan, he descends the moment
with rumors of a burial, to the kneeling field;
and the little bells autumn-ify with shadows.
The blue warped into iron survives,
and in it, with shrouded pupils,
a dog lashes out its pastoral howl. ”

“ Love, I don’t love you when you’re far away
swamped in the make-up of joyful drunk woman,
or in the fragile and snub-nosed features of a woman.
Love, come without flesh, from a darkening Ichor;
and may I, like God, be the man
who loves and begets without sensual pleasure! ”

“ A three-legged stone bench, is the altarpiece
on which choral lips have finished singing
the eucharist of a golden chicha.
Beyond the farms, it rises with the wind-
the smoke that smells of sleep and stable,
as if a firmament were being exhumed. ”

“ Darío of the celestial Americas! They resemble you
so much! And with your braids they make their hair-shirts.
Like souls in search of burials of absurd gold,
those idle archpriests of the heart,
they enter, and appear... and speaking to us from afar,
they lament the monotonous suicide of God!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1928.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1938, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. ”

“ And in each arm that seems like a yoke
the palpitating ferrous juice spatters,
the juice that in a creative daily effort
sparkles, like a tragic diamond,
through the pores of the hand
that the glove has still not byzantinated. ”

“ What must have become of her flannel skirt; of her
yearnings; of her gait;
of her taste of the place’s May lilies.
She must be at the door watching some cloud,
and in the end she’ll say trembling: “It’s awfully cold... Jesus!”
and a wild bird will cry on the tiles. ”

“ I am the pigeon of the condor that has had its feathers removed
by a Latin arquebus;
and bursting with humanity I float in the Andes,
like a perennial Lazarus of light.
I am the Incan grace that gnaws on itself
in golden qurikanchas baptized
by erring matches and by hemlock.
Sometimes the broken nerves of an extinct
puma give a jump in my stones. ”

“ I feel good. Now
a stoic ice shines
in me.
It makes me laugh this ruby
rope
grinding in my body.
Rope without end,
like a
spiral
descending
from
evil...
bloody and left-handed rope
formed by
a thousand daggers in support. ”

“ I come to watch you pass; until the day,
drunk with time and cruelty,
little enchanted steamboat always far away,
the evening star will depart!
The rigging; winds that betray;
winds of a woman who passed by! ”

“ We’ve now sat
often at the table, with the bitterness of a child who
at midnight, cries with hunger, wide awake...
And when we’ll find ourselves with the others, at the edge
of an eternal morning, breaking our fast together! ”

“ The morning when on the shore
of the sea of shadows and of the silent empire,
I leave like a mournful bird,
the white vault will be your prison.
It will have become dark in your gaze;
and you will suffer, and you will then take hold of
penitent lacerated whitenesses. ”

“ At the hushing of the orchestra, veiled
feminine shadows pass below the branches,
through whose falling leaves are filtered icy
chimeras of moonlight, pale cloudscapes.
There are lips crying forgotten arias,
ivory garments feigning great lilies.
Chatter and smiles in wild crowds
perfume with silk the rough thickets. ”

“ Unnail my nails, oh new mother of mine!
Symphony of olive trees, pour out your sobs!
And you must wait, seated beside my dead flesh,
as the threat subsides, and the lark flies off!
You pass by... you return... ”

“ That poor half-breed; poor are her weapons; poor are
her cream-colored sails that go to the limits of the salty
mists of a deadsea. Victorious and vanquished,
she remained pensive and baggy-eyed and claret. ”

“ Love will divert such a law of life,
towards Man’s voice;
and will give us supreme liberty
in blue, virtuous transubstantiation
against what is blind and fatal.
May there beat in every number,
reclusive in fragile dawns,
the heart of an even better Jesus of another great Yolk!
And after... The other line...
A Baptist who lies in wait, lies in wait, lies in wait... ”

“ The Menocucho hacienda
claims a thousand daily disappointments through life.
12 o’ clock. We go toward the waist of the day.
The sun that hurts so much.
Mule driver, with your red poncho you get farther away,
savoring the Peruvian romance of your coca. ”

“ Some shopkeeper
makes his sales pitch in the wind: “Nothing like it!”
The sparks, floating prettily, graciously,
are golden audacious wheat that the farmer
sows in the skies and in the stars.
III
Sunrise. The chicha in the end breaks
into sobs, lusts, fights;
Through odors of urea and pepper
a drunkard sketches a thousand scrawls as he walks.
“The morning that I go...” laments to himself
a rural Romeo sings haltingly.
Morning soup is now for sale;
and there arises an appetizing clamor of plates.
Three women pass by..., a layabout whistles... ”

“ That September night, you were
so kind to me... to the point that it hurt me!
I don’t know about the rest; and for all that,
you shouldn’t have been so kind, you shouldn’t have.
That night you sobbed when you saw me
withdrawn and unyielding, sick and sad. ”