Cesar Vallejo Center

CESAR VALLEJO (Peru: 1892- Paris- 1938)

Translations by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi

EXERGASIA

I was born on a day
God was sick.

Everyone knows I'm alive,
that I'm mean; and they don't know
about the December of that January.
Well, I was born on a day
God was sick.

There is a void
in my metaphysical air
that no one will ever touch:
the cloister of a silence
that spoke flush with fire.

I was born on a day
God was sick.

Brother, listen, listen . . .
Alright. And do not let me set out
without carrying off Decembers,
without leaving Januaries.
Well, I was born on a day
God was sick.

Everyone knows I'm alive,
that I chew . . . And they don't know
why in my verse creak
- a dark bitterness of the coffin -
galling winds
unravelled from the Desert's
inquisitive Sphinx.

Everyone knows . . . And they don't know
that the Light is consumptive,
and the Shadow fat . . .
And they don't know that the Mystery synthesises . . .
that it is the sad
and musical hump that foretells from afar
the meridian stride from the limits to the Limits.

And I was born on a day
God was sick,
gravely.

X

Pristine and last stone of unfounded
happiness, has just died
soul and all, October and pregnant room.
Of three months of absence and ten of sweet.
How destiny,
a single-fingered mitre, laughs.

How, at the rear, meetings of opponents
forsake. How always the numeral pops up
under the line of every avatar.

How the whales pay up the doves.
How these, in turn, leave a beak
cubed to third wing.
How we saddlebow, in face of humdrum rumps.

One tows ten months to decimalise,
in pursuit of a fresh beyond.
Two at least are still in the bud.
And the three months of absence.
And nine of gestation.

There is not the slightest violence.
The patient sits up,
and, seated, dips quiet breadcrumbs.

XIII

I think of your sex.
Simple-hearted, I think of your sex
as I confront day's ripe burgeoning.
I feel the bud of bliss, now in season.
And an ancient sense dies
devolved into mind.

I think of your sex, a furrow more abounding
and melodious than the Shadow's womb,
although Death conceives and bears
from God himself.
Oh Conscience,
yes, I think of the free beast
that delights where it will, where it can.

Oh, honeyed riot of dusks.
Oh muffled crash.

Hsarcdelffum!

XVI

I have faith in being strong.
Give me, lame air, give me
ever added distinctions of zeroes on the left.
And you, sleep, give me your rigorous diamond,
your unseasonable time

I have faith in being strong.
There a hollow woman goes,
a colourless quantity, whose
grace closes where I open.

Out with it, friar past. Crabs, fools!
Catch sight of the green presidential flag,
carrying the six remaining flags,
all the buntings of the return.

I have faith in my being
and in having been less.

Take heart! A good first!

XVIII

Oh the cell's four walls.
Ah the four whitish walls
yielding ever the same result.

Cradle of nerves, fateful breach,
how day after day, with its four corners
it tears apart the fettered limbs.

Loving wardess with countless keys,
were you here, could you see to what
late hour these walls are four.
Up against them, with you, we both
would be two, more two than ever. Nor would you cry,
right, rescuer!

Ah the cell's walls.
Of these I ache, meanwhile, more
from the two long ones which tonight
evoke mothers long dead
leading down bromided slopes,
each a child by the hand.

And only I am left behind
with a right hand that works for both,
raised, on the look out for a tertiary arm
that between my where and my when
may pupil this disabled maturity of manhood.

XXIII

Stifling stove of those biscuits of mine,
pure countless egg-yolk of childhood, mother.

Oh your four gullets, stunningly
ill-moaned, mother: your beggars.
The two last sisters, Miguel who has died
and I trailing still
a braid for each letter of the alphabet.

In the room upstairs, you shared among us
in the morning, in the afternoon, in a double stowage,
time's savoury hosts,
to overstock us now
with husks of clocks that bend to 24
frozen on the dot.

Mother, and now! Now, in what cavity,
might linger, in what capillary shoot,
the crumb that binds my throat today
and will not pass. Today even when
your very bones could be flour
with no place for kneading,
- love's gentle confectioner! -
even in the crude shadow, even in the large molar,
whose gum throbs in that tiny milky dimple
that cuts and teems unnoticed - how you've seen it! -
in the clenched hands newly born.

Thus the earth will hear in your silencing,
how we are being charged
the rent of the world you leave us in
and the value of that inexhaustible bread.

And they tax us when, little as we were
then, as you surely saw,
we could have robbed no one
of it; when you gave it to us,
- right, mam?

XXVIII

I've had lunch alone now, and without mother,
or request, or serve-yourself, or water,
or father who, in the fluent offertory
of tender corn, might ask, through his belated
image, for the older clasps of sound.

How was I to have lunch. How was I to serve
those things from such distant dishes,
when one's own home might be broken up,
when no mother shows up at the lips.
How was I to eat the slightest thing.

I've had lunch at the table of a good friend
with his father just back from the world,
with his white-haired aunts who speak
in mottled tinges of porcelain,
muttering through all their widowed cavities;
and with generous settings of happy wheezes
because they are at home. Sure, what a feat!
And the knives of this table have hurt me
all over my palate.

Dining on such tables as these, in which one tastes
another love instead of one's own,
turns into earth the mouthful not offered by the
MOTHER,
turns the hard swallow into a blow; the sweet,
bile; funereal oil, the coffee.

When your own home is already broken up,
and the motherly serve-yourself comes no more from the
grave,
the kitchen in darkness, the wretchedness of love.

XXXVIII

This crystal awaits to be sipped
in the rough by a forthcoming toothless
mouth. Its teeth unextracted.
This crystal is bread not yet arrived.

It hurts when they force it
and has no more animal affections.
But if made passionate, it would syrup
and take the mold of substantives
that adjectivise when offering themselves.

Those who see it there a colourless
sad individual, would send him off for love,
for the past and at most for the future:
if he is not given by any of his sides;
if he awaits to be sipped instantly,
and as transparency, by a forthcoming
mouth that will have no more teeth.

This crystal has passed from animal
and now sets off to shape lefts,
the new Minuses.
Just leave it alone.

XLIV

This piano travels inward,
it travels in joyous leaps.
Then ponders in iron-clad repose,
nailed with ten horizons.

It advances. It crawls under tunnels,
further on, under tunnels of grief,
under vertebrae that naturally flee.

Other times their horns lead,
slow yellow desires of living,
they go in eclipse,
and insect nightmares are deloused,
already dead to thunder, herald of geneses.

Dark piano, on whom do you spy
with your deafness that hears me,
with your muteness that deafens me?

Oh mysterious beat.

LIX

The terrestrial sphere of love
that lagged below, turns round
and round without stopping a second,
and we are condemned to suffer,
as a centre, its rotation.

Motionless Pacific, glass, pregnant
with every possibility.
Cold Andes, inhumanable, pure.
Perhaps. Perhaps.

The sphere spins on the flint of time,
and sharpens,
sharpens till it wants to lose itself;
it spins forging, before the deserted flanks,
that point so frighteningly known,
because it has gestated, turn
and turn again,
the familiar little corral.

Centrifugal it goes yes, yes,
Yes,
yes, yes, yes, yes: NO!
And I withdraw till blue, and retreating
grow hard, until I clutch my soul!

LXXI

The sun slithers on your fresh hand,
and spreads cautious over your curiosity.

Be quiet. No one knows you are in me,
completely. Be quiet. Don't breathe. No one
knows of my succulent lunch of unity:
a legion of obscurities, amazons of tears.

The carts leave, scourged by the evening,
and among them mine, facing backwards, at the fatal
reins of your fingers.
Your hands and my hands reciprocally hurl
poles on guard, rehearsing depressions,
and brows and sides.

Be quiet also, future twilight,
and withdraw to laugh intimately, at this ardour
of roosters proudly purple,
proudly enrazored
with half-moons, with cerulean widowed halves.
Rejoice, orphan; drink your cup of water
from the store on any corner.

LXXVII

It hails so much, so as to make me remember
and increase the pearls
I have collected from the very snout
of every tempest.

May this rain never dry up.
Unless it were now given me
to fall for it, or unless they would bury me
drenched in the water
that would jet from every fire.

How far will this rain reach me?
I fear it may leave me with a dry flank;
I fear it may part, without having tested me
in the droughts of incredible vocal chords,
through which,
to make harmony,
one must always go up, never descend!
Do we not go up, in fact, downward?

Sing, rain, on the still oceanless shore!