Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo

Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo


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murderous

      burden, the sophism of Good and Reason!

      What the hand grazed, by chance, has been grasped;

      perfumes drifted, and among them the scent of

      mold that halfway down the path has grown

      on the withered apple tree of dead Illusion.

      

      So life goes,

      with the treacherous canticles of a shriveled bacchante.

      Completely rattled, I push onward … onward,

      growling my funeral march.

      Walking at the feet of royal Brahacmanic22 elephants

      and to the sordid buzzing of a mercurial boiling,

      couples raise toasts sculpted in rock,

      and forgotten twilights a cross to their lips.

      So life goes, a vast orchestra of Sphinxes

      belching out its funeral march into the Void.

      [CE]

      ________________

       For Alejandro Gamboa

      One drinks one’s breakfast … The damp graveyard

      earth smells of beloved blood.

      City of winter … Mordant crusade

      of a cart that seems to drag along

      a feeling of fasting in chains!

      One wants to knock on each door

      and ask for who knows who; and then

      see to the poor, and, crying softly,

      give morsels of bread to everybody.

      And to strip the rich of their vineyards

      with the two saintly hands

      that with a blast of light

      flew off unnailed from the Cross!

      Matinal eyelash, don’t raise up!

      Our daily bread—give it to us,

      Lord …!

      All my bones belong to others;

      maybe I stole them!

      I took for my own what was perhaps

      meant for another;

      and I think that, had I not been born,

      another poor man would be drinking this coffee!

      I’m a lousy thief … Where will I go?

      And in this cold hour, when the earth

      smells of human dust and is so sad,

      I want to knock on every door

      and beg who knows who, forgive me,

      and bake him morsels of fresh bread

      here, in the oven of my heart …!

      [CE]

      ________________

      How long will we have to wait for what is

      not owed to us … And in what corner will

      we kick our poor sponge23 forever! How long before

      the cross that inspires us does not rest its oars.

      How long before Doubt toasts our nobility for

      having suffered …

      We have already sat so

      long at this table, with the bitterness of a child

      who at midnight, cries from hunger, wide awake …

      And when will we join all the others, at the brink

      of an eternal morning, everybody breakfasted.

      For just how long this vale of tears, into which

      I never asked to be led.

      Resting on my elbows,

      all bathed in tears, I repeat head bowed

      and defeated: how much longer will this supper last.

      There’s someone who has drunk too much, and he mocks us,

      and offers and withdraws from us—like a black spoonful

      of bitter human essence—the tomb …

      And this abstruse one knows

      even less how much longer this supper will last!

      [CE]

      ________________

       FOR MANUEL GONZÁLEZ PRADA,

       this wild, choice emotion, one for

       which the great master has most

       enthusiastically applauded me.

      My God, I am crying over the being I live;

      it grieves me to have taken your bread;

      but this poor thinking clay

      is no scab fermented in your side:

      you do not have Marys who leave you!

      My God, had you been a man,

      today you would know how to be God;

      but you, who were always fine,

      feel nothing for your own creation.

      Indeed, man suffers you; God is he!

      Today there are candles in my sorcerer eyes,

      as in those of a condemned man—

      my God, you will light all of your candles

      and we will play with the old die …

      Perhaps, oh gambler, throwing for the fate of

      the whole universe,

      Death’s dark-circled eyes will come up,

      like two funereal snake eyes of mud.

      My God, and this deaf, gloomy night,

      you will not be able to gamble, for the Earth

      is a worn die now rounded from

      rolling at random,

      it cannot stop but in a hollow,

      the hollow of an immense tomb.

      [CE]

      ________________

      My father is asleep. His august face

      expresses a peaceful heart;

      he is now so sweet …

      if there is anything bitter in him, it must be me.

      There is loneliness in the house; there is prayer;

      and no news of the children today.

      My father stirs, sounding

      the flight into Egypt, the styptic farewell.

      He is now so near;

      if there is anything distant in him, it must be me.

      My mother walks in the orchard,

      savoring a savor now without savor.

      She is so soft,


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