Cesar Vallejo

[quasimodo1]

Cesar Vallejo
(1892 - 1938) -------------------------------------------------------
Black Stone on Top of a White Stone


I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil. Never like today have I turned,
And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.

César Vallejo is dead. They struck him,
All of them, though he did nothing to them,
They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,
The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain, and the roads...

Cesar Vallejo [biography, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/authors/vallejoA.html ]

[quasimodo1]

Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París y no me corro
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos...

-César Vallejo (Black Stone on Top of a White Stone)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2007summer/vallejo.shtml

[quasimodo1]

Under the Poplars (1919)
by César Vallejo

for Jose Eulogio Garrido


Like priestly imprisoned poets,
the poplars of blood have fallen asleep.
On the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem
chew arias of grass at sunset.


The ancient shepherd, who shivers
at the last martyrdoms of light,
in his Easter eyes has caught
a purebred flock of stars.


Formed in orphanhood, he goes down
with rumors of burial to the praying field,
and the sheep bells are seasoned with shadow.


It survives, the blue warped
In iron, and on it, pupils shrouded,
A dog etches its pastoral howl.

[hatchoi]

These poems really move me so much!

[hatchoi]

But could you tell me the translator's name?

[quasimodo1]

Black Messengers.


There are in life such hard blows . . . I don't know!
Blows seemingly from God's wrath; as if before them
the undertow of all our sufferings
is embedded in our souls . . . I don't know!

There are few; but are . . . opening dark furrows
in the fiercest of faces and the strongest of loins,
They are perhaps the colts of barbaric Attilas
or the dark heralds Death sends us.


They are the deep falls of the Christ of the soul,
of some adorable one that Destiny Blasphemes.
Those bloody blows are the crepitation
of some bread getting burned on us by the oven's door ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

The Eternal Die


These untamed and special thoughts, among those the great teacher most fervently praised, are dedicated to Manuel Gonzales Prada.


My God: I’m mourning the life I live!

I regret having accepted your bread;

but this poor sentient piece of clay

is not a scab, putrid on your side:

you don’t have Marias who leave!


My God! If you’d been a man,

you’d know how to be Divine today;

but you, who’ve always been well,

sense nothing of your own creation. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.pen.org/printmedia.php/prmMediaID/1120

[quasimodo1]

from
César Vallejo, Trilce.

Marsilio Publishers, 1992.


I

Who's making all that racket, and not even leaving
testation to the islands beginning to appear.

A little more consideration
as it will be late, early,
and easier to assay
the guano, the simple fecapital
ponk
a brackish gannet
toasts unintentionally,
in the insular heart, to each hyaloid
squall.

A little more consideration, and liquid muck, six in the evening
OF THE MOST GRANDIOSE B-FLATS.

And the peninsula raises up
from behind, muzziled,
unterrified
on the fatal balance line.



IV

Two carts grind against the hammers
until trifurca lachrymals,
when we never did anything to them.
To that other one yes, unloved,
embitternessed under an unsheltered tunnel
by the first one, and over tough aljid
spiritiveordeals.
I stretched out as a third part,
but the evening-what'her we gonna dooo-
rings around in my head, furiously
not wanting to double mother's dose. They are
the rings.
They are the nuptial tropics already browsed.
The parting, best of all,
breaks into Crucible. ... {excerpt}

[JoanS]

iam really suprised that english and american readers read latin writers.. is Vallejo an exception or is the reading of hispanic writers common?

[stlukesguild]

Actually Vallejo is the exception in that he is one of the most important Spanish-language poets of the 20th century... and yet it has only been recently that one could find (in print) solid translations of his work. I can't speak for American readers in general, but in my personal library I have more than a share of Spanish poets and writers in general. If I skip over the older writers (Cervantes, Gongora, San Juan de la Cruz, Calderon, etc... I still have a solid selection of 20th century Spanish and Spanish-speaking writers: Garcia-Lorca, Jimenez, Alberti, Hernandez, Aleixandre, Guillen, Machado, Unamuno, Francisco de Ayala, Ramon Perez de Ayala, Gonzalo Torente Ballester, Jose Donoso, Sor Juana Inez, Pablo Neruda, Bioy Casares, J.L. Borges, Julio Cortazar, Machado de Assis, Alejo Carpentier, garcia-Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Llosa, Augusto Monterroso, Roberto Juarroz, Octavio Paz, Homero Aridjis, Jose Pacheco, Pedro Paramo, and a number of others.

[JoanS]

sooo.. maybe you are the exception...

(pedro paramo is a novel written by Juan Rulfo, which served to garcía márquez as a model of all his stupid career)

thanks for answer

[stlukesguild]

sooo.. maybe you are the exception...

Reading as much as I do... no matter what or where its from... probably makes me an exception... although its an exception that quite a few here would seem to be equally afflicted with.

pedro paramo is a novel written by Juan Rulfo, which served to garcía márquez as a model of all his stupid career

That's what I get from just glancing at the spines.:blush:

[quasimodo1]

MIGUEL


I'm sitting here on the old patio
beside your absence. It is a black well. ...

...Miguel, we were too good at that game.
Everything would always end in tears.


No one was laughing on that August night
you went to hide away again, so late
it was almost dawn. But now your brother's through
with this hunting and hunting and never finding you.
The shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry
and show yourself? Mama will only worry. {excerpts}


[Translated from the Spanish by Don Paterson]

[quasimodo1]

Paris, October 1936
by César Vallejo
translated from the Spanish by Daniel Bosch

I alone leave all this behind.
I leave this bench, I leave my pants,
the things I’ve done, my “big chance,”
my number split through side to side,
I alone leave it all behind.

From the Champs Elysées or the turn
of the moon’s strange, narrow street,
my death leaves town, my cradle too,
and, alone, cut loose, others at every turn,
the one most like me completes his turn
and dispatches his shadows, singly, discrete.

{excerpt}

[stlukesguild]

To My Brother Miguel

In Memoriam

Brother, I'm sitting on the bench at our house
where your absence is a bottomless pit.
I remember that this is the time we used to play,
and that Mama would pat us and say, "Boys, boys..."

Now I'm hiding, as I used to,
from all those eventide prayers,
and hoping you don't stumble upon me.
Through the sala, the entry hall, the corridors.
Later, you go hid, and I don't find you.
I remember that we made each other cry,
brother, playing that game.

Miguel, you hid
one night in August, near dawn;
but instead of laughing as you hid, you were sad.
And your twin heart from those bygone
afternoons is weary from not finding you. And now
a shadow is falling over my soul...

from the collection Black Heralds
tr. Margaret Sayers Peden

[Smart_Pretty]

Actually Vallejo is the exception in that he is one of the most important Spanish-language poets of the 20th century... and yet it has only been recently that one could find (in print) solid translations of his work. I can't speak for American readers in general, but in my personal library I have more than a share of Spanish poets and writers in general. If I skip over the older writers (Cervantes, Gongora, San Juan de la Cruz, Calderon, etc... I still have a solid selection of 20th century Spanish and Spanish-speaking writers: Garcia-Lorca, Jimenez, Alberti, Hernandez, Aleixandre, Guillen, Machado, Unamuno, Francisco de Ayala, Ramon Perez de Ayala, Gonzalo Torente Ballester, Jose Donoso, Sor Juana Inez, Pablo Neruda, Bioy Casares, J.L. Borges, Julio Cortazar, Machado de Assis, Alejo Carpentier, garcia-Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Llosa, Augusto Monterroso, Roberto Juarroz, Octavio Paz, Homero Aridjis, Jose Pacheco, Pedro Paramo, and a number of others.


Oh my god!!! You have awesome books. Hernandez is that Miguel, and Machado my favorite is Portrait (Retrato). Mario Vargas LLosa the best of his best The War of the end of the World. When I finish that book I cried and I wanted to hog him. Congratulations you know your writers.

[quasimodo1]

The Book of Nature



Professor of sobbing—I said to a tree—
staff of quicksilver, rumorous
linden, at the bank of the Marne , a good student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
between the evident water and the false sun,
his three of hearts, his queen of diamonds.

Rector of the chapters of heaven,
of the ardent fly, of the manual calm there is in asses;
rector of deep ignorance, a bad student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
the hunger for reason that maddens him
and the thirst for dementia that drives him mad.

Technician of shouts, conscious tree, strong,
fluvial, double, solar, double, fanatic,
connoisseur of the cardinal roses, totally
embedded, until drawing blood, in stingers, a student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
his precocious, telluric, volcanic, king of spades.

Oh professor, from having been so ignorant!
oh rector, from trembling so much in the air!
oh technician, from so much bending over!
Oh linden, oh murmurous staff by the Marne!


{ http://www.fascicle.com/issue01/Poets/vallejo4.htm --- translated by Clayton Eshleman }

[quasimodo1]

Guitar



The pleasure of suffering, of hating, dyes my
throat with plastic venoms,
but the bristle that implants its magic order,
its taurine grandeur, between the first string
and the sixth
and the mendacious eighth, suffers them all.

The pleasure of suffering… Who? Whom?
who, the molars? whom society,
the carbides of rage in the gums?
How to be
and to be here, without angering one's neighbor?

You are worthier than my number, man alone,
and worthier than all the dictionary,
with its prose in poetry,
its poetry in prose,
are your eagle display,
your tiger machinery, bland fellow man.

The pleasure of suffering,
of hoping for hope at the table,
Sunday with all its languages,
Saturday with Chinese, Belgian hours,
the week, with two hockers. ...

{excerpt translated by Clayton Eshleman }

28 October 1937http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/CesarVellejo.jpg

[quasimodo1]

The tip of man,
the petty mockery of shrinking
after smoking his universal ash;
tip yielding to secret snails,
tip one grasps wearing gloves,
tip Monday restrained with six bridles,
tip emerging from listening to his soul.

On the other hand,
the soldiers could have been fine rain
and neither square gunpowder, upon returning from their brave follies,
nor deadly bananas; only
a bit of sideburn on the silhouette.
On the other hand, walking fathers-in-law,
brothers-in-law on a sonorous mission,
all the equine grace walking
can flash resplendently!

Oh to think geometrically against the light!
Oh not to die lowly
of such swift and such fragrant majesty!
Oh not to sing; to barely
write and to write with a little stick
or with the edge of a restless ear!

{excerpt} --- translated by Clayton Eshleman

14 September 1937

[quasimodo1]

Feasible of Black Roses

Bow down your head ol’ poet—
To face God’s grace ahead
There are no more trenches

To dig today…
In the forest of your head,

So—: Bow down, bow down,

Ol’ barbaric poet!
Death rides the horse ahead
I hear the crackling of a whip
See the crazed eyes of death.

He summons you to his den—
The devil and his wind,

So—: Bow down, bow down
Your blood stained brows
He will take you to the edge.

Closer, closer, I see you now
Eh! a moving satanic cloud—
I see a festival of black-roses,
I hear clamor in the crowd.

Bow down, bow down, Ol’ poet
…I hear your applause!