XXVII

     It gives me fear, that surge,
good remembrance, strong sir, implacable
cruel sweetness. It gives me fear.
This house gives me a whole well-being, a whole
place for this not knowing where to be.

     Let's not go in. It gives me fear, this favour
of returning by the minute, through blown-up bridges.
I won't go on, sweet sir,
valiant memory, sad
singing skeleton.

     What content, that of this enchanted house,
gives me deaths of quicksilver, and plugs
my spurts with lead
at the dried-up here-and-now.

     The surge that knows not how's it going,
gives me fear, terror.
Valiant memory, I won't go on.
Fair and sad skeleton, hiss, hiss.

 

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.

 

XXIX

     Tedium buzzes bottled-up
under the unperformed moment and cane.

     A parallel passes through
an ungrateful line broken with joy.
Every firmness amazes me, next to that water
that moves away, that laughs steel, cane.

     Retightened thread, thread, binomial thread,
where will you snap, knot of war?

     Armour this equator, Moon.

 

Copyright © Michel Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi, 2005.

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César Vallejo was born in 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, a small town in north central Peru, and died in Paris in 1938. In his short life he was to become one of the greatest Hispanic poets and one of the most significant figures in the pre-war Hispanic literary avant-garde. During his life he published two books of poetry: Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds, 1918) and Trilce (1922). His posthumous poems were first published three books: Nómina de huesos (written 1923-36), Sermón de la barbarie (1936-38) and España, aparte de mí este cáliz (1937-38). In September 2005 Shearsman Books published a complete translation of Trilce (from which the above translations are drawn), together with Vallejo's Complete Later Poems 1923-1938, both edited and translated by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith.

Michael Smith lives in Dublin. Shearsman Books publish his collections, The Purpose of the Gift. Selected Poems and Maldon & Other Translations as well as his translations, with Valentino Gianuzzi, of César Vallejo, which appeared in September 2005.

Valentino Gianuzzi lives in Lima, Perú. He graduated in Hispanic Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and has worked as a journalist, translator and assistant editor. He is currently editing the complete fiction of the Peruvian writer José Díez Canseco (1904-1949).