Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
Читать онлайн книгу.
hard. And I
have no desire to live, my heart!
[CE]
________________
THE BLACK CUP
Night is a cup of evil. Shrilly a police
whistle pierces it, like a vibrating pin.
Listen, bitch, how come if you are gone now
the flicker is still black and still makes me burn?
The Earth has coffinesque edges in the dark.
Listen, bitch, don’t come back.
My flesh swims, swims
in the cup of darkness still aching me;
my flesh swims in her,
in the marshy heart of woman.
Astral ember … I have felt
dry scrapes of clay
fall upon my diaphanous lotus.
Ah, woman! Flesh formed of instinct
exists because of you. Ah, woman!
That is why—oh, black chalice! even after you left
I am choking on dust,
and more urges to drink paw at my flesh!
[CE]
________________
IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS
I
In the landscapes of Mansiche the twilight
fashions imperial nostalgias;
and the race takes shape in my word,
a star of blood on the surface of muscle.
The bell tower tolls … There is no one to open
the chapel … One could say that
a biblical opuscule died in the words of
this twilight’s Asiatic emotion.
A stone bench with three gourd pots, is an altarpiece
on which a chorus of lips have just raised
the Eucharist of golden chicha.
Beyond, smoke smelling of sleep and stable
rises on the wind from the farms,
as if a firmament were being exhumed.
II
Like a relief on a pre-Incan block,
the pensive old woman spins and spins;
in her Mama fingers the thin spindle
shears the gray wool of her old age.
A blind, unlit sun guards and mutilates
her sclerotic snowy eyes …!
Her mouth is scornful, and with a deceptive calm
her imperial weariness perhaps holds vigil.
There are meditating ficuses, routed
shaggy Incan troubadours,
the rancid pain of this idiotic cross,
in the shameful hour that now escapes,
and is a lake soldering crude mirrors
where shipwrecked Manco Capac weeps.
III
Like old caciques the oxen walk
the road to Trujillo, meditating …
And in the iron of the evening, they feign kings
who wander dead domains sobbing.
Standing on the wall, I ponder the laws
happiness and anguish keep exchanging:
already in the oxen’s widowed pupils
dreams that have no when are rotting.
The village, as they pass, is dressed in
harsh gray, where a cow’s mooing
is oiled with dreams and huaca emotion.
And in the banquet of the blue iodized sky
an ancient exiled corequenque13 moans in
the chalice of a melancholy cattle-bell.
IV
La Grama—gloomy, secluded, unadorned—
stifled I don’t know what unknown protest:
it resembles the exhausted soul of a poet,
withdrawn in an expression of defeat.
La Ramada14 has carved its silhouette,
a cadaverous cage, alone and broken,
where my sick heart calms itself in
a statuesque tedium of terra-cotta.
The song saltlessly arrives from the sea
fitted out in the farcical mask of a thug
who drools and staggers, hanged!
The fog weaves a bandage about the lilac hill
enwalled with milliary dreams,
like a gigantic huaco holding vigil.
[CE]
________________
EBONY LEAVES
My cigarette sparkles;
its light cleansed by gunpowder alerts.
And to its yellow wink
a little shepherd intones
the tamarind of his dead shadow.
The whole ramshackle house drowns in
an energetic blackness
the faded distinction of its whiteness.
A delicate odor of downpour lingers.
All the doors are very old,
and a sleepless piety of a thousand hollow eyes
sickens in their worm-eaten Havana brown.
I left them robust;
today spiderwebs have already woven into
the very heart of their wood,
clots of shadow smelling of neglect.
The day the woman by the road
saw me arrive, she shrieked
as if crying for joy, tremulous and sad,
while half-opening her two arms.
For in every fiber there dwells,
for the loving eye, a sleeping
bridal pearl, a hidden tear.
My anxious heart
whispers with I don’t know what recollection.
—Señora? …—Yes, señor; she died in the village;
I still see her wrapped in her shawl …
And the grandmotherly bitterness
of an outcast’s neurasthenic song
—oh defeated legendary muse!—
sharpens its melodious outpouring
under the dark night;
as if below, below,
in an open grave’s
muddy gravel