World, César Vallejo, Robert Bly, Poetry, Translations, Peru

Black Stone Lying On A White Stone by César Vallejo

By T.

8 January 2006

4.16k

Black Stone Lying On A White Stone
César Vallejo
Translated by Robert Bly

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris–and I don’t step aside—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

Cesar Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads…

MARGINALIA

Watching this new show, NUMB3RS. I think it’s true, you know. Great mathematicians have no great facility for language, and great writers have no great facility for numbers. Or maybe, I am just not that well-read.

ABOUT CéSAR VALLEJO

César Vallejo was a Peruvian poet who lived in Paris and Spain for much of his adult life. Vallejo was born in Santiago de Chuco, a small village in the northern Andes mountains. His poetry collections include Los herald negros (“The Black Heralds, 1918) and Trilce (1922), the play La piedra cansada (1927), prose works including a book on his travels in Russia, Rusia en 1931 (1932), and the posthumously published poetry collections Sermón de la barbarie (“Sermon on… (more)