Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo

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Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo Wesleyan Poetry Series

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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      withdrawn in an expression of defeat.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]

      ________________

      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

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