Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert

I came to confuse her with myself,
and how! Through all her spiritual
meanderings, I continued
to play in the strawberry fields,
in the sunrise of her Grecian hands.

After this, she’d come to adjust
my black, unruly tie, and I’d
go back to observing the stone
in its absorption, and the fallow benches,
and the clock that reeled us in
at every stroke of its eternal clockwork.

Good nights they were,
that make me laugh now,
for the strange manner of my dying,
for my brand of ruminations.
Golden confections,
sugary gems
that finally crumble
beneath the stony mortar of this world.

But if your tears are tears of love,
the morning stars are lovely silks,
in lilacs
and oranges
and greens,
soaking full of the heart.
And if their silken threads get choked with bile,
then another silk, all great and apocalyptic,
will reach down from a certain love,
one never born, and one that never dies
—blue, unedited, the hand of God.

 


 

Fresco

 

Llegué a confundirme con ella,
tanto. . . ! Por sus recodos
espirituales, yo me iba
jugando entre tiernos fresales,
entre sus griegas manos matinales.

Ella me acomodaba después los lazos negros
y bohemios de la corbata. Y yo
volvía a ver la piedra
absorta, desairados los bancos, y el reloj
que nos iba envolviendo en su carrete,
al dar su inacabable molinete.

Buenas noches aquellas,
que hoy la dan por reír
de mi extraño morir,
de mi modo de andar meditabundo.
Alfeñiques de oro,
joyas de azúcar
que al fin se quiebran en
el mortero de losa de este mundo.

Pero para las lágrimas de amor,
los luceros son lindos pañuelitos
lilas,
naranjas,
verdes,
que empapa el corazón.
Y si hay ya mucha hiel en esas sedas,
hay un cariño que no nace nunca,
que nunca muere,
vuela otro gran pañuelo apocalíptico,
la mano azul, inédita de Dios!

From Los heraldos negros (Editorial Losada, S. A., 1918) by César Vallejo. Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert. This poem is in the public domain.