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César Vallejo
César Vallejo
César Vallejo was born in Santaigo de Chuco, Peru in 1892. He was the author of four collections of poetry, most famously Trilce...
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Black Stone Lying On A White Stone  
by 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.

   César 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. . .



By César Vallejo, translated and edited by Robert Bly, and published by Beacon Press in Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems. © 1971 by Robert Bly. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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