Translation:Imperial Nostalgias

by César Vallejo

I.

Twilight forms imperial nostalgias
in the landscapes of Mansiche;
and the race forms in my speech,
like a star of blood on the edge of a muscle.

The bell tower peals... There’s no one to open
the chapel... You’d think a Biblical
tract had died in the Asiatic
emotional speech of this twilight.

A three-legged stone bench, is the altarpiece
on which choral lips have finished singing
the eucharist of a golden chicha.

Beyond the farms, it rises with the wind-
the smoke that smells of sleep and stable,
as if a firmament were being exhumed.

II.

The pensive old woman, like the carvings
on a pre-Incan block, spins and spins;
with the gentle spindle in her Mother’s fingers
she shears the gray wool of her old-age.

A blind and lightless sun guards and mutilates
her sclerotic eyes of snow...!
Her mouth is in disdain, and in treacherous calm
her imperial weariness perhaps keeps watch.

There are ficuses that reflect, disheveled
Inca troubadours in defeat,
the rancid sorrow of this idiotic cross,

in the shameful hour that is already escaping,
and that is a lake that welds rough mirrors
where Manco-Capac laments shipwreck.

III.

Like old curacas the oxen go
the path of Trujillo, reflecting...
And to the iron of the evening, imitate kings
go weeping for dead dominion.

Standing atop the wall, I think of the laws
that happiness and anquish go on negotiating:
and in the widowed eyes of the oxen,
timeless dreams decay.

The village, before their step, re-clothes itself
in a rough gray, un which the low of a cow
oils itself in sleep and emotion of a huaca.

And in the feast of the blue iodized sky,
an old exiled caracara
groans in the chalice of sad cowbell.

IV

The withered Grama, clean, simple,
conceals I don’t know what unknown protest:
it seems like the exhausted soul of a poet,
disheartened in a gesture of defeat.

The Ramada has refined its silhouette,
cadaverous cage, alone and broken,
where my sick heart calms itself
in statue-like tedium of terracota.

The saltless song of the plowed sea arrives
in its seething mask of riffraff
that drools and jerks, hanged!

The fog spins a bandage over the white hill,
that walls itself in milestone dreams,
like a giant huaco keeping watch.