Translation:Leaves of Ebony

by César Vallejo

 
    My cigarette is glowing;
its light cleans itself in powders of alertness.
And at its yellow wink
a pastor-boy sings
the tamarind of his dead shadow.

    The entire hovel
drowns in a blackened energy
he withered distinction of its whiteness
A fragile aroma of downpour languishes.

     All the doors are very old,
an insomniac piety of a thousand baggy eyes
grows weary in his moth-eaten Havana cigar.
I left them in good shape;
and today the cobwebs have been woven
to the heart of its boards,
clumps of shadow smelling of forgetfulness.
The woman on the path, the day
she saw me arrive, tremulous and sad,
with her arms half-open,
shouted as in a cry of joy.
That in every fiber there exists
for the eye that loves, a sleeping
pearl of a woman, a hidden tear.

     With I don’t know what memory
my anxious heart whispers.
-Ma’am?... –Yes, sir; she died in the village;
I still see her wrapped in her shawl...

     And the grandmother bitterness
of the neurasthenic chant of an outcast-
oh, defeated legendary muse!
sharpen its melodic torrents
beneath the dark night:
as if beneath, beneath,
in the turbid fragmented pupil
of an open tomb,
celebrating perpetual funerals,
fantastic daggers were breaking.

    It’s raining..., it’s raining... It condenses the downpour,
reducing it to funerary odors,
the mood of old camphors
that keep watch tahuash-ing on the path
with their ponchos of ice and without hats.