César Vallejo, cuatro paredes de la celda / Four Walls of the Cell

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Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is from César Vallejo’s Trilce, first published in Peru in 1922, the year after the poet spent 105 days in prison for allegedly instigating a partisan skirmish in his hometown, Santiago de Chuco. Trilce is still considered one of the most radical Spanish-language avant-garde poetry collections ever written. Wesleyan’s edition of the book was translated by Clayton Eshleman and published in 2000. Eshleman was awarded a National Book Award for his co-translation of The Complete Posthumous Poetry, and was a Griffin Prize finalist for The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. A voluminous edition of Vallejo’s writing is newly available from Wesleyan: Selected Writings of César Vallejo. This new collection, edited by Joseph Mulligan, contains some poetry and a vast number of prose pieces translated to English for the first time. There are articles documenting Vallejo’s travels in Soviet Russia, personal correspondences, and excerpts from several of his plays as well as from his his novel El tungsteno / Tungsten, a work addressing the oppression of indigenous Peruvian miners.

 Selected-Trilce

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From Trilce

XVIII

    Oh las cuatro paredes de la celda.
Ah las cuatro paredes albicantes
que sin remedio dan al mismo número.    

    Criadero de nervios, mala brecha,
por sus cuatro rincones cómo arranca
las diarias aherrojadas extremidades.

     Amorosa llavera de innumerables llaves,
si estuvieras aqui, si vieras hasta
qué hora son cuatro estas paredes.
Contra ellas seríamos contigo, los dos,
más dos que nunca. Y ni lloraras,
di, libertadora!

     Ah las paredes de la celda.
De ellass me duelen entre tanto, más
las dos largas que tienen esta noche
algo de madres que ya muertas
llevan por bromurados declives,
a un niño de Ia mano cada una.

     Y sólo yo me voy quedando,
con la diestra, que hace por ambas manos,
en alto, en busca de terciario brazo
que ha de puilar, entre mi donde y mi cuando,
esta mayoría inválida de hombre.

 XVIII

     Oh the four walls of the cell.
Ah the four bleaching walls
that inevitably face the same number.

     Breeding place for nerves, foul breach,
through its four corners how it snatches at
the daily shackled extremities.

     Loving keeper of innumerable keys,
if only you were here, if only you could only see unto
what hour these walls remain four.
Against them we would be with you, the two of us,
more two than ever. And you wouldn’t even cry,
speak, liberator!

     Ah the walls of the cell.
Meanwhile of those that hurt me, most
the two long ones that tonight are
somehow like mothers now dead
leading a child through
bromowalled inclines by the hand.

     And only I hang on,
with my right, serving for both hands,
raised, in search of a tertiary arm
to pupilize, between my where and my when,
this invalid majority of a man.

CÉSAR VALLEJO (1892–1938) was born in the Peruvian Andes and, after publishing some of the most radical Latin American poetry of the twentieth century, moved to Europe, where he diversified his writing practice to encompass theater, fiction, and reportage. As an outspoken alternative to the European avant-garde, Vallejo stands as one of the most authentic and multifaceted creators to write in the Castilian language.