For Manuel González Prada, this savage, rare emotion, one of those for which,
with more enthusiasm, the great maestro has commended me.
My Lord, I’m weeping for the being I inhabit;
I regret having taken your bread
but this poor, pensive clay
is no fermented scab in your side;
you don’t have Marys who leave you!
My Lord, if you had been man,
today you might know to be God;
but you always felt fine, you
feel nothing your creation feels.
And man certainly does suffer you: the God is he!
Today, since candles burn in my sorcerer’s eyes,
as in those of a man condemned,
My Lord, you’ll light all your candles,
and we will play with the old die...
Perhaps, O gambler, to play the luck
of the entire universe,
the dark circles beneath Death’s eyes will emerge
as two funereal snakes of mud.
My Lord, you won’t be able to play
on this dark, deaf night, because the Earth
is a gnawed die, already rounded
from rolling so randomly,
powerless to stop except in a void,
in the void of an enormous grave.
by César Vallejo
We fight to thread ourselves through the eye of a needle,
confronted by cattle.
The fourth angle of the circle is almost ammoniated.
Female continues male, due to
probable breasts, and precisely
due to how much doesn’t blossom!
Are you there, Venus de Milo?
You pretend to be barely maimed, swarming shoots
buried in the plenary arms
of existence,
of existence that stillvisors,
enduring imperfection.
Venus de Milo, whose amputated, increated
arm turns round and round and tries to encode itself
on verdant pebble stutters,
ortive nautiluses, evens that recently
began to crawl, immortal preludes.
Looseness of immanences, lassoess
of the parenthesis.
You must refuse to set foot
on the duple security of Harmony.
You must refuse symmetry as certainty.
You must intervene in the conflict
of disputing points
in the most violent of the jousts
the leap through the eye of the needle!
Such that I now feel the pinkie
remaining on my left hand. I see it and believe
it must not be me, or at least that it is
in a place where it shouldn’t be.
And it enrages me and irritates me
and there’s no way to get out of it, except
pretending that today is Thursday.
You must yield to the potent new
inequality of orphanhood!
by César Vallejo
Stuart Cooke is a writer & translator based on the Gold Coast, where he lectures in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University. His most recent books include a work of translation, George Dyuŋgayan's Bulu Line: a West Kimberley Song Cycle (2014), and Speaking the Earth's Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013).