Blackstone on Whitestone
I will die in Paris on a rainy day,
on a day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris -- and I don't mind --
perhaps on a Thursday in autumn, like today.
It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday,
as I write
these lines, the bones in my arm ache badly,
and never before, in all my road, have I felt
myself as lonely as I do today.
Cesar Vallejo is dead, everyone kept hitting him,
even though he had done nothing to them.
They hit him hard with a stick, and hard
also with a rope; his witnesses
are the Thursday and the bones of his arms,
the loneliness, the rains, the roads . . .
Translated by Robert Hass
This is doing it the easy way. I ignored the rhymes. I mostly ignored the 12-syllable line. I ignored the grammatical strangenesses, and just tried to find a clear way through the main line of the poem, letting the timing of the phrasings in the stanzas, and the imagery, and the intense melancholy carry it. But I know I did not get Vallejo's poem. Perhaps you will try.
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