#trilce

     Omens leap up to grapple the joints, the base, the brow, the under-face of walking numerators. Omens and warp-ends of lupine lumps.      As the lee of each unraveled caravel, unamericanised, snorts past, every ploughfoot yields in a spasm of misfortune, with the young wrist ill-mannered to snotting on the back of the hand. And the sharpest treble-note is shorn and tied, and largely nosifies, into icicles of infinite pity.      Proud loins puff as they bear, hooked on withered straps, the cockades with their seven colours below zero, from the guano islands to the guano islands. Such the stumps exposed to a poor faith. Such the courting season. That, too, of the circuit to ulterior stages, when the inert griffin tells only of failed, hushed crusades.      Then omens come to cleave even to ghost doors and rough drafts. — César Vallejo, Trilce (trans. Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi)

Estáis muertos.

―César Vallejo

You are dead. What a weird way of being dead. Anybody would say you’re not. But, really, you be Dead. You voidly float behind that membrane which tick-tocking from zenith to nadir journeys from sunset to sunset, throbbing before the music box of a painless wound. I tell you, then, that life is in the mirror, and that you are Death. The original. While the wave goes, while the wave comes, with impunity one is dead. Only when the waters burst upon the facing shores curling and churning do you then transfigure and, believing you’re dying, sense the sixth chord that’s no longer yours. You are dead, not having ever lived before. Anyone would say, not being now, in another time you were. But, really, you are the cadavers come from a life that never was. Sad fate. Not having been anything but dead, always. To be a dry leaf, without ever having been green. Orphanhood of orphanhoods. And nonetheless the dead are not, cannot be cadavers of a life they’ve not yet lived. They died of life. You are dead. — César Vallejo, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, in Selected Writings of César Vallejo (Wesleyan, 2015) It’s very interesting that in the original this is a prose poem. Not sure if they had a reason for lineating it. Still, I like the translation as its own piece.

Sensacional de Diseño Mexicano, Jornada, 2025

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