Esto / sucedio...

       This
happened between two eyelids; I quivered
in my pod, furious, alkaline,
pulled up at the lubricated equinox,
at foot of the cold blaze in which I fizzle out.

       Alkaline slik-up I keep saying,
nearer than garlic, over the syrup sense,
deeper in, very more, the rusts,
on going the water and on coming the wave.
Alkaline slip-up
too, a wild one, in the colossal staging of the sky.

       What curses and harpoons I'll hurl if I die
in my pod; I'll offer up in sacred banana leaves
my five subaltern little bones,
and in the glance, the glance itself!
(They say that in sighs one builds
then bony tactile accordions;
they say that when those who fizzle out die thus
aie! they die outside the clock, hand
clutching a single shoe.)

       Getting it and all, cyma
and all, in the crying sense of this voice,
I make myself suffer, I extract sadly
at night my fingernails;
then I have nothing and talk alone,
I revise my half-years
and in order to stuff my vertebra, touch.


--César Vallejo, "Esto / sucedió..." (23 September 1937)
tr. Clayton Eshleman