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Cesar Vallejo

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Something identifies you with the one who leaves you, and it is your common power to return: thus your greatest sorrow.

Something separates you from the one who remains with you, and it is your common slavery to depart: thus your meagerest rejoicing.

I address myself, in this way, to collective individualities, as well as to individual collectivities, and to those who, between them both, lie marching to the sound of the frontiers, or, simply, mark time without moving at the edge of the world.

Something typically neuter, inexorably neuter, stands between the thief and his victim. This, likewise, can be noticed in the relation between a surgeon and his patient. A horrible halfmoon, convex and solar, covers all of them. For the stolen object has also its indifferent weight, and the operated on organ also its sad fat.

What on earth is more exasperating than the impossibility for the happy man to become unhappy, and the good man to become wicked?

To leave! To remain! To return! To depart! The whole social mechanism fits in these words.


(Translated by Clayton Eshleman, from The Complete Posthumous Poetry, University of California Press, 1979.)