Cesar Vallejo lived between 1892-1938. He was born in Peru but died in France, not on a Thursday as in this poem presaging his own end, but on a Good Friday, I believe. His grandfathers in the Andes where he was born were both Spanish priests, and his grandmothers, Indigenous women. This early experience of the ways of social class, race and ethnicity and religion, drove Vallejo, like so many artists of the time, to seek a world of social justice, egalitarianism and the ending of some of the most barbaric exploitative practices carried out against the Indigenous and rural poor.

Before his early demise, Vallejo’s groundings in his own mestizo and Indigenous identity admixed with European influences, both politically and aesthetically. A life-long Marxist, Vallejo’s contributions of 2 volumes of poetry in his life time, Los Heraldos Negros/The Black Heralds and Trilce, cemented his position as a great modernist writer of the Spanish language and of Latin America and Peru in particular.

Although he spent much time in exile in Europe away from his native soil, he was a committed essayist, playwright and novelist. His later poetry books published posthumously, are Spain, Take This Cup From Me, and Human Poems.

Black Stone On a White Stone
Cesar Vallejo, Peru, 1892 –1938

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.
It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.
César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also
with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .

Translated and edited by Robert Bly,

Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca, Cesar Vallejo

Me moriré en París con aguacero
Un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo
Me moriré en París y no me corro
Tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño
Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso estos versos
Los húmeros me he puesto a la mala
Y jamás como hoy, me he vuelto
Con todo mi camino, a verme solo
César Vallejo ha muerto
Le pegaban todos sin que él les haga nada
Le daban duro con un palo
Y duro también con una soga
Son testigos los días jueves y los huesos húmeros
La soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…