César Vallejo was born in Santiago de Chuco, Peru in 1892 and died in Paris in 1938. According to the Antologia de la Poesia Hispanoamericana, “In 1923, after publishing his second book, Trilce, which placed him at the forefront of the poetic Peruvian vanguard, he left for Europe never to return.” The death of his mother, a bohemian reputation, and an “unfortunate incident which landed him in prison for four months,” are often cited as the reasons for his self-imposed exile. “After a long poetic silence, as if urged by the presentiment of death, he wrote—in just a few months—the ‘Human Poems’ which would be published posthumously [… and which] you can barely speak [of] as poetry, they are the sharp and torn expression of the pain of, not the individual, but our species.”
from the article:
Nine Monsters
And, unfortunately, pain grows in the world all the time, grows, thirty minutes every second, step by step, and the nature of pain, is pain twice over and the condition of martyrdom, carnivorous, voracious, it’s pain twice over and the function of the purest herb, pain twice, over, and the good of being, to hurt us twice over.
Never, kin of mine, humankind, was there ever so much pain, in the chest, on the lapels, inside the purse, in the cup, in the butcher shop, in the arithmetic! Never so much painful affection, Never has so far hit so close, Never fire, ever played better dead, bitter cold! Never, Mr. Minister of Health, was health more deadly nor did the migraine steal so much foresight from the forehead! And the furniture, in its basket-casket cabinet, pain, in the heart, in its basket-casket cabinet, pain, the lizard, in its basket-casket cabinet, pain.
Despair grows, humankind, kin of mine, faster than the machine, ten machines at a time, and it grows with Rousseau’s red beef, with our beards; evil grows for unknown reasons and becomes a flood of its own juices, with its own mud and cloud of brick! It inverts the suffering positions, puts on a show wherein liquid humor rises vertically from the pavement the eye is seen, this ear is heard, and this ear tolls nine times on the hour of lightning and laughter, on the hour of wheat, nine songs sing soprano on the hour of weeping, nine hummed hymns on the hour of hunger, and nine thunders and nine whips, minus one scream.
Pain gets a hold of us, kin of mine, humankind, by the scruff, by the profile, drives us crazy in the cinemas, nails us to the gramophone, un-nails us from the bed, falls perpendicularly, atop our tickets, atop our letters; and it’s terrible to suffer, one can pray… For it ends up being that from pain, some are born, some grow, some die, and some who are born but do not die, and some who are neither born nor buried (the majority). And it also ends up being that from suffering, I am grieved to the top of my head, and even more to just below my ankle from seeing bread, crucified, the turnip blood-soaked, crying, the onion, most grain ground down, to flour, so throw dust in the salt, as water flees and in the wine, an ecce-homo, so pale is the snow, beneath a sunburnt sun!
How then, kin of mine, humankind, not to say that I can’t and I can’t with all the bushels and baskets of cabinet-caskets, with so many minutes, with so many lizards and so many inversions, so very far and so very bad this thirst for thirst! Mr. Minister of Health: what to do? Ah! Unfortunately, humankind, There is, kin of mine, a lot to do.