XXXIII

  If it were to rain tonight, I would take shelter
a thousand years hence.
Better still, no more than a hundred.
As if nothing had happened, I would
pretend that I am still coming.

   Or without mother, without loved one, without haste
for crouching to spy down here, by sheer
strength,
this very night, I would be disentangling
the Vedic fibre,
the Vedic wool of my final end, a thread
of the devil, a scheme of having held
by their noses
two cacophonous clappers of time
                                       in the one bell.

  Though taking account of my life,
or taking account of having not yet being born,
I will not manage to free myself.

  What has not yet come will not be, but just
what has arrived and is already gone,
but just what has arrived and is already gone.


--Cesar Vallejo
Translated by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi