Translation:Januariad

by César Vallejo

 
My father, barely
in the birdlike morning, puts
in the sun his seventy-eight years,
his seventy-eight winter branches.
The Santiago cemetery, anointed
in a joyful new year, is in sight.
How many times did his steps cut towards it,
and turned back from some humble burial.

Today it’s been a long while that my father hasn’t appeared
The joking of children breaks out.

Other times he’d talk to my mother
about urban impressions, about politics;
and today, resting on his exalted cane
that would have sounded better in the years of the Gobernación,
my father is unknown, weak,
my father is a yesterday.
He takes with him, brings back, absorbed, relics, things,
memories, suggestions.
The peaceful morning accompanies him
with its white wings of a sister of charity.

And eternal day is this one, an ingenuous day, choral
infant-like, prayerful;
times crowns itself with doves,
and the future becomes crowded
by caravans of immortal roses.
Father, everything still goes on awakening;
it’s the January that sings, it’s your love
that goes off resonating into Eternity.
Still you’ll laugh about your little ones,
and there’ll be a triumphal racket in the Voids.

Still there’ll be a new year. There’ll be empanadas;
and I’ll be hungry, when he rings the call to mass
on the blessed ball,
the good lyrical blind man with whom
my fresh schoolchild syllables conversed.
And when the morning full of grace,
from its breasts of time,
which are two renunciations, two advances of love
that lie down and pray for infinite, eternal life,
sings, and gives flight to plural Words,
shreds of your being,
on the edge of its white wings of
a sister of charity, oh father of mine!