César Vallejo’s “Black Stone Over a White Stone” (the title’s literal translation) has been a poetic obsession this year. Like Donald Justice and countless others, I found myself writing from its meridians. Because my variant from that meridian, “On the Death of the Day of the Bear,” is forthcoming — and because I’m in the middle of a translation workshop— I wanted to think aloud about why it haunts me, and how different translators have approached this particular self-elegy.

Here is the original version.

“Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca” by 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…

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According to legend, the poem was born when a very melancholy Vallejo strolled the streets of Paris in his black overcoat, and paused to sit on a white stone. This poem moves around this image, a sort of mental monument, and winds up elegizing the speaker’s life with a sort of loose irony that reminds me of Benjamin Fondane, Tomaž Šalamun, Ryszard Krynicki….

It looks like a sonnet. It walks like a sonnet. It turns like a sonnet after the octave, and this turn is a change in temporality, or the tense used by the speaker. I can’t stop palpating the posthumous voice which seems to revoke a post-ness, or a past, by layering time into an ongoing present.

“Black Stone Lying On A White Stone” translated by Robert Bly

In his 1971 translation, Robert Bly titled the poem “Black Stone Lying On A White Stone", and this subtle shift from “Black Stone Over a White Stone” seems to give the black stone more agency: the black stone is lying on the white stone rather than merely existing in a positional relationship over it.

Here is Bly’s translation.

The first line of each stanza is indented; the speaker begins in what seems to be a first-person “I” and uses the future tense, only to switch after the octave, where the envoi begins: “César Vallejo is dead.” It’s possible to read this as an identification with death, with deadness, with an epitaph or a headline. But this poem manages to avoid self-pity—there is something courageous and gorgeous in how it lays out the descriptions without being maudlin.

I don’t feel sorry for the speaker when I read it. What I feel is a sense of existential and ontological respect.

Bly’s translation, like Seiferle’s, puts a negative between the dashes in the third line: “—and I don’t step aside—”. The negative makes the speaker’s voice more passive than it might otherwise sound (which you can see in Andreas Rojas’ version, which translates that line “— and by this I stand—”.

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“Black Stone On A White Stone” translated by Rebecca Seiferle

Rebecca Seiferle’s translation also does something with the title, namely dispenses with the positional modifier “over” and keeps the black stone simply on the white stone, which sounds less hierarchal, or begins the image without an undertone of dominance.

Here is Rebecca Seiferle’s 2008 translation.

Like Bly, Seiferle preserves the stanzaic structure: two quatrains and two tercets.

Like Bly, she indents the first line of each stanza — though she doesn’t do this in the first stanza, a practice I normally associate with prose (i.e. leaving the first paragraph unindented and beginning indentations with the second paragraph). Maybe the self-elegy plays into this choice, or maybe the translator wants to begin with a more anchored I, a more assertive first-person that will increase the impact of the shift in “I” across the poem.

In the translator’s note, Seiferle says she gave up the metric form of the original (a hendecasyllabic count, except for line ten) in order to keep the the language and images, or permit the interruption of time in grammar to be louder than the interruption of time in form.

I thought it interesting that Seiferle’s translation is the only one of the three to not use “Everyone beat him” in the third stanza, choosing a lowercase “they kept hitting him” which isn’t entirely in past tense but closer to something ongoing. “Kept” also feels talismanic here, as something the poet “kept”, or something which creates a fascinating relationship with the “witnesses” of the final stanza. Witnesses keep things they have seen; witnesses are the keeper of visual events, and in this poem, the witnesses are not humans — they are objects or abstract states or segments of time.

To me, Seiferle’s translation inflects the white stone, or draws back to the title in which a rock might speak, or see, and there are monuments in that juxtaposition.

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“Black Stone Over A White Stone” translated by Andres Rojas

Andrea Rojas titled his translation directly, matching Vallejo’s title word-for-word. The black stone is over the white stone. The positionality leaves us wondering if the black stone covers the white stone, or reduces the white stone’s visibility. We are seeing the black stone, and the physical relationship between the stones is clear from the outset. That kind of clarity in titling provides space for visual subversion later: the obvious begs to be undone.

Here is Andreas Rojas’ translation (from his blog).

Rojas doesn’t indent the first lines (and this may due to technical formatting issues on blogs) but he, too, keeps the stanzaic structure. What I value about this translation is its proximity to a direct, word-for-word model that allows one to see the bones. Describing his translation as “inelegantly worded”, Rojas explains his choices:

I am told the 10th line should properly read “without HIS doing anything to them.” I almost instinctually translated it as “without HIM doing anything to them,” and that’s how I’ve kept it for the clarity the “wrong” usage affords.

My solution is inelegantly worded, but it conveys both meanings Vallejo implies with his switch from the past tense (“le pegaban”) to the present tense (“les haga nada”): they beat him “without him doing anything to them” to cause the beatings and “without him doing anything to them” after he was beaten. Since “he” is dead now, impunity for prior beatings is guaranteed. Vallejo’s shift in tense also implies that the beatings were carried out with impunity even while “he” was alive.

He focuses on the double-meaning of the poem’s last word, “casinos”, often translated as “paths” or “roads”:

In Spanish, however, “camino” also means “a journey taken from one place to another.” (See the Royal Spanish Academy’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language, definition 3). I have translated “caminos” as “journeys” to capture the broader meaning I believe Vallejo intended. The same translation is possible in at least one other Romance language: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“In the middle of the journey of our life”).

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What James Wright said of Vallejo, in the way that only Wright could say things, along that blade of love and despair which drew him to other poets, and led him to memorize their poems, to preserve them as talismans, feels true to me. I leave you with his word:

“I think he is one of the greatest poets in any language I know of. There is not a single poem in which any human being is treated with irreverence. There are a great many poems in which death is hated and fought. And it is fought back, not by some vague 'spiritual value'. It is fought back by Cesar Vallejo, lying sick in a charity hospital, dying of hunger and fury.... As a poet, he perpetually took a direct part in the creation of his own identity. He turned his back on the marketplace; he denied the popular press is right, and the academic community is right, to judge the imagination by standards that have been comfortably dead for a hundred years; he was true to his inner self. He was a dangerously religious man.”