Joy, shipmate, joy! (Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry.) Our life is closed, our life begins, The long, long anchorage we leave, The ship is clear at last, she leaps! She swiftly courses from the shore, Joy, shipmate, joy!

If in vain is night beautiful what for is night beautiful for whom is it beautiful? The night

and the curveless stream of stars

that flows cold. The long-haired mourners on the banks, with the breath-taking chant of toads,

are lamenting the reminiscence of which memory,

while every dawn is pierced with the chorus of twelve bullets?

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. . .