With this letter, I endeavor to present a sliver of my interpretation. For sake of brevity, this letter will only address the second stanza. This stanza impressed me more than Vallejo’s original because of a word in the third line: gray. Based on parallel comparison, I infer you use gray to stand in a la mala’s place in the original. However, unlike a la mala, gray accentuates the title of the poem, as gray is a color betwixt black and white. Remarkably, in examining a concrete sensory word, I could distinctly gauge the abstract concepts of bad, poor, or evil (the literal translations). The word gray summons in my mind gloom, death, and void; this void the speaker feels in the line “only to find myself alone.”, so grayness pervades the second
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In literature, silver coins occasionally allude to betrayal, based on two biblical stories. In Genesis, Joseph’s brothers sell Joseph to Ishmaelite slave traders for twenty silver coins (Genesis 37:28). More famously, the Gospel of Matthews accounts Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus for thirty silver coins (Matthew 26:15) (Matthew 27:9). Embodying the worst betrayals, the silver coins, ironically also spectacular to look upon, aid César Vallejo’s death in the narrative of the poem; this allusion induces the assumption that the speaker Vallejo feels physical and emotional pain. The speaker Vallejo resigns himself to death; the superior silver therefore supplements the lesser, but more potent, gray.
As for structural support, the ambiguity of gray illustrates the deliberate befuddlement of tense throughout the poem: a future death already remembered, the meshing of the past tense struck and the present tense are witnesses. Technically, the original Spanish in the third line: “Me moriré en París -y no me corro-”, y no me corro is in present tense, which you translated into future tense, marring the beauty of the unclear tenses. Vallejo’s disobedience to time suggests an interruption of identity, a gray area, so to speak, of the poem’s setting and the mind conveyed. Translation can preserve such
In literature, silver coins occasionally allude to betrayal, based on two biblical stories. In Genesis, Joseph’s brothers sell Joseph to Ishmaelite slave traders for twenty silver coins (Genesis 37:28). More famously, the Gospel of Matthews accounts Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus for thirty silver coins (Matthew 26:15) (Matthew 27:9). Embodying the worst betrayals, the silver coins, ironically also spectacular to look upon, aid César Vallejo’s death in the narrative of the poem; this allusion induces the assumption that the speaker Vallejo feels physical and emotional pain. The speaker Vallejo resigns himself to death; the superior silver therefore supplements the lesser, but more potent, gray.
As for structural support, the ambiguity of gray illustrates the deliberate befuddlement of tense throughout the poem: a future death already remembered, the meshing of the past tense struck and the present tense are witnesses. Technically, the original Spanish in the third line: “Me moriré en París -y no me corro-”, y no me corro is in present tense, which you translated into future tense, marring the beauty of the unclear tenses. Vallejo’s disobedience to time suggests an interruption of identity, a gray area, so to speak, of the poem’s setting and the mind conveyed. Translation can preserve such