César Vallejo - Hymn to the Volunteers of the Republic lyrics

Volunteer of Spain, militiaman of trustworthy bones, when your heart marches off to die, when it marches off to k** with its world-wide agony, I truly don't know what to do, where to put myself; I run about, I write, I applaud, I weep, I watch, I destroy, they extinguish, I tell my breast to make an end to it, good, to come, and I want to do myself injury; I bare my impersonal forehead till I touch the vessel of my blood, I restrain myself, my stature is restrained by those famous architect's falls which honour the animal which honours me; my instincts ebb back to their halters, joy smokes before my tomb and, once again, not knowing what to do, with nothing, leave me behind on my blank stone, leave me, alone, quadrumane, closer by, much more distant, for my hands won't hold your long ecstatic moment and I smash against your double-edged speed my smallness dressed up in grandeur. One diurnal day, clear, expectant, fertile – oh biennium* of gloomy, suppliant semesters throughout which gunpowder kept biting its lip!** oh hard pain and harder flints! oh bits champed by the people!–, one day the people lit their captive match, prayed with rage and sovereignly full, circular, sealed their birthright with elective hands; the despots were now trailing padlocks and in the padlocks their dead bacteria ... Battles? No! Pa**ions! And pa**ions preceded by sorrows with bars of hope, by sorrows of common people with hopes of men! d**h and pa**ion for peace, the people's! Martial d**h and pa**ion among olive trees, let's be clear about it! Thus in your breath the winds change atmospheric needle and the tombs change key in your breast, as your frontal raises itself to the first power of martyrdom. The world exclaims: “One of those Spanish affairs!” And it's true. Let's consider, in a balance, at point-blank range, Calderon asleep on the tail of a dead amphibian, or Cervantes saying, “My kingdom is of this world, but also of the next”: point and edge in two roles! Let's observe Goya, on his knees and praying in front of a mirror, Coll, the paladin in whose Cartesian a**ault plain footsteps had a sweat of clouds, or Quevedo, that instantaneous grandfather of the dynamiters, or Cajal, devoured by his tiny infinite, or, again, Teresa, a woman, dying because she doesn't die, or Lina Odena, at odds with Teresa on more than one issue ...* (Every act or voice of genius comes from the people and goes towards them, directly or conveyed by incessant blades of gra**, by the rosy smoke of bitter, unsuccessful pa**words.) Thus your creature, militiaman, your bloodless creature, stirred by a motionless stone, sacrifices itself, departs, declines upwards and rises up its incombustible flame, rises up to the weak, distributing spains to the bulls, bulls to the doves ... Proletarian dying of the universe, in what frantic harmony will your greatness end, your misery, your driving maelstrom, your methodical violence, your chaos theoretical and practical, your urge, Dantesque and so very Spanish, to love your enemy, be it by treachery! Liberator girded with fetters, but for whose endeavour the expanse would still be handleless to this very day, nails go about headless. the day remain ancient, slow, red, our beloved skulls, unburied! Peasant fallen for man with your green foliage, with the social inflection of your little finger, with your ox that remains behind, with your physics, also with your word tied to a stick and your rented sky and with the clay ingrained in your weariness and that which was under your nails on the march! Builders, agricultural, civilian and military, of bustling, teeming eternity: it was written that you would create light, closing your eyes with d**h; that, with the cruel fall of your mouths. abundance will come on seven salvers, everything in the world will suddenly be of gold and gold, oh fabulous beggars of your own secretion of blood, gold itself will then be of gold! All men will love one another and will eat holding the corners of your sad handkerchiefs and will drink in the name of your ill-fated throats! They'll rest walking at the foot of this run and they'll weep thinking of your orbits, happy they'll be and to the sound of your return, atrocious, flourishing, innate, tomorrow they'll adjust their chores, the figures they've dreamt and sung! The same shoes will fit him who ascends without track to his body and him who descends to the form of his soul! Embracing, the dumb will speak, the lame will walk! The returning blind will see and, quivering, the deaf will hear! The ignorant will be wise, the wise ignorant! Given will be the kisses you couldn't give! Only d**h will die! The ant will bring scraps of bread to the elephant fettered to its brutal delicacy; aborted children will be born again, perfect, spatial, and all men will work, all men will procreate, all men will understand! Worker, saviour, our redeemer, forgive us, brother, our trespa**es! As a rolling drum says in its adagios: what an ephemeral never, your back! what a changing always, your profile! Italian volunteer, among whose campaign animals limps an Abyssinian lion! Soviet volunteer, marching at the head of your universal breast! Volunteers from the south, from the north, from the east and you, the westerner, bringing up the rear of the dawn's funeral chant! Known soldier, whose name parades in the sound of an embrace! Combatant whom the earth raised, arming you with dust, shoeing you with positive magnets, you, with your personal beliefs in full force, your distinct character, your intimate rod, your immediate complexion, your language walking about on your shoulders and your soul crowned with pebbles! Volunteer swathed in your cold, temperate or torrid zone, heroes all round, victim in a column of victors: in Spain, in Madrid, they're calling you to k**, volunteers of life! Because they're k**ing in Spain, others k** the child, his toy which comes to a stop, radiant mother Rosenda, old Adam who talked aloud with his horse, and the dog which slept on the stairs. They k** the book, they fire on its auxiliary verbs, on its defenceless first page! They k** the statue's exact case, the scholar, his stick, his colleague, the barber next door – possibly he cut me, but a good man and, besides, unfortunate; the beggar who yesterday was singing opposite, the nurse who today went by weeping, the priest burdened with the persistent height of his knees Volunteers, for life, for good men, k** d**h, k** the wicked! Do it for the freedom of everyone, of the exploited and of the exploiter, for peace without pain – I intuit it when I'm asleep at the foot of my forehead and even more when I go around shouting –, and do it, I say, for the illiterate to whom I write, for the barefoot genius and his lamb, for the comrades who have fallen, their ashes embracing the corpse of a road! So that you would come, volunteers of Spain and the world, I dreamt that I was good, and it was to see your blood, volunteers ... That was much breast ago, many yearnings, many camels at the age of prayer. Today good marches blazing on your side, there follow you lovingly reptiles with immanent eyelashes and, two steps, one step behind, the course of water rushing to see its limit before it burns.