Ágape
César Vallejo
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
Today no one came to enquire; nor,
this evening, did anyone ask me for anything.

I didn't see a single graveyard flower
in such a joyful procession of lights.
Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!

This evening everyone, everyone, walks past
without enquiring or asking me anything.

And yet something or other was left behind, it sits
awkwardly in my hands, as if it belonged to someone else.

I've gone over to the door,
and I feel like calling out to everyone:
If you've lost anything, it's here!

Because in all the evenings of this life,
I don't know which doors will be slammed in whose face,
and a something not mine grips my soul.

Today, no one came;
and today, this evening, how little I have died!


Ágape

Hoy no ha venido nadie a preguntar;
ni me han pedido en esta tarde nada.

No he visto ni una flor de cementerio
en tan alegre procesión de luces.
Perdóname, Señor: qué poco he muerto!

En esta tarde todos, todos pasan
sin preguntarme ni pedirme nada.

Y no sé qué se olvidan y se queda
mal en mis manos, como cosa ajena.

He salido a la puerta,
y me da ganas de gritar a todos:
Si echan de menos algo, aquí se queda!

Porque en todas las tardes de esta vida,
yo no sé con qué puertas dan a un rostro,
y algo ajeno se toma el alma mía.

Hoy no ha venido nadie;
y hoy he muerto qué poco en esta tarde!
from the book THE ETERNAL DICE: SELECTED PORMS/ New Directions
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This poem is from the collection entitled "Los heraldos negros" ["The Black Heralds"] published in 1919. "Ágape" is an ancient Greek word for brotherly or familial love, as opposed to eros. It is, in a sense, one of his easier poems to translate, although still full of syntactical oddities like: “I don’t know which doors will be slammed in whose face." “oddities” intended to convey the poet’s sense of alienation.

Margaret Jull Costa on "Ágape"
Color cover image of Mamie Morgan's new collection, Everyone I've Danced with Is Dead
What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back
 
"Mamie Morgan’s poem grabbed me by the bare neck. 'Everyone I’ve Danced with is Dead,' does that mean everyone I have had sex with is dead? Everyone I have known? Dabbled with? Taken seriously? The line cook who kidnapped the narrator might be dead, and the poet Keats is, of course, dead. The poem mixes a volatile cocktail of trauma and youth, with the restaurant work so many of us landed into by necessity or chance, when we were at our most naïve, thrown into a crew of co-workers, lecherous managers, and ex-cons who FELT like family, but, ultimately, weren't."

Millicent Borges Accardi
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Grayscale illustration of a young Philis Wheatley on a pink background
"On Phillis Wheatley Peters and the Poetry of Survival"

"[Wheatley] was named after the slave ship that brought her over the Atlantic to Boston to be sold to John and Susanna Wheatley as a young, sick child, naked body on the auction block. When they found Peters writing with a piece of coal on the wall of their home, instead of punishing her, they fostered her education, encouraging her to read and write poetry. When tracing my literary ancestry, I come from that chunk of charcoal, from that strain of self-reliance and persistence from the middle passage till now. 'It’s such a futuristic idea,' Terrance Hayes said, 'a world in which the descendants of slaves become poets.'"

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