César Vallejo: The Spider

   It's an enormous spider that no longer goes;
a colorless spider, whose body,
a head and an abdomen, is bleeding.

   Today I have watched it, up close. And with what effort
towards every flank
it was extending its innumerable feet!
And I've thought about its invisible eyes,
deadly pilots of the spider.

   It's a spider that was trembling, stuck
on the edge of a stone;
its abdomen over one side,
its head over the other.

   With so many feet, poor thing, and still unable
to resolve itself. And on seeing it aghast
in such a crisis
today I feel so bad for that traveler.

   It's an enormous spider, whose abdomen keeps
it from following its head.
And I've thought about its eyes,
its numerous feet...
And I feel so bad for that traveler!


From Vallejo's first collection, The Black Heralds (1918), which contains astonishing poetry far in advance of anything the English-speaking world was doing at the time. Without anthropomorphizing the spider Vallejo uses it as a metaphor for all difficulty and pain, including human pain. The not totally successful translation is by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross (1990); another, better-known, attempt by Robert Bly is available on Google Books.