WEBVTT

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This next one is called
"Russia en 1931."

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And it's the name of a book
written by the Peruvian poet

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César Vallejo when he
visited Russia in that year

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to write a book for
the Communist Party

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in France about the second
five-year plan of Lenin.

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It-- initiated by Lenin.

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And there is a
striking thing about it

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which occurred to me,
which was the year he

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was there was the last year
the great Russian poet Osip

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Mandelstam lived freely.

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They were both the same age.

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Two of the greatest poets
of the 20th century.

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One of them half Indian Peruvian
and the other are Russian Jew.

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[INAUDIBLE]

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That's never funny.

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That's never funny.

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"Russia in 1931."

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"The Bishop of El Salvador
is dead, murdered by no one

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knows who.

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The left says the right,
the right says provocateurs.

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But the families
in the barrio sleep

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with their children beside
them and a machete, or a rifle

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if they have one.

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And posterity is
grubbing in the footnotes

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to find out who the Bishop
is, or waiting for the poet

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to get back to his business.

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Well, there's this.

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Her breasts were the color
of brown stones in moonlight

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and paler in moonlight, and that
should hold them for a while.

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The Bishop is dead.

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Poetry proposes no solutions.

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It says justice is the
well water of the city

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of Novgorod, black and sweet.

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Amen.

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César Vallejo died
on a Thursday.

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It might have been
malaria, no one is sure.

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It burned through the small
town of Santiago de Chico

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in an Andean valley
in his childhood.

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It may very well have
flared in his veins in Paris

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on a rainy day.

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And nine months
later, Osip Mandelstam

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was seen feeding off the
garbage heap of a transit

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camp near Vladivostok.

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They might have met
in Leningrad in 1931

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on a corner, two men about 40.

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They could have compared
gray hair at the temples

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or compared reviews of
Trilce and Tristia in 1922.

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What French they
would have spoken?

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And what the one thought would
save Spain killed the other.

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I am no wolf by blood,
Mandelstam wrote that year.

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Only an equal could break me.

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And Vallejo: think
of the unemployed.

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Think of the 40 million
families of the hungry.

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[APPLAUSE]

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