This next one is called "Russia en 1931."
And it's the name of a book written by the Peruvian poet
César Vallejo when he visited Russia in that year
to write a book for the Communist Party
in France about the second five-year plan of Lenin.
It-- initiated by Lenin.
And there is a striking thing about it
which occurred to me, which was the year he
was there was the last year the great Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam lived freely.
They were both the same age.
Two of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
One of them half Indian Peruvian and the other are Russian Jew.
[INAUDIBLE]
That's never funny.
"Russia in 1931."
"The Bishop of El Salvador is dead, murdered by no one
knows who.
The left says the right, the right says provocateurs.
But the families in the barrio sleep
with their children beside them and a machete, or a rifle
if they have one.
And posterity is grubbing in the footnotes
to find out who the Bishop is, or waiting for the poet
to get back to his business.
Well, there's this.
Her breasts were the color of brown stones in moonlight
and paler in moonlight, and that should hold them for a while.
The Bishop is dead.
Poetry proposes no solutions.
It says justice is the well water of the city
of Novgorod, black and sweet.
Amen.
César Vallejo died on a Thursday.
It might have been malaria, no one is sure.
It burned through the small town of Santiago de Chico
in an Andean valley in his childhood.
It may very well have flared in his veins in Paris
on a rainy day.
And nine months later, Osip Mandelstam
was seen feeding off the garbage heap of a transit
camp near Vladivostok.
They might have met in Leningrad in 1931
on a corner, two men about 40.
They could have compared gray hair at the temples
or compared reviews of Trilce and Tristia in 1922.
What French they would have spoken?
And what the one thought would save Spain killed the other.
I am no wolf by blood, Mandelstam wrote that year.
Only an equal could break me.
And Vallejo: think of the unemployed.
Think of the 40 million families of the hungry.
[APPLAUSE]