Capitulation (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1850943Capitulation1918César Vallejo

 
Last night, some deep red Aprils capitulated
before my disarmed Mays of youth,
the hysterical ivories of her kiss found me
dead; and in a sigh of love I locked them up.

Strange, docile corn-ear. Her eyes besieged me
one amaranthe evening on which I recited a song to her
songs; and last night, in the middle of the celebration, the two languages
of her thirst-scorched breasts spoke to me.

That poor half-breed; poor are her weapons; poor are
her cream-colored sails that go to the limits of the salty
mists of a deadsea. Victorious and vanquished,

she remained pensive and baggy-eyed and claret.
I left at dawn. And since that battle,
at night two slave serpents entered my life.


 This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.

Original:

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1938, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 85 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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Translation:

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed.

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