Dead Idyll (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1846313Dead Idyll1918César Vallejo

 
What must she be doing at this hour my Andean and sweet Rita
of the reeds and capuli;
now that Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood
dozes, like weak cognac, inside me.

Where must her hands be, hands that in contrition
ironed in the evenings whitenesses to come;
now, in this rain that saps
my desire to live.

What must have become of her flannel skirt; of her
yearnings; of her gait;
of her taste of the place’s May lilies.

She must be at the door watching some cloud,
and in the end she’ll say trembling: “It’s awfully cold... Jesus!”
and a wild bird will cry on the tiles.


 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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