The Eternal Dice (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1858614The Eternal Dice1918César Vallejo

 
For Manuel Gonzalez Prada, this coarse
and selected emotion, one for which, with great
enthusiasm, the great master applauded
me.

My God, I’m mourning the being I live;
it weighs on me to have eaten your bread from you;
but this poor pensive clay
is not a fermented scab in your side:
you don’t have Marias who depart!

My God, if you had been a man,
you’d know now how to be God;
but you, who were always good,
you feel nothing of your creation.
And man does have to endure you: God is he!

Now that there are candles in my sorcerer eyes,
as in a man condemned,
My God, you’ll light up all your candles,
and we’ll play with the old dice...
Perhaps, oh player! in playing with the luck
of the entire universe,
the baggy eyes of death will arise
like two funerary aces of mud.

My God, and on this deaf, dark night,
you won’t be able to play anymore, because Earth
is a mangled die and already round
from rolling off carelessly,
that cannot stop but in a hole,
in the hole of an immense tomb.


 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.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse

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.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse