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

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1846315Agape1918César Vallejo

 
Today no one has come to question;
nor to ask of me this late afternoon.

I haven’t even seen a cemetery flower
in such a joyful procession of lights.
Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!

On this late afternoon, they all, they all pass by
without questioning me or asking anything of me.
I don’t know what is forgotten and remains uneasily
in my hands, like some alien thing.

I have gone up to the door,
and I have the urge to shout to all of them:
If you’re missing something, it remains right here!

Because in all the late afternoons of this life,
I don’t know with what doors they close in one’s face,
and my soul is upset over something alien.

Today no one has come;
and today I have died so little this late afternoon.


 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