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

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1846307May1918César Vallejo

 
At daybreak the house’s smoke pours out
its taste of the remnant of crops;
and, making firewood, the shepherdess sings
a savage hallelujah!
Sepia and red.

Smoke from the kitchen, legendary
aperitif in this brave dawn.
The last fugitive star
drinks it, and, drunk already from its sweetness-
oh celestial shepherd boy awake all night!
it sleeps in a dawn-pink droplet.

He has a certain lovely craving to eat lunch
and to drink from the brook, and to amuse himself!
To take flight with the smoke over there, on the heights;
or to surrender to the autumnal winds
in search of same sacred, pure Ruth
who offers a corn-ear of sweetness
beneath the Hebraic unction of the wheat!

Sickle at the calm shoulder,
his spirited expression rough,
a young farm-laborer goes to Irichugo.
And in each arm that seems like a yoke
the palpitating ferrous juice spatters,
the juice that in a creative daily effort
sparkles, like a tragic diamond,
through the pores of the hand
that the glove has still not byzantinated.
Beneath the arc formed by the green alder tree,
oh fecund crusade of the derelict!

The shepherd girl who cries
her yaravi at daybreak,
gathers, oh poor Venus!
fresh fragrant logs
on her exposed arrogant arms
sculpted in copper.
Meanwhile a bull-calf,
chased by the dog,
runs through the coarse
slope, offering to the flowering day
a hymn of Virgil with his cowbell.

Before the shack,
the Indian grandfather smokes;
and the mountainous rosy sundown,
the primitive altar perfumes itself
with the gas of the tobacco.
Thus rises the fabulous essence
of the epic huaco,
mythical aroma of bronzed lotus
the blue thread of broken breaths!


 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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