The Black Cup (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1835780The Black Cup1918César Vallejo

Night is a cup of evil. A piercing whistle
of the guard crosses it, like a vibrating pin.
Listen, you, whore, how is it that if you’re gone,
the wave is still black and still makes me burn?

Earth has the sides of a coffin in the shadow.
Hey, you, whore, don’t come back.

The flesh swims, swims
in the cup of shadows that still wounds me;
my flesh swims in it,
like in the marshy heart of a woman.

Astral ember... I’ve felt
dry touches of clay
falling on my translucent lotus.
Oh, woman! It’s for you
that the flesh of instinct exists. Oh woman!

That’s why, oh, black chalice! even when you left,
I choke on the dust;
and the desire to drink beats within my chest!


 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