Translation:The Black Heralds

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

Title poem in the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1814993The Black Heralds1918César Vallejo

There are such blows in life, so strong... I don’t know!
Blows like God’s hatred; as if before them,
the undercurrent of everything suffered
were welling up in the soul... I don’t know!

There are few of them; but they’re there... They open dark trenches
in the toughest face and in the strongest back.
Perhaps they’ll turn out to be the foals of barbarous Attilas;
or the black heralds sent us by death.

They’re the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adorable faith blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloody blows are the cracklings
of some bread that burns us from the oven door.

And man... poor man... poor man! He turns his eyes, as
when someone taps us on the shoulder;
he turns his wild eyes, and all he’s lived
wells up, like a puddle of guilt, in his face.

There are such blows in life, so strong... I don’t know!

 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