The Mule Drivers (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1863433The Mule Drivers1918César Vallejo

 
Mule driver, you go fabulously glazed in sweat.
The Menocucho hacienda
claims a thousand daily disappointments through life.
12 o’ clock. We go toward the waist of the day.
The sun that hurts so much.

Mule driver, with your red poncho you get farther away,
savoring the Peruvian romance of your coca.
And I from a hammock,
from a century of doubt,
I reflect upon your horizon, and I and observe lamented,
through mosquitos and through the gentle and sick
refrain of a “paca-paca.”
In the end you’ll arrive where you need to arrive,
mule driver, who, behind your sanctimonious mule,
you go...,
you go...

Happy for you, in this heat that riles up
all the fears and all the motives;
when the spirit barely brings to life the body,
goes without coca, and doesn’t manage to halter
his beast towards the oxidental
Andes of Eternity.


 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