The Weary Rings (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1859272The Weary Rings1918César Vallejo

 
There’s the desire to return, to love, to remain present,
and there’s the desire to die, fought by two
opposite streams that may never converge.

There’s the desire: of a great kiss that shrouds Life,
that ends in the africa of a burning agony,
suicide!

There’s the desire to... not to desire. Lord;
it’s you I’m pointing at, with a deicidal finger,
there’s the desire to not have had a heart.

Spring returns, returns and it’ll go away. And God,
curved in time, recurs, and passes: he passes
with the Universe’s spine upon his shoulders.

When, my temples beat their forlorn drum...
when I’m pained by the dream engraved in a dagger,
there’s the desire to remain stuck in this verse.


 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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