Translation:The One of a Thousand

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The One of a Thousand (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1849529The One of a Thousand1918César Vallejo

The lottery-ticket-vendor who shouts “The One of a Thousand”
shares some kind of essence with God.

All the lips pass by. Weariness
in a single wrinkle reveals its not-yet.
He passes by, this vendor who hoards,
perhaps nominal, like God,
along with tantalic bread, human
impotence of love.

I watch the rag-dressed man. And he could
gives us the heart;
but that luck that he doles out
in his hands, proclaiming loudly,
like a cruel bird, will come to a stop
where he neither knows nor wants,
this Bohemian god.

And I say on this warm Friday
overwhelmed by the sun:
why would God’s will have clothed itself
as a lottery-ticket-vendor!


 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.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse