Translation:Absolute

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Absolute (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1850203Absolute1918César Vallejo

 
Color of old clothes. A dark July,
and a just-reaped August. And a
watery hand that grafted evil fruits
onto the resinous pine from boredom.

 Now that you’ve anchored, dark clothes,
you return drenched in a sumptuous scent
of time, of abbreviation... And I have sung
the desired and overflowing feast.

But can’t you, Lord, against death,
against the limit, against what ends?
Ah, the old-clothing-colored sore,
how it slightly opens and smells of burnt honey!

Oh sublime unity! Oh that which is one
for all!
Love against space and against time!
A single heartbeat,
a single rhythm: God!

And as the boundaries shrink back
in a rough unyielding disdain,
there’s a stream of serpents
in the virgin plenitude of 1.
A wrinkle, a shadow!


 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