Translation:The Mule Drivers

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.