B003EEN38U EBOK The Complete Poetry A Bilingual Edition nodrm Read online

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

  The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution toward the publication of this book provided by the Director's Circle of the University of California Press Foundation, whose members are:

  ROBERT & ALICE BRIDGES FOUNDATION

  EARL & JUNE CHEIT

  LLOYD COTSEN

  SONIA H. EVERS

  ORVILLE & ELLINA GOLUB

  ANN GIVEN HARMSEN & BILL HARMSEN

  DANIEL HEARTZ

  LEO & FLORENCE HELZEL

  MRS. CHARLES HENRI HINE

  PATRICK KING

  RUTH A. SOLIE

  EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

  CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

  WITH A FOREWORD BY

  MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

  AN INTRODUCTION BY

  EFRAIN KRISTAL

  AND A CHRONOLOGY BY

  STEPHEN M. HART

  In memory ofJose Rubia Barcia (1914-1997), dear friend and early collaborator

  CESAR VALLEJO. Photograph taken by Juan Domingo Cordoba Vargas in Versailles, 1929.

  Foreword Mario Vargas Llosa / ix

  Acknowledgments / xi

  Introduction Efrain Kristal / I

  LOS HERALDOS NEGROS - THE BLACK HERALDS / 22

  Plafones agiles - Agile Soffits / 26

  Buzos - Divers / 48

  De la tierra - Of the Earth / 56

  Nostalgias imperiales - Imperial Nostalgias / 76

  Truenos - Thunderclaps / Ioo

  Canciones de hogar - Songs of Home / 150

  TRILCE / 164

  POEMAS HUMANOS - HUMAN POEMS / 324

  /326 I

  /436 II

  ESPANA, APARTA DE MI ESTE CALIZ - SPAIN, TAKE THIS CUP FROM ME / 566

  Notes to the Poems / 621

  Afterword: A Translation Memoir / 677

  Appendix: A Chronology of Vallejo's Life and Works Stephen M. Hart / 689

  Bibliography / 705

  Index of Spanish Titles and First Lines / 707

  Index of English Titles and First Lines / 713

  NOTE: In the poems and their translations the symbol >, placed in the right margin at the foot of the page and the left margin on the following page, signals the continuation of a poem (to distinguish from the first line of an untitled poem). Asterisks that appear in the right margin of the translation indicate a word or phrase discussed in the Notes to the Poems.

  There are poets whose work can be explained, and there are inexplicable poets, like Cesar Vallejo. But being unable to explain does not mean being unable to understand, or that his poems are incomprehensible, totally hermetic. It means that, contrary to our reading of explicable poets, even after we have studied everything about his poems that rational knowledge has to offer-his sources, his techniques, his unique vocabulary, his subjects, his influences, the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of his poems-we remain in the dark, unable to penetrate that mysterious aureole that we feel to be the secret of this poetry's originality and power.

  Whether or not a poet is rationally explicable implies nothing about the depth or the excellence of his poetry. Neruda is a great and original poet, and his poetry, even the most obscure, that of Residencia en la tierra, is accessible through logical analysis by perceptive critics who know how to follow the text down to its roots, to its deepest core. With Vallejo the opposite happens. Even the poems of his youththose of The Black Heralds, strongly marked by modernism and the avant-garde schools that came after it-have, within their seeming transparency, a nucleus irreducible to pure reason, a secret heart that eludes every effort the rational mind makes to hear it beat.

  Vallejo's poetry, for all its references to familiar landscapes and a social and historical milieu, transcends those coordinates of time and space and positions the reader on a more permanent and profound plane: that of the human condition. Which is to say, the existential reality of which the lives of men and women are made: the uncertainty about our origin and our future beyond this earth; the extremes of suffering and desperation that human beings can reach; and also the intensity of our emotions when we are overcome by love, excitement, pity, or nostalgia. But the mystery in his poetry resides not in those existential subjects or states but, rather, in how they take shape in a language that communicates them to the reader directly, more through a sort of osmosis or contagion than through any intelligible discourse.

  Vallejo's is a poetry that makes us feel the very fibers of existence, that strips us of all that is incidental and transitory, and confronts us with the essence we have within us: our mortality, the desperate wish to achieve transcendence and somehow to survive death, the skein of absurdities, errors, and confusions that determine our individual destinies.

  Clayton Eshleman discovered Vallejo in 1957, while still in college and not yet fluent in Spanish. As he himself recounts, he has spent a good part of his life reading, studying, and trying to render this poetry in English. He was never satisified with the results; again and again he revised and polished his versions to achieve an elusive perfection. There is a sort of heroism in his undertaking, like that of those creators in pursuit of a work as beautiful as it is impossible. His case reveals an admirable fidelity to a poet who no doubt changed his life. His tireless loyalty and determination have made possible this edition of the complete poetry of Vallejo in English, perhaps the one that comes closest to the texts of the poet's own hand. Only the dauntless perseverance and the love with which the translator has dedicated so many years of his life to this task can explain why the English version conveys, in all its boldness and vigor, the unmistakable voice of Cesar Vallejo.

  TRANSLATED BY ROSE VEKONY

  Over the many years that I have been involved in translating Vallejo, a number of people have been extraordinarily generous with their time in response to my questions and research needs. I want especially to thank Cid Corman, Maureen Ahern, Octavio Corvalan, Julio Ortega, Americo Ferrari, Jose Cerna Bazan, and Efrain Kristal, who were, in their individual ways, instrumental in clarifying translation quandaries. All these people worked through at least one version of one of Vallejo's individual books with me. I would also like to thank Eliot Weinberger, Cecilia Vicuna, Walter Mignolo, Esther Allen, Jill Suzanne Levine, Theodoro Maus, Monica de la Torre, Susan Briante, Jorge Guzman, and Stephen Hart for their responsive readings and suggestions. My gratitude as well goes to Eastern Michigan University for two research fellowships (1989 and 1997) and to the Wheatland Foundation and the National Translation Center for grants.

  In i98o I wrote a note about co-translating Vallejo's European poetry with Jose Rubia Barcia in Los Angeles in the 1970s. In one paragraph I tried to get at what often appeared to be an impossible task:

  A marvelous complex of emotions is stirred when I think back to our work together. We were like two beavers, both working at different angles into the Vallejo tree, hoping it would fall at the angle each of us was setting it up to fall, but unsure if it would fall at all. Does this line really mean anything? It reads like nonsense but doesn't feel like nonsense. Have we simply not found its uncommon sense? There was always the risk of making sense of what was actually poised on the edge of sense and nonsense.

  Jose and I worked together, always at his home in Westwood, several times a week, for around five years. During this period I came to terms with Vallejo and gained the ground necessary for going ahead, on my own, to translate T
rilce and Los heraldos negros. Jose's honesty, intelligence, and stubborn scrupulousness coincided beautifully with the texts we were working on. Whatever I have ultimately managed to accomplish in this book I owe to having worked with him.

  Versions of my Vallejo translations and co-translations, almost always in nonfinal form, appeared between i96o and 2005 in the following magazines: American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Arson, Bezoar, Boundary 2, Burning Water, Camels Coming, Caterpillar, Caw!, Choice, Contemporary Literature in Translation, El Corno Emplumado, Denver Quarterly, East Village Other, Ecuatorial, Evergreen Review, Folio, Grand Street, Hunger, Impact, Kulchur, Mandorla, Maps, Mid-American Review, Montemora, The Nation, New American Writing, Oasis (London), oblek, Omega 5, origin, Partisan Review, Pequod, Potpourri, Prairie Schooner, Quark, Review, River Styx, Sparrow, Sulfur, Text, Tish, Tri-Quarterly, and Ygdrasil. Two of the translations appeared as Ta-wil and Bellevue Press broadsides. Several translations appeared as a Backwoods Broadside.

  My translations of individual Vallejo collections have also appeared in different versions: Human Poems was first published in 1968 by Grove Press, which brought out my co-translation with Jose Rubia Barcia of Spain, Take This Cup from Me in 1974. Both these collections, retranslated with Barcia, appeared in 1978 as Cesar Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, published by University of California Press. Forty-three poems from The Complete Posthumous Poetry appeared, again in differing translations, in my Conductors of the Pit: Major Works by Rimbaud, Vallejo, Cesaire, Artaud, Holan (Paragon House, 1988). Marsilio published my translation of Trilce in 1992, and Wesleyan University Press brought out a new, slightly revised edition of Trilce in 2000, with an introduction by Americo Ferrari. Translations of four Vallejo prose poems were included in a revised and expanded version of Conductors of the Pit, published by Soft Skull Press in 2005. In the same year, Letters Bookshop in Toronto brought out Telluric k Magnetic, a booklet containing thirteen poems.

  The emotional rawness of Cesar Vallejo's poetry stretched the Spanish language beyond grammar and lexicon into compelling dissonances and asymmetries, unprecedented and unsurpassed in the history of Hispanic poetry.' His affecting directness makes him immediately accessible, even while his poems can defy interpretation. Like Paul Celan, Vallejo has presented daunting perplexities to his readers and translators: his language, fraught with inner tensions, generates false starts, fragmentations, silences, and paradoxes.' His poetry cannot be analyzed within a single register because he writes in multiple ones, and can shift from one to another, or operate simultaneously within several in the same poem. In Vallejo, oral expression and the conventions of written language are often in conflict, as are memory and the passing of time, but his distortions can be moving, and his visual configurations are often arresting, as are his auditory effects. His ambiguities and ambivalences, made up of embers and auras of meaning, an affront to reductive paraphrase, are charged with pathos, even when pitched as parody. He is not immune to sentimentalism, or even bathos, but his blemishes are those of an inspired poet who unsettled and reoriented the local and cosmopolitan literary traditions on which he drew.

  Vallejo's poetry is imbued with feelings of guilt, trepidation, and uncertainty and with intimations that satisfying one's own needs can feel shameful when confronted with the suffering of others. In The Black Heralds (i9i8), his first book of poems, Vallejo confronts his theological demons, expressing a tragic vision in which sexuality and sin are one and the same. With Trilce (1922) he still longs for attachment and is nostalgic for family bonds but no longer relies on the rhetoric of religion to address his angst, reaching his most persuasive experimental heights. In his posthumous poetry, the Human Poems and Spain, Take This Cup from Me, his feelings of collective anguish and compassion are expressed with a keener historical awareness and a nettled attentiveness to cosmopolitan concerns.

  While some have branded Vallejo's most difficult poetry as either densely hermetic or as a challenge to the logos of Western culture, others have argued that his difficulties are a window into the indigenous soul of the Andean peoples. Jose Maria Arguedas, the most celebrated novelist of the Andes, made this point:

  Vallejo carried the anguished and tortured sensibility of a great people in his heart and in his spirit. This accounts for the immense depth, the human palpitation of his oeuvre, his undeniable universal value. With Vallejo, Peruvian poetry soars above the lyrical heights of Latin America. Ruben Dario was probably a greater master of versification, but his voice is always the voice of an individual man; he always speaks of his personal destiny. Vallejo feels the guilt of the pain and destiny of humanity; he speaks and protests in the name of us all.'

  DARIO, NERUDA, AND VALLEJO

  Like Ruben Dario (1867-1916) and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Cesar Vallejo is a towering figure of Hispanic poetry, and like them he was born far away in the periphery, both in geographical and social terms: Dario was an illegitimate child from a remote Nicaraguan village, Neruda was the son of a railroad operator in the rainy southernmost regions of Chile, and Vallejo grew up in Santiago de Chuco, an isolated hamlet in the northern Andes of Peru ten thousand feet above sea level. All three left the confines of their provincial birthplaces, attracted by larger cities and international hubs of cultural life; but Vallejo did not receive either the social recognition or the financial rewards of his counterparts, and his fame was posthumous. His literary merits did not go unnoticed in Peru, where local luminaries, including Jose Maria Eguren, Abraham Valdelomar, and Jose Carlos Mariategui recognized the significance of his poetry, or in Spain, where poets like Gerardo Diego, Juan Larrea, and Jose Bergamin discovered and championed him in the 193os. But he lived a life of financial penury, serious illnesses, and distressing encounters with the law, including imprisonment in Peru and deportation from France.

  According to Ricardo Gonzalez Vigil, Dario was Vallejo's favorite poet in the Spanish language.' Vallejo called him "Dario of the Americas!" in an early poem; and even as he and other poets distanced themselves from the ornamental excesses and mellifluous rhythms of the Nicaraguan poet, Vallejo continued to defend his legacy. "Dario, el cosmico" ("Dario the cosmic one"), the title of an article Vallejo wrote in 1927, five years after the publication of his TrUce-the masterpiece of avant-garde poetry in the Hispanic world-is sufficient testimony to Vallejo's appreciation of his predecessor.'

  In the two centuries before Dario the conventions of Spanish poetry were so codified and petrified that even the most daring of the Romantics were limited to a handful of poetic forms. With Dario, Spanish prosody ceases to be normative and becomes descriptive, as poets assume responsibility for inventing the forms and motifs of their works. His Prosas profanas (1896) was studied by many Spanish American poets as a virtual manual of formal possibilities; and in Songs of Life and Hope (1905) his formal magic takes on an earnest confessional tone, espousing political and spiritual ideals aiming to unite Latin America, and even the Hispanic world, in the aftermath of the Spanish War of 1898.6 Dario's impact, felt throughout Spanish America, gave rise to modernismo, the first literary movement generated locally yet diffused widely throughout the Spanish-speaking world. After Dario, Spanish American poets such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Octavio Paz shared the Nicaraguan writer's confidence that European literature would no longer fix the parameters of their creativity. Spanish literature itself entered a rich period of renewal, in which poets such as Juan Ramon Jimenez, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, and Federico Garcia Lorca acknowledged their debt to developments in Spanish America and worked to establish the fraternal environment of literary relations in which Spain embraced Neruda and Vallejo.

  Pablo Neruda-whose beginnings were as marked by Dario as Vallejo's-is the most internationally celebrated Latin American poet, recipient of both the Lenin and the Nobel Prize during the cold war, and a player in the political developments of his nation. His remarkable ability to write in a seamless, flowing verse with a distinctive music of earnest pathos, or to sing a simple ode
to the most elemental object of everyday life, has been widely acclaimed.

  Neruda reinvented the language of love in Spanish America with his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), expressing sensual longing and fulfillment with a directness that had eluded Dario. In his early masterpiece, the two volumes of Residence on Earth (1933, 1935), Neruda observes, sometimes with sadness, the inevitable triumphs of unfeeling nature over human mortality. When he became a socialist, Neruda was eager to follow Whitman with an invigorated voice confident in a political vision. In his later books Neruda meditated, now with calm resignation, on the return of living beings to a state of matter. The vastness of his poetic universe was always grounded in the material world. Disdainful of abstractions and metaphysical speculations, Neruda could write a poem about anything his five senses might encounter. His voice did not question language's ability to mirror reality. In contrast, Vallejo's vision is often vexed: he struggled with language itself as he tested his own emotional resources.

  It is instructive to compare the poetry of Vallejo and Neruda written as the Spanish Civil War was unfolding. Neruda expresses pain and outrage but also certainty about the ultimate outcome. After describing the fires of fascist bombings, the death of his friend Lorca, and the blood of Spain flowing through the streets of Madrid, he strikes a defiant stance:

  ("I EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS," ESPANA EN EL CORAZON, 1937)

  Vallejo's poetic response to the same events is more anguished and uncertain, even though he was no less committed than Neruda to the armed response in favor of the Spanish Republic:

  ("HYMN TO THE VOLUNTEERS FOR THE REPUBLIC," SPAIN, TAKE THIS CUP FROM ME)

  ("SPAIN, TAKE THIS CUP FROM ME," SPAIN, TAKE THIS CUP FROM ME)

  Their differences can also be appreciated in their poems of human solidarity. In "Heights of Machu Picchu," the epiphanous tour de force of his Canto general, Neruda vows to become the voice of the disenfranchised. Neruda's poetic persona moves from a valley to reach the summit of Machu Picchu, where his metaphors pile one on another, like the stones of the Incan ruins. The poem's steady crescendo culminates as the poet becomes one with the common man: