B003EEN38U EBOK The Complete Poetry A Bilingual Edition nodrm
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("HEIGHTS OF MACHU PICCHU," CANTO GENERAL)
In "Telluric and Magnetic," his comparable statement, Vallejo adheres to what he takes to be the soul of the Andes with a contrapuntal contempt for everything outside its aura:
("TELLURIC AND MAGNETIC," HUMAN POEMS)
In this poem, whose tone can suddenly shift from the cosmic to the vulgar, Vallejo's invectives-including "Condors? Screw the condors!"-were intended to knock Jose Santos Chocano (1875-1934) from his pedestal. Chocano's star has long since fallen, but in Vallejo's lifetime he was the most celebrated Peruvian poet, best known for his invocations of condors and other images of the Andean environment in his self-appointed role as spokesman of the Peruvian nation. Vallejo is derisive of Chocano, and more guarded than Neruda in his attitude toward the indigenous world. He does not attempt to become the voice of the Sierra (as the Andean region is called in Peru). His yearnings are more challenging: to alter his own consciousness by engaging with the indigenous world on terms other than his own.
Vallejo's multilayered world of imagery is less expansive than Neruda's but more inventive and unpredictable, denser and more emotionally intense. Neruda draws on the natural world for metaphors that can inspire political rallies; Vallejo's metaphors evince a sometimes perplexing tension between the natural, political, linguistic, and spiritual realms. His struggles with language are at times a stirring articulation of his anger and subversion, and he often communicates the frustration that linguistic expression may be too ephemeral to withstand human sorrow:
("AND IF AFTER SO MANY WORDS," HUMAN POEMS)
VALLEJO'S PERUVIAN PERIOD (1892-1923)
Vallejo's first forays into the literary world took place in the provincial city of Trujillo, where he graduated from the local university in 1915 with a thesis on Romantic poetry in the Spanish language. He singles out two Peruvians, Carlos Augusto Salaverry and Jose Arnaldo Marquez, for special praise ("every time I read them I am deeply moved");' traces of their concerns emerge in the sentimental moments of Vallejo's early poetry. His encounter with Spanish Golden Age poetry, however, was more fruitful. His friend Antenor Orrego remembered a notebook in which Vallejo had rehearsed variations on Spanish classics, including imitations of Quevedo and Lope de Vega, and indicated that echoes of these exercises reverberate through The Black Heralds and Trilce.8 Antonio Armisen has shown that Vallejo's engagements with Golden Age poetry are also evident in the Human Poems. Armisen demonstrated that "Intensity and Height," which begins "I want to write, but out comes foam," is not just a variation on a sonnet by Lope that begins "I want to write, but my tears won't let me" but is also a "deconstruction of poetic and religious language," including that of St. John of the Cross.
Vallejo's early poetry draws directly on Dario's symbolist aesthetic, nuanced by inflections of Peruvian poets of his time: Abraham Valdelomar's modernismo, respectful of Catholicism; Jose Maria Eguren's dreamy symbolism, with nods to the Germanic lyrical tradition; and the anticlerical anarchist virility of Manuel Gonzalez Prada. As Andre Coyne and Americo Ferrari have shown, Vallejo was also influenced by the poetry of two Latin American contemporaries: the Uruguayan Jose Herrera y Reisig and the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones.
In Peru Baudelaire, discovered in the 18gos, became a contemporary of Dario.'° Indeed, some of the versions that Vallejo read came from Eduardo Marquina's 1905 translation of Lesfleurs du mal, which evince a sensibility closer to Vallejo than to the French original: vagabond becomes mendigo (beggar), misere (misery) and horreur (horror) become dolor (pain), and ma Douleur (my pain) becomes tu, Dolor mio, humano (you, my human Pain). The often-debated Gallicisms in Vallejo's poetry, such as the adjective pluvioso (for rainy, instead of the everyday Spanish llu- vioso) in Trilce XV, also appear in Marquina's translation of Baudelaire. Jose Pascual Buxo intimated that Vallejo's engagements with French poetry in Spanish translation were decisive in his own movement from the stylized conventions of symbolism to "the unmasked solitude of the individual in agony.""
Tensions between religion and sexuality in various permutations were recurrent in Spanish and Spanish American Romantic poetry; but it was Ruben Dario, in "Lo fatal" ("The inevitable"), who best expressed erotic apprehensions by addressing the conflict between sexuality and religion in an agnostic vein:
Dario's poem was the benchmark for any Spanish American poet who addressed sexual anxieties using the rhetoric of Christian sin, but Vallejo is to Dario what Dario was to his own Romantic antecedents. Vallejo's erotically mangled poetry traces imaginal contours that relegate Dario's poem, which once felt disarmingly contemporary, to the search for honest expression in a dated past:
(TRILCE XXX)
THE BLACK HERALDS (I918)
The Black Heralds is a landmark in Spanish-language poetry. The title of the collection pays homage to Dario's poem "Los heraldos" ("The heralds") and to the darkness of Baudelaire. In The Black Heralds the symbolist idiom of Ruben Dario and the early Juan Ramon Jimenez gives way to a new aesthetic whose intensity is palpable from the first line, one of the most memorable in Latin American poetry:
The full pathos is not in the words that can be recited, but in the silence of the ellipsis. One feels the breath knocked out of the poetic voice, or at least the poet's inability to finish a sentence expressing the impotence of a suffering humanity. This is a world in which love is miserable, and no God can save or console.
In his most intimate writings, the "blows" of the poem were integral to Vallejo's vocabulary. During a hospitalization Vallejo wrote a despairing letter to his friend Pablo Abril de Vivero:
In life, Pablo, there is a dark blackness that is closed to all consolation. There are hours that are more sinister and agonizing than one's grave .... In my convalescence I often cry for the slightest cause. A childlike propensity for tears has saturated me with an immense pity for things. I often think of my home, my parents, and lost affection. Some day I will be able to die in the course of the risky life that has been my lot, and then, like now, will find myself alone, an orphan without family or even love.... In a few days I will leave the hospital, according to the doctor. In the street life awaits me ready to strike its blows at will."
This heart-wrenching letter offers intimations of Vallejo's propensity to transform his own pain into pity for the collective. As in the letter, the "blows" of the poem are those of "destiny," but they are also compared to the "hatred of God." It is not the soul of man that falls within a Christian framework, but Christianity itself within a humanistic one, for the blows of suffering are themselves "the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,/of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny." In Vallejo's religious rhetoric, humanity is not awaiting Christ's salvation. On the contrary, and with intended blasphemy, a Christ "falls" each time the soul is battered by the blows of life. Jose Carlos Mariategui, who set the tone for Vallejo's reception, offers a precis of his early poetry:
The pessimism is full of tenderness and compassion, because it is not engendered by egocentricity and narcissism, disenchanted and exacerbated, as is the case almost throughout the Romantic school. Vallejo feels all human suffering. His grief is not personal. His soul is "sad unto death" with the sorrow of all men, and with the sorrow of God, because for the poet it is not only men who are sad.13
The opening poem is followed by a few lyrical exercises in which Vallejo has not yet found his own voice, but these hesitations are left behind with his remarkable poem "The Spider," and with many other poems in which he moves into uncharted territories that would be reached, decades later, by some of the representative writers of the twentieth century. Vallejo's closest analogue in world literature is not Samuel Beckett, whose compassion for human suffering is expressed with personal detachment, but rather Beckett's character Lucky, who gives the longest speech in any of his plays. Lucky is both a victim of brutality and a compassionate observer of human quandaries:
Given the existence [ ... ] of a personal God [ ... ] who from the heights of divine apathia [ ... ] loves us dearly
with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment [ ... ] and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished [ ... ] that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines [... ] and considering [ ... ] that in the plains in the mountains [ ... ] the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones [ ... ] the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull [ ... ] alas the stones.14
Lucky's philosophical reflections on bodily functions, human predicaments, and theological apprehensions are central in Vallejo's poetry. His God, distant and personal, who can love, suffer, and become indifferent to human torment, corresponds to the complex and paradoxical conception of God in Vallejo's early poetry:
("GOD," THE BLACK HERALDS)
("THE ETERNAL DICE," THE BLACK HERALDS)
The grim image of heavy, colored skulls used to refer to humanity was so central to Vallejo that the provisional title of Trilce (1922) was "Craneos de bronce" ("Bronze skulls"). The mention of skulls, as blue suffering stones, with which Lucky's speech comes to an abrupt end when he is assaulted by Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo, is akin to Vallejo's "The Stones":
Even the situation of Lucky, who is pulled by a rope and beaten with it by those who punish him without cause, could have been inspired by another one of Vallejo's most anthologized poems in which he forecasts his own death:
("BLACK STONE ON A WHITE STONE," HUMAN POEMS)
When writing Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett worked as a translator for UNESCO in Paris. One of his assignments was to translate Latin American poetry into English for Octavio Paz.15 It is appropriate that Beckett should have turned to the forms and images of a Latin American poet in composing a speech that expresses commiseration with the miserable fate of the tormented.
In his own Peruvian context, Vallejo's religious poems corrected the writings of his most celebrated contemporaries, even those he admired. Unlike Manuel Gonzalez Prada-who railed against priests and Catholicism, and to whom Vallejo dedicated "The Eternal Dice," one of his poems of deicide-Vallejo does not attack the institutions of the Church. Instead, he deploys the very concepts and categories of Catholic dogma in quarreling with his waning Christian faith.
This is a tragic vision-perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature-in which salvation and sin are one and the same ("Lover, on this night you have been crucified on/the two curved beams of my kiss"). Vallejo's protests against our fate are nuanced by alternating feelings of pity, isolation, and guilt: responses to the affliction his poetic voice might have witnessed or caused, for he is not innocent and does not feel blameless. In "Dregs," in The Black Heralds, the poet laments the consequences of his anger:
This poem is an inspired rewriting of Lope de Vega's sonnet "~Que tengo yo que mi amistad procuras?" ("Why do you seek my friendship?"), in which the poetic voice recalls his undeserved mistreatment by a lover.
A misogynistic streak manifests itself in some of Vallejo's erotic poetry. Intermittent expressions of contempt for the objects of his sexual desire ("The tomb is still/woman's sex that draws man in!") resonate with letters that blame women for the consequences of his own actions: "How easily one catches one of these infections, and how difficult it is to get rid of them. Believe me, I sometimes have such anger toward women. 1116
In The Black Heralds Vallejo's poetic voice seeks but fails to find salvation in sexuality, or in his commiseration with the hungry and the indigenous peoples of the Andes. Anticipating Kafka, Vallejo projects the inner struggles of a human being into an order that exceeds his individuality but cannot save him: "I was born on a day/when God was sick." With the emphatic repetition of this line at the end of The Black Heralds, the omnipotent deity has been purged from Vallejo's poetry.
TRILCE (1922)
Trilce, Vallejo's second book of poems, is widely considered a masterpiece of avantgarde poetry. Here there is no divinity against which to argue, and the tragic vision subsides, but the malaise that informed his deicide in The Black Heralds intensifies. Most of the poems that make up the volume were conceived between 19rg and 1922, a stormy period of Vallejo's life during which he attempted suicide, Abraham Valdelomar (one of his most influential literary supporters in Peru) died, and Vallejo was jailed in Trujillo for four months for his alleged participation in social unrest.
Trilce includes not only jaggedly abstract writing full of non sequiturs (undoubtedly received as nonsensical babble by many of its first readers) but also poems in which capitalized consonants are repeated within a word, spaces of various lengths separate words, and words are written vertically rather than horizontally or are grouped in geometrical patterns. Vallejo creates neologisms to a much more daring degree in this book than he did in The Black Heralds, uses numbers as symbols, and turns nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives. Trilce's originality, both surprising and transgressive, resonates with the gestures and sensibilities of Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and other poets associated with the American Language Poetry movement of the i970s.17
Some distinguished Peruvian critics wrote early reviews of TrUce they would later regret. Luis Alberto Sanchez called it "incomprehensible and outlandish," and Clemente Palma wondered if its unaccountable title and style were an affront to good taste. Others, however, recognized TrUce as a great work beyond their grasp: "Trilce is incomprehensible, because it is strange, unique, and strong. To understand it one needs a spontaneous critical attitude and an exceptional psychological endowment."18
A humorous haughtiness in Trilce camouflages irreverent gestures, confounding readers' expectations, in a collection that shifts gears as it moves from the experimental to the sentimental to the realistic. Compare the following stanzas, two pages apart, which seem to have been written by two different poets. The first is from a poem in which a troubled adult consciousness evokes childhood memories, and the second from a poem that generates apprehension by endowing numbers with symbolic force:
Vallejo's ars poetica, Trilce XXXVI, is an explicit response to Dario's ars poetica, a poem titled "Yo persigo una forma" ("I'm searching for a form"). In Dario's poem the intractable search for poetic harmony is signaled by the image of the "impossible embrace of Venus de Milo." In TrUce XXXVI Vallejo dissects Dario's image, shunning his harmonies and symmetries in the name of an existence, odd and imperfect:
Vallejo's poetry offers sustained reflections on time and memory, with inflections that honor Quevedo's engagements with human temporality and his masterful effects that seem to slow the passing of time or speed it up. Vallejo redirects Quevedo's attainments in poems such as in Trilce LXIV, in which a whirlwind of remembrances are capped by a disquieting ordering of temporal labels:
Oh voices and cities that pass galloping on a finger pointed at bald Unity. While, from much to much, farmhands of a great wise lineage pass, behind the three tardy dimensions.
Vallejo's tendency to create dramatic links between events that may have taken place at different times informs his rewriting of Abraham Valdelomar's poem "El hermano ausente en la cena de Pascua" ("The absent brother at the Christmas meal"). Valdelomar's poem captures the anguish of a mother at a family meal after the death of her son:
In Trilce XXVIII, Vallejo's variation on this poem, a mother is absent, and the despondent poetic persona longs for a family meal:
Four stanzas down, on another occasion he is invited to dine at a friend's home, where the mother is also absent; and yet there is a sense of communion. Vallejo's poetic persona feels even more bereft in the company of those who were able to mourn and move on:
THE EUROPEAN PERIOD (1923-1938)
In 1923 Vallejo traveled to Europe, never to return to Peru. His exhilaration and excitement on his arrival in France ("Paris! Oh what a wonder! I have realized the
greatest yearning that every cultured man feels when gazing at the globe of the earth!")19 was soon to dissolve into disappointment. For a period of some six years he felt unsettled and paralyzed. In a letter he recounts
the long years of worthless and perhaps injurious optimism in which I have lived in Europe ... I'm sunk in a provisional parenthesis, on the threshold of another form of existence that never comes. I take everything as provisional. And so have transpired almost five years in Paris. Five years of waiting, without being able to do anything seriously, nothing in a state of rest, nothing definitive; agitated in a continuous economic stress that does not allow me to undertake or treat anything too deeply.20
Vallejo's correspondence can be painful to read. He is continually requesting loans, payments, fellowships, governmental support, and even monetary gifts from friends and acquaintances in order to stay afloat. He entered a short period of relative financial ease in 1929 with Georgette Philippart, his companion and future wife, thanks to a small inheritance she had received. This period coincided with his political radicalization, which began in 1928, when he traveled to the Soviet Union on the first of three trips. He aroused suspicion from French immigration authorities, who tagged him as a potential subversive and deported him from the country in 1930 for his communist sympathies. He moved to Madrid, and returned to Paris two years later.