bubblish The Spanish bullosas is a neologism, possibly based on bullir (to boil, bubble) and/or bullicioso (bustling, boisterous).
LXIII (page 295)
oxident The Spanish oxidente is a neologism, first used in Los heraldos negros, fusing occi- dente (Occident) and dxido (oxide).
LXV (page 299)
tori Round moldings (torus, in the singular), not to be confused with Shinto temple gateways! In the same line as tondos, repulgos could be translated as architectural "borders" or as "pie edgings." I opted for the latter.
axling Ejando is eje (axle) turned into a verb.
reveilles champing This mysterious phrase, tascar dianas, might also be translated as "dianas scotching" or even more dramatically, "bull's-eyes crunching." It appears, however, to play off tocar dianas (to sound reveille), which would eliminate the other two denotations of "Diana." Tascar means "to scotch or swingle flax," as well as "to nibble, browse, or champ" (as in "to champ against the bit") -see IV, where it is also rendered as champ. Perhaps the sensation here is that of trumpet blasts trying to break the constraints of reveille and reach the dead mother (to awake the dead).
humblest According to Meo Zilio (and to Anterior Orrego before him), with humilddse Vallejo has taken an archaic verb, humildarse, and substituted it for the current humillarse. Meo Zilio quotes Orrego: "When he says humildarse instead of humillarse reviving an archaism in the language, the habitual semantic cap has been broken and the word has been transformed, now signifying tenderness and loving reverence. The father does not lower and humiliate himself before his wife [see stanza 41, he exalts his love and gives it a tender reverence humbling himself `until less than half a man, /until being the youngest child that you had."' I am not aware of such a distinction in English, though the difference between to humble and to humiliate may be close (the former implying self-abasement without the loss of respect, the latter always implying ignominy). The translation problem is that to render humilddse as humble does not, as such, sound a difference with humiliate.
LXVI (page 301)
Neale-Silva (whose interpretations sometimes strike me as far-fetched) suggests that behind this poem commemorating All Souls Day are the deaths of Vallejo's first sweetheart in Trujillo, Maria Rosa Sandoval (February io, 1918), and of his mother, Maria de los Santos Gurrionero (August 8, 1918). Since Vallejo unconventionally capitalizes Noviembre and Julio, in LXVIII, I capitalize the full dates, as in Fourteenth of July, and so on.
LXVIII (page 305)
atfulmasT The horizontal part of the last stanza looks like a flag flying from the pole made by the vertical formation atodastA, a compression of a toda asta (based on the expression a media asta, "at half-mast").
LXX (page 309)
Barrancos Barranco is a lima beach resort (now a part of the city) that Vallejo used to frequent. Between pages 368 and 369, Gonzalez Vigil reproduces a photo of Vallejo at Barranco in igi9, in profile, standing in front of the surf, pants rolled up to his knees.
horizonifying Vallejo coined horizontizante by fusing horizonte (horizon) with izante (as in electrizante, electrifying). Note that in Spanish, the izon and izant sounds play against escaleras and escaladas in the same sentence.
LXXI (page 311)
fitted out with demilune/spurs The Spanish ennavajados is a neologism based on navaja (razor), to which a prefix and past-participle suffix have been added. Larrea comments that the phrase refers to the attaching of demilune razors to the spurs of the gamecocks. Literally, "enrazored with cupolas."
LXXIV (page 317)
we hardly let/fly The Spanish enflechamos is a neologism based on flecha (arrow) and enflechado (loaded, with arrow ready, said of a bow).
the hanky-panky hinges The Spanish gozna is a neologism, based on gozne (hinge) and engoznar (to hinge). By dropping the prefix, Vallejo evokes goznar (to enjoy oneself, even in a sexual way), suggesting that the travesura (mischief) involved sexual games. Unable to pick up this aspect of the phrase in the verb, I attempt to suggest it in my choice of noun.
LXXV (page 319)
Espejo writes that
As Ferrari points out, the poem clearly transcends such an incident-yet at the same time, it is interesting to know its setting. In Cesar Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence, Jean Franco quotes a convincing paragraph by the painter Macedonio de la Torre on the earlytwentieth-century tedium of Trujillo (7).
Trilce was published in October 1922, and the following June Vallejo sailed from Peru for Europe, never to return to Peru. In the fall of 1923, a poem called "Trilce" appeared in the Spanish magazine Alfar (the name curiously evokes the opening line of XXV). This poem is now part of the various editions of Vallejo's Obra poetica completa; however, it is impossible to link it directly to Trilce or to the post-Peruvian prose poems or poetry. Espejo reports that this poem was written in Peru when the Trilce manuscript was complete but was still being called " Craneos de bronce." Clearly this story conflicts with the one about discovering the book's title at the last minute via wordplay. The fact that this poem was not included in the second Madrid edition of Trilce (1930) indicates that Vallejo did not want it to be part of the book. The poem treats "Trilce" as an ineffable location in the mind that is right here and unreachable. It seems to me now to be the kind of piece Vallejo might have written after Trilce was titled and complete, an attempt to make locational sense out of a title that he knew would appear abstract to nearly all readers. I think that the poem was definitely written and sent out before he left Peru, given the fact that he left in June and the poem appeared in a Spanish magazine less than six months later. Perhaps it is the last poem he wrote before leaving, and if so, then it is especially appropriate to present a translation of it here, at the end of this commentary on Trilce.
TRILCE
HUMAN POEMS
The poems in Human Poems were written in Europe, for the most part in Paris, between 1923 and 1938. They were first published by Vallejo's widow, Georgette de Vallejo, in 1939 as Poemas humanos. The 1939 edition contained eighty-nine poems. Since then, ten more have been added, six by Georgette, two by Ricardo Gonzalez Vigil, and two by the editor of a Cuban edition, bringing the book now to ninety-nine poems.
The title of these poems, at least in terms of the author's intentions, has never been definitively determined. For years, it was thought that Georgette either had invented the title herself or had played a variation on the title of a Gerardo Diego book, Versos humanos. In the 1970s, Vallejo's old friend the poet Juan Larrea, who for decades had been deeply involved in Vallejo research, established a rational ordering of the undated European poems (which had appeared in various arbitrary orders over the years in editions of Poemas humanos), by coordinating them with dated letters from the six typewriters Vallejo had used while in Europe. While Poemas humanos does appear to fall into two basic groupings of undated poems (written for the most part between 1924 and the early to mid-1930s) and dated ones (September 4-December 8, 1937), Larrea took what could be two sections of the same collection as two separate books, proposing that in 1936 Vallejo took all the poetry and prose poetry he had written since coming to Europe and called it Ndmina de huesos (Roster of Bones), based on the title of what Larrea considered to be the first poem in the manuscript. Larrea's conjecture here was based on the fact that the title poem of Vallejo's first book, Los heraldos negros, is the first in that book.
As for the dated poems, since no title could be found, Larrea made a plausible, if not convincing, case for Sermon de la barbarie (Sermon on Barbarism), arguing that it is the key phrase in the last dated poem, "Sermon sobre la muerte," and suggests that "la barbarie" was a metaphor for "Babel," the Word (bab-ilu), the "Gate of God," which Vallejo engaged in the central book of his career. My co-translator at the time, Jose Rubia Barcia, was himself an old friend of Larrea, and based on the latter's impressive credentials, he proposed that we accept Larrea's findings and retitle Human Poems as The Complete Posthumous Poetry, including under this general title the two books making up the
old Human Poems along with the short collection of Spanish Civil War poems, Spain, Take This Cup from Me.
In the i99i RGV edition of Vallejo's complete poetry, the editor notes that in 1929 it appears that the poet did conceive of, along with other potential books, "a Book of human poems." He reproduces the contents from one of Vallejo's notebook pages dated September 2o, 1929 (made available by Georgette in 1978). While there is still no evidence that Vallejo directly linked his European poetry with such a title, which can be thought of as descriptive of poems, as well as a title per se, the only possible candidate for such a title at this point is all the European poetry, aside from the Spanish Civil War poems (the title of which has never been disputed).
Human Poems is also a title that for over sixty years has often been attached to, and associated with, this period of Vallejo's poetry. The word humanos occurs six times, in crucial placements, in this writing. Vallejo's poetry from 1923 to 1938 is a magisterial meditation on the sympathies, passions, compassions, and failings of humankind. It "humanizes" a common nonracial trunk in which the animal is not separated out of the human, and in this way reengages an extremely ancient matrix underlying the divisions that have resulted in body and soul, culture and wilderness.
For all these reasons I have restored Human Poems as the title of these now ninety-nine poems, including four new prose poems that Barcia and I were not aware of when we worked together in the 1970s.
Besides Larrea's scholarship, our work was also greatly facilitated by the Francisco Moncloa Obra poetica completa (1968), with its facsimile reproductions of the hand-corrected typescripts for all but a few of the posthumously published European poems. Not only did such reproductions enable us to avoid the error-riddled (often pirated) editions that I had worked from in the i96os, but they also offered us the thousands of handwritten changes that Vallejo made on the typescript. We therefore constructed a section of notes in which we translated what in our opinion was the most interesting of the legible crossed-out material. I have included most of this information in what follows here, as well as making a few additions, and I have continued to present it as work by us both, to honor Barcia's role in its essential formation.
The RGV edition lists, as part of the annotations to the undated poems, Georgette de Vallejo's conjectures about dates and in a few cases, dates of publication (that is, while such manuscripts do not bear a completion date stated by Vallejo himself, they were published in magazines in a particular year). I have chronologically ordered these poems according to conjectures and publication dates, putting the conjectural dates in brackets, while leaving brackets off the publication dates. In regard to the poems dated by Vallejo himself, I have included such dates also without brackets. As mentioned before, the fact that the dated poems appear to have been completed in a short, intense work period of several months sets them apart from the others, which may have been written over some eleven or twelve years. To respect this chronology, I have divided the current Human Poems into parts i and 2.
Good Sense (page 327)
through consummated pacts At the beginning of the paragraph following this line, Vallejo had originally written:
My mother is successive of beings and an alternative of hours.
she would become sad Following this line, there is a crossed-out paragraph:
What is there, then, about me, that my father lacks and since my returning home, leaves my mother so pensive? My father is now losing his authority and home oscillates around me, with sleeves, fillet, galloon, and lapels.
There resides the candor There area number of corrections from this point on, so we have translated Vallejo's original version:
There resides her woman's illusion and the most sacred candor that becomes a brilliant melancholy in the depth of her face. In order to support her illusion and her candor, I say to her filially:
-There is, mother, in the world a place called Paris. A very big place and very far off, where there are more men than women, more grown-ups than children. Thick beam! Cilicious stone!
My mother, on hearing me, eats her lunch and shows in her mortal eyes the order in my personal life.
Violence of the Hours (page 331)
TITLE According to Larrea, this poem was written before Vallejo's father's death on March 24, 1924. Larrea assumes that the father would have been mentioned in the poem had it been written after his death.
interior corridors In response to our query, Larrea wrote Barcia that Vallejo's home in Santiago de Chuco had two floors, with interior corridors encircling a small inner patio. We have thus translated corredores in this poem as "interior corridors," or in "Languidly Her Liquor" as "interior corridor."
there is no one in my experience After this line, a five-line paragraph has been crossed out:
My horse Macach6n died, no longer with us but with others. My father was informed of his death, one night, a long time ago, by the alfalfa farmer Manuel Benites, the peasant who shook the hair from his shoulders with the bristles of his climates.
"The windows shuddered . . . " (page 333)
TITLE The following title has been crossed out: "Complement of Time in the Boyer Hospital" ("Complemento de tiempo del Hospital de Boyer"). Vallejo wrote to the poet Pablo Abril that he was in the Boyer Hospital in October 1924, to be operated on for an intestinal hemorrhage, with twenty horrible days of physical pain and incredible spiritual depression. He tells Abril that an infantile ability to cry has left him saturated with an immense piety for all things.
After this crossed-out title, the following lines are also crossed out:
The bedsheets still stink of expedience because of the death of a man. The mattress has been turned, according to regulations. Thus the stench of the last agony will not hit you in the face. As for the one now arriving, it would be better if they looked at him, if they put him to bed, if they asked him lots of questions, for if they leave him alert, he will handle the perilous density of his importance by himself. But he understands very well that there are other men crying here and that no one will know how to answer them, if his mouth looks at the mouth of the others, of us, the sick ones.
Ay The word ay often appears in Vallejo's poetry, and I have usually resisted converting it literally into alas, which for me has a different tenor and a less poignant edge. I have tried to pick up the emotional sense of the word in each context in which I encountered it, at times spelling it differently or putting an exclamation mark after it to render it more acutely.
forgive us our chests Larrea suggests that nos perdonan pecho might mean "they forgive us the sin of having chests (and allow us, as a consequence, to breathe)." The word pecho, depending on the context, can mean "chest," "breast," "heart," or even "courage." Larrea's interpretation is strengthened by the probability that the mosca (fly) in the following line seems to be a religious person, e.g., a nun. Since Vallejo uses pecho often (especially in Spain, Take This Cup from Me), and gives it a feeling of his own, we have decided to stick with its literal meaning in English.
Blood runs wild This single line was originally the following three-line paragraph:
Blood runs wild in the thermometers ... The order of numbers reared up on ii, and the following numbers exclaim: head office! head office! head office!
The Low Point in Life (page 339)
TITLE The original title was "Concerning the Correctness of Actions" ("Acerca de la correc- ci6n de los actos").
Roster of Bones (page 341)
TITLE "List of Bones" ("Lista de huesos") was crossed out in favor of the final title.
I Am Going to Speak of Hope (page 343)
After the second paragraph, the following paragraph has been crossed out:
It is necessary to differentiate my present pain, from that pain which derives from not having a cause to feel pain. Today I suffer a pain that did not have a cause nor did it lack one. There are pains like this in the bottomless kingdom, without history or future, of the heart of man. I suffer, then, without conditions or consequence
s. Suspended in the air, I do not know if fragile or resistant, my pain has now such sufficiency and a courage so much its own, that before it men feel a respect almost religious and almost joyous. Because oh miracle of the maximum circles! this pain is not conditioned to come or to leave.
After the last paragraph, the following paragraph was crossed out:
And in this heart, which has neither had a cause nor the lack of one; in this heart, without back or chest, without state or name, without source or use, there is no room for hope or for memory and what is even sadder ah tremendous fall upward! how I now make my pain feel pain.
Discovery of Life (page 345)
Before the first paragraph, the following paragraph has been crossed out:
When was it that I savored for the first time the taste of life? When was it that I tested this impression of nature, that makes me ecstatic at this moment? Have I savored on another occasion the taste of life? Have I already tested at another time my impression of nature? I am completely convinced of not having tested it, of never having savored it, except now. This is extraordinary! Today is the first time that I savor the taste of life; today is the first time that the effect of nature has made me ecstatic. This is extraordinary! This astonishes me and makes me brim with tears and with happiness.
aknown The word inconocido appears to be a play on desconocido (unknown), and I have translated it accordingly.
After the fourth paragraph, the following paragraph has been crossed out:
I am possessed by the emotion of this discovery. A discovery of the unexpected and a discovery of goodness. How much has this happiness cost me? How long have I awaited it? NEITHER expectation nor price. Do you know the unexpected happiness? Do you know the unpaid happiness? This is my happiness today. That which makes me ecstatic and clothes me with an air so unused, that people will take me for a foreigner on earth. Yes. I neither know anyone nor does anyone know me.
After the last line, the following two sentences have been crossed out:
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