what a wheat spike on the agricultural thumb!
if the sky fits between two terrestrial limbos this line originally read:
if the sky fits between terrestrial plates,
Appendix: BATTLES IN SPAIN
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VIII
For nearly fifty years, I have been translating the poetry of Cesar Vallejo. His writing has become the keelson in the ship of poetry I have attempted to construct. Here I would like to offer an overview of my lifelong evolving relationship with Vallejo and with translation, and to evoke some of the experiences that have come out of it. Finally, I would like to say what this companionship has meant to me, as a poet and as a human being.
While I was a student at Indiana University in 1957, a painter friend, Bill Paden, gave me a copy of the New Directions 1944 Latin American Poetry anthology. I was particularly impressed with the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo. While I was able to make sense of Neruda's Latin American Surrealism by comparing it to its French prototypes, Vallejo was something else: he had a unique imagination and a highly complicated style, and his images seemed to work on several levels. He wrote bitterly about Peruvian provincial life and passionately about the Spanish Civil War. I decided at that time to read Neruda first and, other than a few poems from his first book, hold off on Vallejo until later.
I then discovered that Angel Flores had translated all of Neruda's Residencia en la tierra, and on comparing his versions with those of H. R. Hays and Dudley Fitts in the anthology, I was intrigued by the differences. Without knowing any Spanish, I began to tinker with the versions. Doing so got me to thinking about going to Mexico City, which was then featured in the literary news as a mecca for the Beats and their followers. At the beginning of the summer of 1959, with a pocket SpanishEnglish dictionary and two hundred dollars, I hitchhiked to Mexico. The following summer, in order to improve my Spanish, I returned to Mexico, rented a room in the back of a butcher's home in Chapala, and spent the summer reading Neruda's poetry, as well as writing most of the poems that were to appear in my first book, Mexico k North, in 1962.
In 1960 I edited three issues of the English Department-sponsored literary triquarterly, Folio, where I printed some Neruda translations I had done with friends in Mexico City, and four Vallejo versions, co-translated with another graduate student, Maureen Lahey. Discovering the poetry of Neruda and Vallejo made me realize that poetry was an international phenomenon and that North American poetry was but one part of it. As a young aspiring poet, I had a hunch that I would learn something about poetry by translating it that I would not learn solely from reading poetry written in English.
I finished a master's degree in 1961 and took a job with the University of Maryland's Far Eastern Division, teaching literature to military personnel stationed in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Before leaving, almost as an afterthought, I packed the copy of Poesia de America #5, Homenaje a Cesar Vallejo that I had found in a Mexico City bookstore.
The following year, my first wife, Barbara, and I moved to Kyoto on the advice of the poet Gary Snyder, who was studying Zen Buddhism there. For the next two years I studied and wrote, making a living by teaching English as a second language at various Japanese companies. In 1962, having completed a small collection of Neruda translations (published in San Francisco by George Hitchcock's Amber House Press as Residence on Earth), I decided to investigate the Vallejo poems in the Mexican journal.
The first poem I tried to read, from Poemas humanos, was "Me viene, hay dias, una gana uberrima, politica ..." It was as if a hand of wet sand had come out of the original and "quicked" me in-I was quicksanded, in over my head. Or was it a spar Vallejo threw me? In this poem, Vallejo was claiming that he desired to love, and that his desire for desire led him to imagine all sorts of "interhuman" acts, like kissing a singer's muffler, or kissing a deaf man on his cranial murmur. He wanted to help everyone achieve his goal, no matter what it was, even to help the killer killand he wanted to be good to himself in everything. These were thoughts that, had I had them myself, I would either have dismissed or so immediately repressed that they would have evaporated. But now I realized that there was a whole wailing cathedral of desires, half-desires, mad-desires, antidesires, all of which, in the Vallejo poem, seemed caught on the edge of no-desire. And if so, what brought about these bizarre desires? The need to flee his body? His inability to act on desire? A terrible need to intercede in everyone's acts? I did not know, but trying to read him made me feel that I was in the presence of a mile-thick spirit. So I kept at it.
Soon I decided that I should not just read the eighty-nine poems in Poemas humanos, but I should also try to translate them. To do that meant an awesome commitment of psyche as well as time. In committing myself to such a project, was I evading the hard work of trying to find my way in poetry of my own? Or could I think of working on Vallejo as a way of working on myself? Possibly. But much of what he wrote seemed obscure to me. Did that mean my Spanish was so inadequate that I simply could not make sense of Vallejo's language? Or was it a combination of those things, plus my having tapped into something that was coherent, and instructive, but at a level I had yet to plumb?
In the afternoon I would ride my motorcycle downtown and work on translations in the Yorunomado coffeeshop. I would always sit by the carp pond on the patio. There I discovered the following words of Vallejo: "And where is the other flank of this cry of pain if, to estimate it as a whole, it breaks now from the bed of a man?" In that line I saw Vallejo in a birth bed, not knowing how to give birth, an impression that led me to a whole other realization: that artistic bearing and fruition were physical as well as mental, a matter of one's total energy. Both in translating and in working on my own poems, I felt a terrific resistance, as if every attempt I made to advance was met by a force that pushed me back. It was as if through Vallejo I had made contact with a negative impaction in my being, a nebulous depth charge that I had been carrying around with me for many years. For most of 1963 and the first half of 1964, everything I saw and felt clustered around this feeling; it seemed to dwell in a phrase from the I Ching, "the darkening of the light," as well as in the Kyoto sky, gray and overcast, yet mysteriously luminous.
I also began to have violent and morbid fantasies that seemed provoked by the combination of translating and writing. More and more I felt that I was struggling with a man as well as a text, and that this struggle was a matter of my becoming or failing to become a poet. The man I was struggling with did not want his words changed from one language to another. I also realized that in working on Vallejo's Poemas humanos I had ceased to be what I was before coming to Kyoto, that I now had a glimpse of another life, a life I was to create for myself, and that this other man I was struggling with was also the old Clayton who was resisting change. The old Clayton wanted to continue living in his white Presbyterian world of "light"where man is associated with day/clarity/good and woman with night/opaqueness/bad. The darkness that was beginning to spread through my sensibility could be viewed as the breaking up of the belief in male supremacy that had generated much of that "light."
In the last half of "The Book of Yorunomado," the only poem of my own I completed to any satisfaction while living in Japan, I envisioned myself as a kind of angel-less Jacob wrestling with a figure who possessed a language the meaning of which I was attempting to wrest away. I lose the struggle and find myself on a seppuku platform in medieval Japan, being condemned by Vallejo (now playing the role of a karo, or overlord) to disembowel myself. I do so, cutting my ties to the "given life" and releasing a visionary figure of the imagination, named Yorunomado (in honor of my working place), who had till that point been chained to an altar in my solar plexus. In early 1964, the fruit of my struggle with Vallejo was not a successful linguistic translation but an imaginative advance in which a third figure had emerged from my intercourse with the text. Yorunom
ado then became another guide in the ten-year process of developing a "creative life," recorded in my booklength poem, Coils (1973).
I was close to completing a first draft of Human Poems in March 1963 when I had a very strange experience. After translating all afternoon in the Yorunomado coffeeshop, I motorcycled over to the pottery manufacturer where I taught English conversation once a week. Whenever I had things to carry on the cycle, I would strap them with a bungee cord to the platform behind the seat. That evening when I left the company, I strapped on the poem-filled notebook, my dictionary, and a copy of the Spanish book. It was now dark, and the alley was poorly lit. I had gone a half-block when I heard a voice cry in Japanese: "Hey, you dropped something!" I stopped and swerved around to find the platform empty-even the bungee cord was gone! I retraced my path on foot-nothing. I looked for the person who had called out. No one was there. While I was walking around in the dark, a large skinny dog began to follow me. I was reminded of the Mexican pariah dogs, and that association gave an eerie identity to this dog. Was it Peruvian? Was itVallejo? I went back the next morning to search in daylight, and of course there was no trace of the notebook. So I had to start all over again.
If I had turned Vallejo into a challenging mentor from the past, I had also found a living mentor, as complicated in his own way as Vallejo himself: he was Cid Corman, a poet, editor (of origin magazine and books), and translator who had taken up residence in Kyoto. I began to visit him weekly, in the evening, at the Muse coffeeshop downtown. Corman, who was eleven years my senior, seemed to like me, but he did not like the kind of self-involved poetry that I was trying to write. Since, especially in origin, he presented an impressive vision of what poetry could be on an international scale, I found myself in the impossible situation of wanting to address the forces erupting in me and also wanting to write poems that might make their way into his magazine. Thus while testing myself against Vallejo's Spanish, I was also working with a Corman raven on my shoulder staring critically at what I was struggling to articulate. At times the tension between Vallejo and Corman was almost unbearable. These figures who were offering me their vision of the creative also seemed to be dragging me under. I was hearing things, having terrifying nightmares, and suffering unexplainable headaches.
In the following year I completed three more drafts of Human Poems. Cid went over the second and third drafts, and to him I owe a special debt, not only for the time he put in on the manuscript but for what I learned from him about the art of translation.
Before talking with Cid about translation, I had thought that the goal of a translating project was to take a literal draft and interpret everything that was not acceptable English. By interpret I mean: to monkey with words, phrases, punctuation, line breaks, even stanza breaks, turning the literal into something that was not an original poem in English but-and here is the rub-something that because of the liberties taken was also not faithful to the original itself. Ben Belitt's Neruda translations or Robert Lowell's Imitations come to mind as interpretative translations. Corman taught me to respect the original at every point, to check everything (including words I thought I knew), to research arcane and archaic words, and to invent English words for coined words-in other words, to aim for a translation that was absolutely accurate and up to the performance level of the original (at times, quite incompatible goals). I learned to keep a notebook of my thoughts and variations on what I was translating so that I could keep this material separate, for every translator has impulses to fill in, pad out, and make something "strong" that in a more literal mode would fall flat-in short, to pump up or explain a word instead of translating it. By reinterpreting, the translator implies that he knows more than the original text does, that, in effect, his mind is superior to its mind. The "native text" becomes raw material for the colonizer-translator to educate and reform.
During these years of undergoing a double apprenticeship-to poetry and to translation-I was so psychically opened up by Vallejo that I had to find ways to keep my fantasies out of the translation. One way was to redirect them into my poetry, as I did with "The Book of Yorunomado." While in Paris in 1973, I visited Vallejo's tomb in the Montparnasse cemetery and imagined my relationship to him and to his work in a poem, "At the Tomb of Vallejo." And on completing the revision of a translation of Poemas humanos in 1977, I developed a culminative fantasia on my years with this poet called "The Name Encanyoned River," a title based on a line that Vallejo had crossed out in one of these poems. Finally, beginning with the 1977 revision, I added detailed notes to my Vallejo collections, commenting on crossed-out material as well as arcane and coined words. Thus, I was able to excavate and employ the psychic turmoil of my Kyoto life, all the while keeping the translation of a body of work contoured with its own unadulterated chasms.
Poemas humanos is made up of poems left by Vallejo at the time of his death, in April 1938, in a heavily hand-corrected typescript. When his widow, Georgette, published them in 1939 there were many errors, and the poems were presented out of chronological order. These errors were repeated and amplified in subsequent editions, many of which were pirated because Georgette would not cooperate with publishers. By the spring of 1965, now back in Bloomington, I was working from four textually differing editions of Poemas humanos, having seen neither the first edition nor the worksheets.
Instead of shaping up as I worked along, the whole project was becoming a nightmare. Now I was having dreams in which Vallejo's corpse, wearing muddy shoes, was laid out in bed between Barbara and me. By this time I had gotten in touch with Georgette Vallejo and explained that I did not see how I could complete the translation effectively unless I came to Peru and examined the worksheets. I hired a lawyer to draw up a contract and mailed it to her, along with samples from my fourth draft. I received one reply from her in which she did not respond to any of my requests. But I was determined to go, and with Barbara several months pregnant, we left in August 1965, with just a few hundred dollars.
Once in Lima, we moved into a small apartment next to a grade school playground on Domingo Orue in Miraflores, the district where Georgette Vallejo also lived. Georgette was a small, wiry, middle-class French woman in her late fifties. Supported by the Peruvian government, she lived rather spartanly, yet not uncomfortably, in an apartment appointed with pre-Incan pottery and weavings. I was in a very delicate position with her, because I not only needed to see the first edition and the worksheets, but I also needed her permission before I could get a publishing contract. I had not been in her apartment for fifteen minutes when she told me that my translations were full of "howlers," that Vallejo was untranslatable (she was at that time working on a French translation of his poetry), and that neither the first edition nor the worksheets were available to be studied.
The months that followed were stressful and cheerless. I had been hired as editor of a new bilingual literary magazine, to be called Quena, at the Peruvian North American Cultural Institute. Because I was working for the Institute (which turned out to be an annex of the American Embassy in Lima), most of the Peruvian writers and critics I met thought I was an American spy. Only when I turned in the three-hundred-page manuscript for the first issue of Quena did I realize what the Institute represented. My boss told me that the translations I had included of Javier Heraud could not be published in the magazine because, although the poems themselves were not political, their author, after visiting Cuba, had joined a guerrilla movement in the Peruvian jungle and had been killed by the army. Since his name was linked with Cuba and revolution, my boss told me, the Institute did not want to be involved. I refused to take the translations out of the manuscript and was fired.
At the end of 1965 I met Maureen Ahern, an American with a PhD from San Marcos University, who was then married and living with her family on a chicken farm in Cieneguilla, about twenty miles outside Lima. Maureen agreed to read through the sixth and seventh drafts of my Vallejo manuscript with me (and she would later facilitate the manuscript's first publication aft
er I had left Peru). Her husband, Johnny, worked in Lima, and once a week he would give me a ride to their place as he drove home from work. Maureen and I would work together all of the following day, and I would ride back to Lima with Johnny the next morning. This arrangement was ideal, but it remains indissociable in my mind from a near tragedy that marked my year in Peru. On one of the evenings that I would normally have gone to Maureen's, her husband was unavailable and I stayed home. That night-it was the week after my son, Matthew, was born-Barbara began to hemorrhage. After attempting to staunch the flow I realized that if I did not get her to a hospital immediately she was going to bleed to death. I raced out of our apartment and ran through the halls of the building across the street, screaming for help. A door opened, a doctor came out, we bundled her into the back of his Volkswagen and sped to the nearest clinic. We saved her life, barely-but I shudder to think what might have happened had I gone to Cieneguilla as planned.
One afternoon someone knocked on our door, and I opened it to be told by a stranger that Georgette Vallejo wanted to see me in her apartment that evening. When I arrived, I found there a small group of Peruvian writers and intellectuals, such as Javier Sologuren, Carlos German Belli, and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen. Georgette explained that she had assembled everyone to try to determine what poems I could be given permission to translate. This turned out to be a ridiculous and impossible task, with these luminaries arguing for hours over why X poem could be translated and Y poem could not. At one point, when they all agreed that a particular poem could absolutely not be translated, Georgette cried out, "But I just translated that poem into French!" Nothing was resolved, and after the writers left, I found myself despondently sitting with Georgette. She asked me if I would like a pisco and brought out a bottle. We began drinking, and I recalled that the editor of Peru Nuevo, a press that had published a pirated edition of Poemas humanos, had told me that Georgette and Cesar had never been formally married, and because of this Georgette had no legal control over the estate. I think I blurted out, "Well, I really don't need your permission it turns out, as Gustavo Valcarcel told me you and Vallejo were never actually married!" At that point she jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and began bringing out shoeboxes of memorabilia, looking for the marriage certificate. She couldn't find it. But the next morning, of course, she was furious over my confrontation. I never saw her again.
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