B003EEN38U EBOK The Complete Poetry A Bilingual Edition nodrm
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When Barbara and I returned to the States in the spring of 1966 and moved to New York City, Grove Press expressed interest in the translation. I prepared a seventh draft, and after having it checked by readers, Dick Seaver, then the senior editor at Grove, offered me a contract-contingent on Mme. Vallejo's signature. I wrote to Maureen and asked her if there was anything she could do. She offered to go meet Georgette. Over the next six months, Maureen must have seen Georgette almost weekly, and she did this while taking care of her kids, teaching full-time, battling illness, and trying to save a floundering marriage.
Seaver was also working on Georgette, sending letter after letter to convince her that the translation Grove wished to publish was not the one I had sent her from Bloomington in 1964. Maureen and Johnny were inviting her out to the farm for holiday weekends and sending her back home with chickens and eggs. Since Seaver was getting nowhere, Maureen eventually had to mention that she was a friend of mine and that she had worked on the translation. Georgette protested that she had been betrayed, and once again it looked as if it was all off.
But Maureen kept after her, and one day Americo Ferrari, a Peruvian scholar who had written on Vallejo (and worked with Georgette on her French edition of Vallejo's poetry), appeared in the Grove offices and told Seaver that Mme. Vallejo had asked him to check the translation. Apparently he wrote her that it was publishable, because a week or so later, she wrote Seaver that she would sign a contract if Grove would include the following clause: when and if she found a better translation, Grove would have to destroy mine and publish the other. Seaver told me he'd had it with her.
I wrote again to Maureen, telling her that unless a signed contract were sent to Grove within a month, the whole project would be off. Maureen continued to plead with Georgette, who finally said that if Johnny would type up the contract she wanted, she would sign it. He did, she signed it, and a few weeks later Seaver called to tell me that while it was not their contract, Grove found it acceptable and their lawyer had determined it was legal. He wrote Mme. Vallejo, enclosing her part of the advance. Subsequently, Maureen wrote that Georgette called to complain that she had never intended to sign a legal contract; she considered the contract Johnny had typed up "only a gesture" that she accepted so that Maureen would not be "upset." Grove went ahead anyway, and Human Poems was published in the spring of 1968.
I ended my introduction to the Grove edition of Human Poems with the words "My work is done." I must have forgotten that I had begun several drafts of a translation of Vallejo's sheaf of poems on the Spanish Civil War, Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, with Octavio Corvalan, a professor in the Spanish Department at Indiana University, when I was living in Bloomington in 1965. By starting this new translation project and leaving it unfinished, I had unconsciously prolonged my relationship with Vallejo.
In 1970 I took a job at the new California Institute of the Arts outside Los Angeles, and my present wife, Caryl, and I moved to the San Fernando Valley. There I returned to Espana, made a new draft, and once again found myself looking for someone to check it with. I was introduced to Jose Rubia Barcia, a Spanish poet and essayist in exile since the Spanish Civil War, who had been teaching at UCLA for years. While going over the draft with Barcia, I was so impressed with his honesty, scrupulousness, and literary intelligence that I suggested we work together as co-translators.
Grove Press published our completed translation of Spain, Take This Cup from Me in 1974. While Jose and I were working on these poems, I showed him the 1968 translation of Human Poems, which he carefully went over, penciling in the margins around two thousand queries and suggestions for changes. He felt that what I had accomplished was meaningful but that we could do a better job working together. We worked from roughly 1972 to 1977. The University of California Press brought out Cesar Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry in 1978, including what had previously been called Human Poems along with Spain, Take This Cup from Me.
Over the years, initially stimulated by Vallejo, I had developed an affinity for a poetry that went for the whole, a poetry that attempted to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world. I saw Vallejo, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Aime Cesaire, and Vladimir Holan as examples of these poetics. All inducted and ordered materials from the subconscious as well as from those untoward regions of human experience that defy rational explanation. Instead of conducting the orchestra of the living, they were conducting the orchestra's pit.
In 1988 I arranged with Paragon House in New York City to bring out a selec tion of my translations and co-translations of these poets, to be called Conductors of the Pit. While making the Vallejo selection, I got involved, once again, in revising previous versions, this time the ones that I had done with Jose. Some of these changes today strike me as less effective than the Eshleman/Barcia translations they were based on, and I have again, and now clearly for the last time, revised this work. But I do understand my dilemma: given the contextual density of Vallejo's European poetry, there are often multiple denotative word choices, and no matter how closely I have tried to adhere to what I thought Vallejo had written, I have found, over the years, that my own imagination has played tricks on me. At the same time, I have often had to invent words and phrases in an attempt to match Vallejo's originality, and these back-and-forth movements, between adherence to standard Spanish and the matching of the coined and arcane, have occasionally become confused. And in continuing to read Vallejo scholarship over the years, from time to time I have picked up an interpretation of a particular word that has made me rethink my own translation of it.
Up until the late 198os, all my translational attention to Vallejo had been confined to the European poetry, written between 1923 and 1938. However, I had been circling around his second book, Trilce (1922), for many years, realizing in the 196os and '70s that since it was a much more difficult book to translate than Poemas humanos, I should leave it alone. In 1988 I decided that if I could work with a Peruvian, a translation of Trilce could be attempted. I teamed up with Julio Ortega (one of the few Peruvian writers in Lima in the 196os who did not think I was a spy!), and we decided to do it together. We worked out a first draft of the book in the fall of 1989. Caryl and I moved to Boston for a month, and every morning I took a bus into Providence and climbed the hill to Julio's office at Brown University, where we would work for several hours. Once back in Michigan, I went over our work and realized that I often had questions about several words in a single line. While Julio would occasionally respond to my queries, it was clear by the end of 1990 that he had decided I should finish Trilce on my own. And by then I needed his, or someone's help, even more than I did in the beginning. There are still many words in this book that have gone uncommented on in Vallejo scholarship (or have been wildly guessed at), and while critics can generalize and address Vallejo in terms of themes and preoccupations, a translator must go at him word by word, revealing all his choices in English without being able to dodge a single one. This process is especially tricky in the case of Trilce, with its intentionally misspelled words (often revealing secondary puns), neologisms, and arcane and archaic words.
At this point I contacted Americo Ferrari, who had inspected my manuscript at Grove Press in the late z96os and who was now teaching translation at a university in Geneva. Ferrari had brought out an edition of Vallejo's Obra poetica completa in 1988, and I figured he knew more about Vallejo's poetry than anyone. He agreed to respond to my questions; I would write in English and he in Spanish. Ferrari was willing to go to the library and research words he thought he was familiar with but that my questions led him to doubt. We had a wonderful exchange, and about two years later, after translating up to thirty versions of the most complex poems, I had something that I thought was publishable. Marsilio Publishers brought out a bilingual edition of Trilce, with an introduction by Ferrari, in 1992. When it went out of print, Wesleyan University Press brought out a second edition, with around one hundred word changes, in 2000.
Once more I felt that my involvement with Vallejo had come to an end. The only poetry of his that I had not translated was Los heraldos negros (i9i8), his first book, which had always struck me as more conventional by far than TrUce or the European poetry. Much of it is rhymed verse, which presents, in translation, its own problems: a sonnet is a little engine of sound and sense, and if you rhyme it in translation, you inevitably have to change some or much of its meaning. If you translate it for meaning alone, there is a chance you will end up with atonal free verse.
But as Michael Corleone says midway through Godfather III, "just when you think you're out, they pull you back in!" In 2003 I began to realize that all the years I had spent on this body of work had brought me very close to a "Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo," and that it would be appropriate to review all my previous translations and add to them a version of Los heraldos negros. Once I began to work on The Black Heralds, I found the poems in it more interesting than I had originally thought, and since they were relatively easy to render, I took some pleasure in what could be thought of as strolling on a level playing field rather than climbing a vertical wall. When I could rhyme certain words in a sonnet and not change the meaning, I did so, and I constantly made myself aware of sound possibilities, attempting to make the translations sound as rich in English as I could without distorting Vallejo's intentions. Efrain Kristal, a Latin American scholar at UCLA who has recently edited a Spanish edition of Los heraldos negros, went over my third draft and made some very useful suggestions. Jose Cerna-Bazan, a Vallejo scholar from northern Peru now at Carleton College in Minnesota, has inspected my Trilce version word for word and proposed around a hundred changes, many of which I have accepted. Assuming that Vallejo is not writing poems in his Montparnasse tomb, I now should be able to stick to my statement that my work is done.
With an overview in mind, it is worth noting that Vallejo's poetic development is quite unusual. Coming from the conventional, if well-written and passionate, rhymed verse in Los heraldos negros, the reader is completely unprepared for Trilce, which is still the most dense, abstract, and transgression-driven collection of poetry in the Spanish language. For Vallejo to have gone beyond Trilce, in the experimental sense, would have involved his own version of the made-up language that one finds at the end of Huidobro's Altazor. On one level, then, Vallejo took a step back from Trilce in his European poetry, but not as far back as the writing of Los heraldos negros. In moving from Lima to Paris, the poet hit the aesthetic honey head of the European colonial world just as it was being rocked by political revolution in Russia. Given the non-sequitur shifts in Trilce's composition, it is possible to imagine Vallejo forming some sort of relationship with French Surrealism (the first Manifesto having appeared a year after he arrived). However, Vallejo had nothing but contempt for Surrealism, which he seems to have regarded pretty much as Artaud did: as an amusing parlor-game, more concerned with pleasure and freedom than with suffering and moral struggle.
Vallejo's development in his post-Peruvian poetry involves taking on an ontological abyss, which might be briefly described as follows: Man is a sadness-exuding mammal, self-contradictory, perpetually immature, equally deserving of hatred, affection, and indifference, whose anger breaks any wholeness into warring fragments. This anger's only redeeming quality is that it is, paradoxically, a weapon of the poor, nearly always impotent against the military resources of the rich. Man is in flight from himself: what once was an expulsion from paradise has become a flight from self, as the worlds of colonial culture and colonized oppressiveness intersect. At the core of life's fullness is death, the "never" we fail to penetrate, "always" and "never" being the infinite extensions of "yes" and "no." Sorrow is the defining tone of human existence. Poetry thus becomes the imaginative expression of the inability to resolve the contradictions of man as an animal, divorced from nature as well as from any sustaining faith and caught up in the trivia of socialized life.
I have thought more about poetry while translating Vallejo than while reading anyone else. Influence through translation is different from influence through reading the masters in one's own tongue. I am creating an American version out of a Spanish text, and if Vallejo is to enter my own poetry, he must do so through what I have already, as a translator, turned him into. This is, in the long run, very close to being influenced by myself, or better, by a self I have created to mine. In this way, I do not feel that my poetry reflects Vallejo's. He taught me that ambivalence and contradiction are facets of metaphoric probing, and he gave me permission to try anything in my quest for an authentic alternative world in poetry.
Human Poems redefines the "political" poem. With one or two exceptions, the poems in this collection have no political position or agenda in the traditional sense. Yet they are directly sympathetic, in a way that does not remind us of other poetries, with the human situation I have briefly described above. In fact, they are so permeated by Vallejo's own suffering as it is wedded to that of other people, that it is as if the dualisms of colonial and colonized, rich and poor, become fused at a level where the human animal, aware of his fate, is embraced in all his absurd fallibility. Whitman's adhesive bond with others comes to mind, but Whitman used his "democratic vista" to express an idealism that is foreign to the world Vallejo saw around him while growing up in Peru and to the even darker world he encountered as a poor man in Paris, where his already marginal existence imploded before the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
I think the key lesson Vallejo holds today may be that of a poet learning how to become imprisoned, as it were, in global life as a whole, and in each moment in particular. All his poetry, including the blistering Eros that opens up a breach in the wall separating mother and lover in Trilce, urges the poet to confront his own destiny and to stew in what is happening to him-and also to believe that his bewildering situation is significant. To be bound to, or imprisoned in, the present, includes confronting not only life as it really is but also psyche as it really is notweighing all affirmation against, in an American's case, our imperial obsessions and our own intrinsic dark.
YPSILANTI, MARCH-AUGUST 2005
Screw yourself, Vallejo, your fate is to screw yourself.!
FERNANDO IBANFZ
1892 On March 16, Cesar Abraham Vallejo is born at 96 Calle Colon (now Calle Cesar Vallejo) in Santiago de Chuco, a small Andean town in northern Peru, in the Libertad district, the eleventh child of Francisco de Paula Vallejo Benites (1840-1924) and Maria de los Santos Mendoza Gurrionero (1850-1918). Although the date is based on Andre Coyne's original supposition,' it appears reasonable, despite the recent claim that Vallejo was born on March 7, 1892.2 He is baptized at the local church in Santiago de Chuco on May 19.3
1900-1905 Vallejo attends primary school in Santiago de Chuco. As the shulca, or youngest, of the family, Vallejo is a cosseted child; when returning home from school, his mother sucks his toes to warm him up .4
1905-1908 Vallejo attends secondary school at the Colegio Nacional de San Nicolas in Huamachuco, a small town in the Libertad region. He is given the nickname machetdn because his nose looks like a machete.5 Vallejo creates a scandal in the village by disturbing the peace during a funeral wake, for which he is severely reprimanded.'
1910 On April 2, Vallejo enrolls in the Faculty of Humanities at La Libertad University in Trujillo but does not complete the year. He works for a while in the mines of Quiruvilca, an experience he will later use as a basis for his proletarian novel, El Tungsteno.7
1911 On April ii, Vallejo enrolls in the Faculty of Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, but he is unable to continue his studies for financial reasons. From May to December he is employed as a private tutor for the children of the wealthy mine owner Domingo Sotil. He stays on the Acobamba estate, where he meets Americo Espana, the Italian anarchist who may have kindled the revolutionary flame that would burn brightly in years to come .8
His first poem, "Soneto," dated November iii, is published in the newspaper El
Minero Ilustrado (Cerro de Pasco), no. 782 (6 December igii).9 Rather similar in tone and imagery to the section "Nostalgias imperiales" in Los heraldos negros, this sonnet contains early evidence of Vallejo's verbal ingenuity; line 7 concludes with the neologism soledumbre.
1912 Vallejo works as an assistant cashier on the sugar plantation Roma, near Trujillo, owned by the Larco Herreras, one of the two big families (the other being the Gildemeisters) who had come to monopolize the sugar industry in Peru after the War of the Pacific. The sight of hundreds of peons arriving at the sugar estate at the crack of dawn and working until nightfall in the fields, with only a fistful of rice to live on, made a lasting impression on Vallejo.
1913 In March, Vallejo reenrolls in the Faculty of Humanities at La Libertad University in Trujillo. He supports himself with a teaching job at the Centro Escolar de Varones in Trujillo.
1914 Vallejo enrolls for his second year at La Libertad and continues his job at the Centro Escolar.
1914-1916 Vallejo begins to publish poems in local newspapers, which he would subsequently use as drafts for Los heraldos negros.10
1915 Vallejo enrolls for his third year at La Libertad and also takes courses in law. He subsequently gets a post as teacher at the Colegio Nacional de San Juan and, while there, teaches Ciro Alegria, who would one day publish the novel El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941). Alegria later said that he felt there was something profoundly "torn" in Vallejo's being: "From his whole being there flowed a deep sadness."11