by Unknown
Poetry in South America is a different matter altogether. You see there are in our countries rivers which have no names, trees which nobody knows, and birds which nobody has described. It is easier for us to be surrealistic because everything we know is new. Our duty, then, as we understand it, is to express what is unheard of. Everything has been painted in Europe, everything has been sung in Europe. But not in America. In that sense, Whitman was a great teacher. Because what is Whitman? He was not only intensely conscious, but he was open-eyed! He had tremendous eyes to see everything—he taught us to see things. He was our poet.
Whitman has clearly had much more influence on the Spanish poets than on the North American poets. Why didn’t the North American poets understand him? Was it because of the influence of England?
Perhaps, perhaps the intellectualist influence of England. Also many of the American poets just following Eliot thought that Whitman was too rustic, too primitive. But he is not so simple—Whitman—he’s a complicated man and the best of him is when he is most complicated. He had eyes open to the world and he taught us about poetry and many other things. We have loved him very much. Eliot never had much influence with us. He’s too intellectual perhaps, we are too primitive. And then everyone has to choose a road—a refined and intellectual way, or a more brotherly, general way, trying to embrace the world around you, to discover the new world.
In his essays, Eliot directed attention toward tradition. But the suggestion you made seems to be that really South America has no tradition—America has no tradition—and admitting this lack of tradition has opened up things.
That is an interesting thing. We do have to mention that in some South American poets you can see the trace of very old ways of thought and expression, Indian ways of thought in Vallejo, for instance. César Vallejo has something that comes from very deep in his country, Peru, which is an Indian country. He is a wonderful poet, as you know.
As for a literary tradition, what tradition could we have? The Spanish poetry of the 19th century was a very poor poetry—rhetorical and false—postromantic in the worst way. They never did have a good romantic poet. They had no Shelley, no Goethe. Nothing of the sort. No, no. Rhetorical and empty.
Your poetry presents a vision of affection between people, an affection between man and animals, compassion for plants and snakes, and a certain give and take between man and his unconscious. Most modern poets present a very different vision. How do you feel about that?
Well, I make a distinction between kinds of poetry. I am not a theoretician, but I do see as one kind of poetry the poetry which is written in closed rooms. I’ll give as an example Mallarmé, a very great French poet. I have sometimes seen photographs of his room; they were full of little beautiful objects—“abanicos”—fans. He used to write beautiful poems on fans. But his rooms were stuffy, all full of curtains, no air. He is a great poet of closed rooms and it seems that many of the New World poets follow this tradition: they don’t open the windows and you not only have to open the window but come through the windows and live with rivers and animals and beasts. I would say to young poets of my country and of Latin America—perhaps this is our tradition—to discover things, to be in the sea, to be in the mountains, and approach every living thing. And how can you not love such an approach to life, that has such extravagant surprises?
I live by a very rough sea in Isla Negra—my house is there—and I am never tired of being alone looking at the sea and working there. It is a perpetual discovery for me. I don’t know, maybe I am a foolish 19th century nature lover like your great writer Thoreau, and other contemplative writers. I am not contemplative, but I think that is a great part of a poet’s life.
You have fought many political battles, fighting seriously and steadily like a bear, and yet you have not ended up obsessed with political matters like Tolstoy, or embittered. Your poetry seems to become more and more human, and affectionate. Now how do you explain that?
You see, I come from a country which is very political. Those who fight have great support from the masses. Practically all the writers of Chile are out to the left—there are almost no exceptions. We feel supported and understood by our own people. That gives us great security and the numbers of people who support us are very great. You see the elections in Chile are won by one side or the other by few votes only. As poets we are really in touch with the people, which is very rare. I read my poems everywhere in my country—every village, every town—for years and years, and I feel it is my duty to do it. It is a tiresome thing, but partly from that has come my attachment to politics. I have seen so much the misery of my country. The poverty I see—I cannot get away from that.
Only in recent years have the people in the United States begun to realize what South American literature is. They still know very little about it.
I think the problem here is a matter of translation. We need to have more North American writers translated into Spanish and South American poetry and literature translated into English. The delegation of the P.E.N. Club of Chile have shown me a list of books they have drawn up. The list contains one hundred basic works in South American literature which could be read by all the North American people. They intend to look for support for this project and plan to present it as a motion during the P.E.N. Congress. That is a good idea. I don’t know if the P.E.N. Club can support it, but someone should support the project. The whole problem of translation is a great and serious one. Imagine—that Vallejo’s work has never been published in the United States! Only the twenty poems published by your Sixties Press.
I know you have come to believe that among the many enemies mankind has are gods. I think you said you first felt this in Rangoon. But don’t the gods come from the unconscious of men, just as poems do? In what sense then are they enemies?
In the beginning gods help like poems. Man makes gods who help men. But afterward men overpower gods and then bankruptcy.
I have a good question for you. Do you think you have ever lived before?
I don’t know … I don’t think—I will try to inquire!
Tolstoy said a new consciousness was developing in humanity, like a new organ, and that the governments had set themselves to stop the growth of this new consciousness. Do you think this is true?
In general, you see, governments have never understood anywhere in the world the spirit of writers and poets. That is the general thing which we are going to cure. How? Producing and writing. You poets are doing a wonderful thing in the United States which I have seen from your lectures in public and all that. You are awakening a new thing since you are defending this spirit you are talking about.
César Vallejo, after struggling through or plunging into a long period of surrealism (The Trilce Poems), came out into a very human simplicity in Poemas Humanos. You also passed through a long period of surrealist poetry in Residencia en la Tierra and then came out into the simplicity of Odas Elementales. Isn’t it strange you have both followed the same path?
I love Vallejo. I always admired him, we were brothers. Nevertheless, we were very different. Race especially. He was Peruvian. He was a very Peruvian man and to me Peruvian man is something interesting. We came from different worlds. I have never thought about what you tell me. I like very much the way you approach us—that you bring us near each other in our work worlds. I never thought of it. I like it.
What was Vallejo like when you were in a room with him? Was he excitable, or calm and broody?
Vallejo was usually very serious, very solemn, you see, with great dignity. He had a very high forehead and he was small in stature, and he kept himself very much aloof. But among friends—I don’t know if he was this way with others but he was with us—I have seen him jumping with happiness, jumping. So I knew at least these two sides of him.
People often talk of the “Indian element” which they see in much Latin American poetry and fiction. What is this “Indian element” exactly?
In Vallejo it shows itself as a subtle way of tho
ught, a way of expression that is not direct, but oblique. I don’t have it. I am a Castilian poet. In Chile we defend the Indians and almost all South Americans have some Indian blood, I do too. But I don’t think my work is in any way Indian.
In Residencia your poems dug deeper and deeper into despair, like a man digging into black earth. Then you turned away in another direction, and your poetry moved more and more toward a simplicity. Did this come about partly because the Spanish Civil War made it absolutely clear how much the people needed help?
You say that very well—it is true. You see, when I wrote Residencia One and Two I was living in India. I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three years old. I was isolated from the Indian people, whom I didn’t know, and also from the English people whom I didn’t understand, nor did they understand me, and I was in a very lonely situation. I was in an exciting country which I couldn’t penetrate, which I couldn’t understand well. They were lonely days and years for me. In 1934 I was transferred as consul to Madrid. The Civil War did help me and inspire me to live more near the people, to understand more and to be more natural. For the first time I felt that I belonged to a community.
Have your opinions of Rilke and the “Poetas Celestes” (Divine Poets) changed at all since the poem you wrote attacking them?
Yes, I must say I have been mistaken many times in my life. I was dogmatic and foolish. But the trend of my ideas is as it was. Only in my exaggeration I was mistaken, because he is a great poet, just as Kafka is a great writer. Excuse me, but the contradictions—one sees them only when life rolls on, one sees one has been mistaken.
Many people feel that the quality of literary work being done now shows a decline from the work being done thirty years ago? Do you think so?
No, no. I think the creativity is strong. I see so many new forms in poetry now in the young poets I have never seen before. There is no more fear of experience. Before there was a great fear of breaking the mold and now there is no more of this fear. It is wonderful.
How come you don’t have that fear of experience?
It took me a lot of time to have no fear. When I was a young poet I was full of fear like a real rat in a corner. When I was a very young poet I was afraid to break all the laws which were enforced on us by the critics. But now there is no more of this. All the young poets come in and say what they like and do what they like.
In one of your essays you described something that happened to you as a boy which you thought has had a great influence on your poetry. There was a fence in your backyard. Through a hole in it one day a small hand passed through to you a gift—a toy lamb. And you went into the house and came back and handed back through the hole the thing you loved most—a pinecone.
Yes, that boy passed me a lamb, a woolen lamb. It was beautiful.
You said that somehow this helped you to understand that if you give something to humanity you’ll get something else back even more beautiful.
Your memory is wonderful, and this is exactly right. I learned much from that in my childhood. This exchange of gifts—mysterious—settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit.
The interview took place
June 12, 1966, in New York.
Selected Poems of
CÉSAR VALLEJO
WHAT IF AFTER SO MANY WINGS OF BIRDS
César Vallejo is not a poet of the partially authentic feeling, as most poets in the English tradition are, but a poet of the absolutely authentic. He does not hide part of his life, and describe only the more “poetic” parts. He lived a difficult life, full of fight, and in describing it never panders to a love of pleasantries nor a love of vulgarity. He had a tremendous feeling for, and love of, his family—his father, his mother, and his brothers—which he expresses with simple images of great resonance. There is a tenderness, as in Chaucer. His wildness and savagery exist side by side with it. The wildness and savagery rest on a clear compassion for others, and a clear intuition into his own inward directions. He sees roads inside himself. In the remarkable intensity with which he follows a thought or an image, there is a kind of heroism. Like a great fish, he follows the poem wherever it goes in the sea.
II
César Vallejo was born March 15, 1892, in a small mining town in Northern Peru. His family had Indian blood on both sides. The poem called “To My Brother Miguel” describes the mood of the house—a Catholic house, with devotions and prayers. About the family, James Wright has written:
His home town was small and provincial, with an ancient and living tradition of large, affectionate families who were of necessity mobilized, as it were, against the physical and spiritual onslaughts of death in its ancient and modern forms: disease, undernourishment, and cold on the one hand ; the officials of the tungsten mines on the other … he is always returning to poems about his family, poems which in their intensity and daring are more beautiful than any other poems on the subject that I have seen.
He went off at eighteen to the university in Trujillo. After studying and working on and off for several years, he graduated there when he was twenty-three. He was already at work on a book. He supported himself after graduation teaching in primary schools. He worked on his book another three years, and it was published in Lima in 1919. He called it Los Heraldos Negros, suggesting horsemen, maybe riding black horses, who come with messages, messages from death. It is a staggering book, sensual, prophetic, affectionate, wild. It has a kind of compassion for God, and compassion for death, who has so many problems, and it moves with incredible leaps of imagination. I think it is the greatest single collection of poems I have ever read.
The next year he went home for a visit, and got involved, without intending to, in a provincial political feud. His politics were known, and his imprisonment may have been revenge for those. His sentence was three months in a jail in Trujillo. There he wrote some of the poems for his second book, Trilce. Trilce is difficult, even for people who read poetry a great deal. The poems are like flashes of light in a room already light. The associative thinking in them takes place with incredible speed, and most are oblique, surrealist, interior, like willows, “almost air.” Their surrealist airiness is at the opposite pole from Neruda’s dense Residencia poems, which are borne down by his entangled, intestinal, jungle surrealism. The Trilce poems are so difficult that very few of them have been translated into English.
The year after it was published, Vallejo lost his teaching job in Lima, and decided to go to Paris as a stringer for a Trujillo newspaper. After all, the surrealists lived in Paris. Once there he was poor right away, and despite occasional translating and newspaper jobs, his poverty returned on and off for the rest of his life. There were many South American intellectuals in Paris, and in any case the French tended to regard all South Americans as second class citizens. The poverty he experienced was not a playful bohemian poverty, but something permanent, a state that he could not get out of. He felt close to others at the bottom of the ladder, and he has a number of compassionate poems written to and for French whores that he knew. His “Poem To Be Read and Sung” appears to be one of them. He remained in Europe for fifteen years and never returned to America. Somewhere I read that he developed elaborate theories on how you could step off a subway car without wearing out the soles of your shoes; how to cross your legs so as not to wear out your trouser knees. He read much French poetry, and met Artaud and others. When the Depression came, he thought as much about the problem of poverty as about the problem of poetry, and evidently more about other people’s poverty than his own. He took the Communist movement seriously, and was a committed Marxist. In 1928 he went on a visit to Russia, and the next year interviewed Mayakovsky in Moscow. In 1930 the French deported him and his French wife, Georgette.
They went to Spain and so Vallejo experienced Spain in the early Thirties, when Lorca and his generation were writing their fantastically rich surrealist poems. In Spain Vallejo wrote a novel, a book of essays, and two plays. None of his reporting or essays or plays from this p
eriod have been translated.
In 1932 he returned to Paris, and except for short visits to Spain, lived in Paris with Georgette until his death six years later. Franco’s invasion of the Spanish Republic in 1936 affected his life profoundly. During these years Vallejo worked constantly for the Republic, gathering money and support, writing. A small book of his poems about the Civil War, called España, aparte de mí esta Cáliz (Spain, Take This Cup from Me), written shortly before he died, was printed in Spain, as Miguel Hernández’ poems were, by the Republican soldiers themselves.
His third large collection of poems, following Los Heraldos Negros and Trilce, is the volume called Poemas Humanos. It is not clear when the poems making up Poemas Humanos were written. During his last year, he spent some months preparing the collection for publication; he rewrote many, and possibly wrote a number of new ones. If a poem we have translated here has a date following it, the date is that of the final draft of the poem, and was marked on the manuscript by Vallejo himself sometime in September, October, November, or December 1937. Whether the undated ones were written at that time, or years before, and if written years before, were considered unsalvageable, or already finished, no one seems to know. At the start of the Poemas Humanos group I have put some prose poems which apparently belong to an unfinished book called Codigo Civil, but which are always published with Poemas Humanos poems, though written during his earliest years in Paris.