1892–1938
Cesar Vallejo
Source: Poetry Foundationhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/caesar-vallejo
Peruvian expatriate César Vallejo was a major poet, known for the
authenticity and originality of his work. Deeply rooted in his mixed European
and Peruvian Indian heritage, his poetry expressed universal themes related to
the human condition. Sometimes called a surrealist poet, “Vallejo created a
wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its
imagery and the nature of its rhythms. No facile trend setter, Vallejo forged a
new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human
suffering,” Edith Grossman writes in Los Angeles Times Book Review. “A
constant feature of his poetry is a compassionate awareness of and a
guilt-ridden sense of responsibility for the suffering of others,” observes
James Higgins in The Poet in Peru: Alienation and the Quest for a
Super-Reality. His compassion was informed by his own painful experience as
an inmate in a Trujillo prison, as an expatriate political activist, and as a
witness of the devastating Spanish Civil War. He also endured poverty and a
chronic illness of which he died in 1938. Grossman relates, “He saw the world in
piercing flashes of outrage and anguish, terror and pity. . . . A passionate,
tragic poet, he mourned our loss of moral innocence and despaired of the
injustice that moves the world.”
Vallejo was born in Santiago de Chuco,
a small village in the northern Andes mountains. Raised Catholic and encouraged
to become a priest, he discovered that he could not adhere to the requirement of
celibacy. His family relationships remained secure and close. For a time, he was
a clerk in his father’s notary office. His mother’s friendship, in particular,
was a sustaining force in his life until her death in 1923 (some sources say
1918). The comfort of his rural life set for Vallejo a standard against which
all later experiences seemed arduous and painful.
Early poems in his
first collection Los heraldos negros (“The Black Messengers”)
relate Vallejo’s bewilderment when struck with the harshness of city life in
Trujillo and Lima, where he studied medicine, literature, and law. Introduced to
the ideas of Marx, Darwin, and Rationalist philosophers, Vallejo felt that the
faith in which he was raised was no longer viable. Together with other
intellectuals, he became actively interested in his pre-Columbian heritage and
was anguished to learn of the suffering of aboriginals in his country. When the
parents of his lover broke off their relationship for reasons he did not
understand, he attempted suicide. Higgins summarizes that Vallejo’s “arrival in
Lima therefore, marks his initiation into a seemingly absurd and senseless world
whose meaning escapes him.” Unable to replace the caring family he had lost,
Vallejo felt alienated in the city. Alienation and the apparent senselessness of
his suffering became his recurrent themes.
Poems in Los heraldos
negros, like most Latin American poetry of that time, follow the
conventions of the modernista movement. The modernistas, D. P.
Gallagher explains in Modern Latin American Literature, highlighted the
melodic quality of language; breaking a taboo, Vallejo added erotic lyrics to
the descriptions of beautiful landscape common to this style.
Modernista poets Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrara y Reissig
influenced the young Vallejo significantly. “They were both masters of the
violently surprising image, and their poetry is free of the jaded air of
fatigued mimicry that many modernista poems had come to display,”
Gallagher comments. By the end of Los heraldos negros in the “Canciones
de hogar” (“Songs of Home”) section, Vallejo had given voice to concerns which
would remain his major themes: he lamented his status as an orphan unprepared
for the brutality of life in a world where God himself seemed powerless to
intervene. In addition, the urgency of personal statement and original idiom in
these poems show that Vallejo had outgrown his dependence on traditional
literary models. Thus he presented a mature original voice having more social
relevance and literary importance than his modernista mentors,
Gallagher adds.
After a number of years in Trujillo and Lima, in 1920
Vallejo returned to his birthplace where he became involved in a political
insurrection during which the town’s general store burned down. He was accused
of instigating the conflict and was jailed for three months. Added to the death
of his mother, the isolation and savagery of jail conditions affected him
deeply. “The subject of a number of poems, that experience reinforced his belief
in the world’s arbitrary cruelty and his sense of inadequacy in the face of it,”
Higgins writes in A History of Peruvian Literature. Accordingly, poems
written in prison (collected in Trilce) are markedly different from the
idyllic poems of Los heraldos negros.
Trilce is more
difficult, more intense, and more original than Vallejo’s first volume. Pared of
all ornamental language, these poems convey the poet’s personal urgency as he
cries out against the apparent meaninglessness of his suffering. Trilce
introduces the wrenched syntax that allows Vallejo to get beyond the constraints
of received linguistic conventions to a language that is true to his experience.
Writing in A History of Peruvian Literature, Higgins catalogues the
elements of Vallejo’s diction: “Vallejo confounds the reader’s expectations by
his daring exploitation of the line pause, which often leaves articles,
conjunctions and even particles of words dangling at the end of a line, by his
frequent resort to harsh sounds to break the rhythm, by employing alliterations
so awkward as to be tongue-twisters. He distorts syntactic structures, changes
the grammatical function of words, plays with spelling. His poetic vocabulary is
frequently unfamiliar and ‘unliterary,’ he creates new words of his own, he
often conflates two words into one, he tampers with cliches to give them new
meaning, he plays on the multiple meaning of words and on the similarity of
sound between words. He repeatedly makes use of oxymoron and paradox and, above
all, catachresis, defamiliarising objects by attributing to them qualities not
normally associated with them.”
Vallejo’s wrenched syntax is not a mere
literary performance; it is the means necessary “to discover the man that has
been hitherto hidden behind its decorative facades. The discovery is not a
pleasant one, and the noise in the poems make it consequently aggressive and not
beautiful,” Gallagher observes. Out of Vallejo’s self-discovery comes an
“unprecedented, raw language” that declares Vallejo’s humanness despite his
confinement to make a statement “about the human problems of which Vallejo is a
microcosm,” Gallagher adds. New York Review of Books contributor
Michael Wood explains, “With Vallejo it is an instrument—the only possible
instrument, it seems—for the confrontation of complexity, of the self caught up
in the world and the world mirrored in the self. It is an answer, let us say, to
the simultaneous need for a poetry that would put heart into an agonizing Spain
and for a poetry that will not take wishes for truths.” Gallagher suggests that
Vallejo was “perhaps the first Latin American writer to have realized that it is
precisely in the discovery of a language where literature must find itself in a
continent where for centuries the written word was notorious more for what it
concealed than for what it revealed, where ‘beautiful’ writing, sheer sonorous
wordiness was a mere holding operation against the fact that you did not dare
really say anything at all.”
The facade separating Vallejo from the
truth about himself—and all men—was one of many boundaries he strove to break
through by means of writing. This is most evident in Trilce where the
poet recognizes his imprisonment as a symbol of the human struggle against all
limitations. For example, for Vallejo, the Spanish Civil War points to the
existence of man’s greater struggle, a predetermined conflict between an
individual and his desires for transcendence, as he phrased it in Poemas
humanos. “More than a political event,” states Gallagher, to Vallejo the
war was yet another facet of entropy, “that dismemberment of unity which we have
seen him observing even in his own body.”
Vallejo saw that beyond the
obvious constraints of government, society, and culture, man is incarcerated by
time, space, and his biological limitations. Repeatedly the later poems complain
of “the frustration of the poet’s spiritual aspirations by the limitations of
the flesh,” relates Higgins in The Poet in Peru. The poet’s hope of
freedom seems to be precluded by an inescapable biological determinism, Jean
Franco notes in César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence.
“While his spirit holds up to him a vision of a higher life, his experience of
hunger and illness brings home to him the extent to which his existence is lived
on an elemental level, through that frail, decaying body of his which constantly
demands satisfaction of its appetites and repeatedly breaks down under the
effects of illness and age,” Higgins elaborates. He adds, “Much more serious,
the poet-doctor insinuates, is the malaise brought on by reasoning which, by
destroying illusions and laying bare the vanity of things, insidiously
undermines his spiritual health. Since man is unable to find any meaning to
life, he has no real existence and lives only through the anguished sense of
futility which is slowly destroying him and which has become contagious in an
age when all human values seem to have failed.” Though it becomes more subtle in
later books, the theme of man versus his limits continues throughout Vallejo’s
work.
In 1923, Vallejo moved to Europe. Until 1930, when he was expelled
from France for his unorthodox politics, he lived in Paris, where he wrote
articles about the need to get beyond the superficiality of much contemporary
poetry. Literary posturing sustained by simple mimicry of the style currently in
vogue may disguise a poet’s lack of talent but will not render a vital
contribution to life or art, he maintained in Literatura y arte. The
harshness of his standards is perhaps forgivable in that he applied them
relentlessly to his own work, Gallagher comments. By achieving authenticity in
innovative language, Vallejo influenced many younger poets to embrace
nontraditional techniques.
In the 1920s and 1930s Vallejo became more
engaged in politics. His three visits to the Soviet Union—the first in
1928—aided the formulation of his political views, and he subsequently produced
political tracts including Rusia en 1931 and Reflexiones al pie del
Kremlin, first published in Spain and not printed in Peru until almost
thirty years later. He also wrote the novel El tungsteno
(“Tungsten”), which condemns an American company for exploiting its
Peruvian workers to get the element it needed to make weapons. Political
statements emerge in his other works as well, but they do not dominate. Vallejo
was an ambivalent Marxist. Gallagher reports, “Vallejo regards Communism, in
Poemas humanos and ‘Espana, aparta de mi este caliz,’ as . . .
just the vague sighting of a way out from a world that nevertheless remains as
hermetically frontier-bound as that of Trilce.” Higgins finds evidence
in Poemas humanos that Vallejo sometimes admired the single-mindedness
of those who could submit themselves to “the cause,” but again found it
impossible to subject himself without question to Marxist or communist ideals.
He moved to Spain during its war years to work as a journalist and lend support
to his friends in defense of the Spanish Republic. At the same time, Vallejo
admired the brotherhood achieved among the activists who gave their lives to
serve what they believed was the improvement of life for the poor.
After
he died in 1938, his widow Georgette de Vallejo selected poems for publication
in Poemas humanos. Gallagher maintains that the style of this volume is
best described as “eccentric,” in two senses of the word. Poemas
humanos was written in a highly personal idiom. Vallejo expressed the
suffering of people in general, for instance, in the terms of his own specific
experience in a violently contorted language. Secondly, Vallejo’s word choice
was often “ex-centric” or off center to parallel the ambiguous nature of
contemporary experience. In Vallejo’s poems, things and events do not function
as symbols; they signify no apparent cause, no meaning behind the objects and
events of daily life. At the same time the poems are haunted by the dread that
meaning does exist, but humanity cannot grasp it. If man’s “a priori” contest is
“beyond reckoning,” as Vallejo wrote in Poemas humanos, it must also
lay somewhat beyond words. Vallejo’s unique diction is a natural extension of
his personal crisis.
Though he won little critical acclaim before his
death, Vallejo came “to be recognized as an artist of world stature, the
greatest poet not only of Peru but of all Spanish America,” Higgins sums up in
The History of Peruvian Literature. Gallagher concludes, “There is no
poet in Latin America like Vallejo, . . . who has bequeathed so consistently
personal an idiom, and no poet so strictly rigorous with himself. It is a
curiously subtle, menacing world that he has left us in his mature works.”
Vallejo will be remembered for discovering a unique poetic language that
expresses what he perceived as the frustration inherent in the human condition
and the chaos of the world. Franco comments that for Vallejo, using that
language was a vital exercise of freedom: “Vallejo knew that with every
automatic word and gesture man contributes to his own damnation and
imprisonment. His great achievement as a poet is to have interrupted that
easy-flowing current of words which is both a solace and the mark of our
despair, to have made each poem an act of consciousness which involves the
recognition of difficulty and pain.” Vallejo is seen as the progenitor of many
innovations in poetic technique. New York Times Book Review contributor
Alexander Coleman observes that Vallejo, “the standard for authenticity and
intensity” in Hispanic literature, opened the way for future poets by leaving to
them “a language swept clean, now bright and angular, ready for the man in the
street.”
Career
Poet and freelance writer. Worked in his father's notary office, in mine
offices, as a tutor, and in an estate accounts office; teacher, Centro Escolar
du Verones and Colegio Nacional de San Juan, 1913-17; lived in Lima, Peru,
1917-23; teacher, Colegio Barros, 1918-19, and another school, 1920; involved in
political riot, Santiago de Chuco, Peru, and imprisoned, 1920-21; teacher,
Colegio Guadalupe, 1921-23; lived in Europe after 1923; secretary, Iberoamerican
press agency, 1925. Worked as journalist and helped publish Nuestra
Espana in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-38.
Bibliography
POETRY
FICTION
- Los heraldos negros (title means "The Black Messengers"), includes "Canciones de hogar," [Lima], 1918, Peru Nuevo, 1959, published as Los heraldos negros, 1918, Losada (Buenos Aires), 1961, translation by Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf published as The Black Heralds, edited by Yvette E. Miller, introduction by Jean Franco, Latin American Literary Review Press, 1990.
- Trilce, Talleres Tipografia de la Penitenciaria (Lima), 1922, second edition with introduction by Jose Bergamin, Cia Iberoamericana de Publicaciones (Madrid), 1931, published with essays by Antenor Orrego and Bergamin, Fondo de Cultura Popular, 1962, translation by David Smith, Grossman (New York, NY), 1973, translated by Rebecca Seiferle, edited by Stanley Moss, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1992.
- Poemas humanos, Presses Modernes (Paris), 1939, Peru Nuevo, 1959, translation by Clayton Eshleman published as Poemas Humanos: Human Poems, Grove Press, 1969.
- Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, with introductory essay "Profecia de America" (title means "Prophecy of America"), Seneca (Mexico), 1940, translation by Alvaro Cardona-Hine published as Spain, Let This Cup Pass from Me, Red Hill, 1972, translation by Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia published as Spain, Take This Cup from Me, Grove Press, 1974.
- Antologia de Cesar Vallejo, compiled by Xavier Abril, Claridad, 1942.
- Antologia, compiled by Edmundo Cornejo U., Hora del Hombre, 1948.
- Poesias completas (1918-1938), compiled by Cesar Miro, Losada, 1949.
- Los mejores versos de Cesar Vallejo, [Buenos Aires], c. 1956.
- La vida, y quince poemas: antologia poetica, compiled by Jose Escobar and Eugenio Martinez Pastor, Baladre, 1958.
- Poemas, compiled with notes by Ramiro de Casabellas, Perrot (Buenos Aires), 1958.
- Poemas escogidos, compiled with prologue by Gustavo Valcarcel, Latinoamericana, 1958.
- Poemas humanos (1923-1938) [and] Espana, aparta de mi este caliz (1937-1938), Losada, 1961.
- Poesias completas, Volume 1: Los heraldos negros, Volume 2: Trilce, Volume 3: Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, Volume 4: Poemas humanos, Peru Nuevo, 1961.
- Cesar Vallejo: Sus mejores obras, (includes Los heraldos negros, Trilce, and Rusia en 1931: Reflexiones al pie del Kremlin), Ediciones Peru, 1962.
- Twenty Poems (bilingual edition), selection and translations by Robert Bly, James Wright, and John Knoepfle, with essay by Wright, Sixties Press, 1962.
- Antologia poetica, with introduction by Valcarcel, Impresiones Nacional de Cuba, 1962.
- Los heraldos negros y Trilce, Ediciones Peru, 1962.
- Poesias completas, with prologue by Roberto Fernandez Retaman, Casa de las Americas (Havana), 1965.
- Antologia, edited with notes by Julio Ortega, Universitaria, 1966.
- Cesar Vallejo, edited by wife, Georgette de Vallejo, P. Seghers (Paris), 1967.
- Seven Poems, translation by Eshleman, R. Morris, 1967.
- Obra poetica completa, with manuscript facsimiles, edited by G. de Vallejo, (includes Los heraldos negros and Poemas humanos), F. Moncloa, 1968.
- Obras completas (three volumes), Mosca Azul (Lima), Volume 1: Contra el secreto profesional: A proposito de Pablo Abril de Vivero, 1968, Volume 2: El arte y la revolucion, 1968, Volume 3: Obra poetica completa, with revised biographical essay by G. de Vallejo, 1974.
- Cesar Vallejo: An Anthology of His Poetry, edited with an introduction and notes by James Higgins, Pergamon Press, 1970.
- Un hombre pasa, translation by Michael Smith, New Writers' Press, 1970.
- Ten Versions from Trilce, translations by Charles Tomlinson and Henry Gifford, San Marcos Press, 1970.
- Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, translation by Bly, Wright, and Knoepfle, edited by Bly, Beacon Press, 1971, edited and a new preface by Robert Bly, Beacon Press (Boston), 1993.
- Poesias completas de Cesar Vallejo, J. Pablos (Mexico), 1971.
- Selected Poems, edited by Gordon Brotherston and Ed Dorn, Penguin, 1976.
- Cesar Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, translation by Eshleman and Barcia, University of California Press, 1978.
- Perfil de Cesar Vallejo: Vida y obra antologia poetica, edited by Juan Larrea and others, Grafica San Andres, 1978.
- Poesia completa, Premia (Mexico), 1981.
- Canciones de hogar: Songs of Home, translation by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross, Ziesing Bros., 1981.
- Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo, translation by H. R. Hays, Sachem, 1981.
- Obra poetica completa: Cesar Vallejo, with introduction by Americo Ferrari, Alianza, 1982.
- Palms and Guitar, translation by J. C. R. Green, Aquila/Phaethon Press, 1982.
- Asi es la vida, tal como es la vida, edited with introduction by Juan Antonio Massone, Nascimento, 1982.
- Poemas humanos; Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, Laia (Barcelona), 1985.
- Selected Poetry, edited by Higgins, F. Cairns, 1987.
- Poemas en prosa; Poemas humanos, Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, Catedra, 1988.
- Poesia completa, Ediciones Consejo de Integracion Cultura Latinoamericana, 1988.
- Cesar Vallejo, a Selection of His Poetry, with translations, introduction, and notes by James Higgins, F. Cairns (Wolfeboro, NH), 1988.
- Cesar Vallejo en El Comercio, Edicion de El Comercio (Lima, Peru), 1992.
- Cesar Vallejo en Europa, 1926-1938, Ediciones Imago Mundi (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1992.
- De Cesar a Cesar: Poesia escogida, Ediciones del banco de los Andes (Quito, Ecuador), 1994.
FICTION
- Escalas melografiadas (short stories), Talleres Tipografia de la Penitenciaria (Lima), 1923.
- Fabla salvaje (novella), [Lima], 1923, Editorial Labor, 1965.
- El tungsteno: La novela proletaria, Editorial Cenit (Madrid), 1931, first Peruvian edition published as Tungsteno, Ediciones de Cuadernos Trimestrales de Poesia, 1958, translation by Robert Mezey with preface by Kevin O'Connor published as Tungsten: A Novel, Syracuse University Press, 1988.
- Novelas: Tungsteno, Fabla salvaje, Escalas melografiadas, Hora del Hombre, 1948.
- Tungsteno y Paco Yunque, J. Mejia Baca & P. L. Villanueva, 1957.
- Novelas y cuentos completos, F. Moncloa (Lima), 1967, 2nd edition, Moncloa-Campodonico, 1970.
- Paco Yunque, [Lima], 1969, first Honduran edition with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, Girandula (Honduras), 1981.
- Rusia en 1931: Reflexiones al pie del Kremlin, Ulises (Madrid), 1931, published in two volumes, Peru Nuevo, 1959.
- El romanticismo en la poesia castellana, Juan Mejia Baca & P. L. Villanueva, 1954.
- Articulos olvidados, compiled with prologue by Luis Alberto Sanchez, Asociacion Peruana por la Libertad de la Cultura, 1960.
- Rusia ante el segundo plan quinquenal, Grafica Labor, 1965.
- Literatura y arte, Ediciones del Mediodia (Buenos Aires), 1966.
- Desde Europa, edited by Jorge Puccinelli, Instituto Raul Porras Barranchea (Lima), 1969, Ediciones Fuente de Cultura Peruana, 1987.
- Cartas a Pablo Abril, Rodolfo Alonso (Buenos Aires), 1971.
- Battles in Spain, translation by Eshleman and Barcia, Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
- Teatro completo, two volumes, La Catolica, 1979.
- Epistolario general (letters), Pre-Textos, 1982.
- Autopsy on Surrealism, translation by Schaaf, edited by James Scully, Curbstone, 1982.
- The Mayakovsky Case ( "El caso Maiakovski," a critical essay), translation by Schaaf, edited by Scully, Curbstone, 1982.
- Cronicas (prose works; in several volumes), Volume 1, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Direccion General de Publications, 1984.
- La cultura Peruana: Cronicas (collected essays), selection by Aguirre, Mosca Azul, 1987.
- Desde Europa: Cronicas y Articulos, 1923-1938, Ediciones Fuente de Cultura Peruana (Lima, Peru), 1987.
- A lo major, soy otro: 27 neuvas cartas, Delgado Villanueva Editores (Lima, Peru), 1998.
Further Reading
BOOKS
- Adamson, Joseph, Wounded Fiction: Modern Poetry And Deconstruction, Garland (New York, NY), 1988.
- Niebylski, Dianna C., The Poem on the Edge of the Word: The Limits of Language and the Uses of Silence in the Poetry of Mallarme, Rilke, and Vallejo, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1993.
- Clayton, Michelle, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, University of California Press (Berkley, CA), 2011.
- Amaru, number 13, October, 1970.
- Americas, November-December, 1968, pp. 46-48, 48-49.
- Aula Vallejo, number 1, 1961; number 2/4, 1963; number 5/7, 1967; number 8/10, 1971; number 11/13, 1974.
- Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Volume 43, number 1, 1966, pp. 47-55.
- Courier, June, 1988.
- Cuadernos Americanos, January, 1957.
- Fiction International, summer, 1986.
- Hispamerica, April 6, 1974.
- Hispania, September, 1987; March, 1989, pp. 42-48.
- Hispanic Review, Volume 50, number 3, 1982.
- Hudson Review, winter, 1979.
- Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Volume 17, number 3, 1970, pp. 247-58.
- Library Journal, June 15, 1992, p. 79; August, 1992, p. 106.
- Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 1, 1989.
- Nation, October 28, 1968.
- New Republic, July 12, 1993, p. 34.
- New York Review of Books, December 21, 1978.
- New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1969; June 8, 1969; February 26, 1989; May 7, 1972.
- Poetry, June, 1969; January, 1981.
- Publishers Weekly, May 4, 1992, p. 52; July 13, 1992, p. 51.
- Revista Hispanica Moderna, January-April, 1969, pp. 268-84.
- Revista Iberoamericana, April, 1970 (special Vallejo issue).
- Times Literary Supplement, September 25, 1969, p. 1098; August 5, 1977, p. 964; January 18, 1980; June 14, 1989.
- Tri-Quarterly, fall, 1968.
- Village Voice, March 21, 1989.
- Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1980.
- Vision del Peru, number 4, 1969.
- Western Humanities Review, winter, 1969.
- West Indian Review, July, 1939.
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