[Pre-modern Peru included regions now located in Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile. That Andean world was a rich find for Europeans who enslaved indigenous people to the tasks of rugged and poisonous mining. The central city of the Chimu kingdom had been the city of Chan-Chan, whose ruins are located near Trujillo, where Vallejo attended university and later was briefly imprisoned.]

[The quote reads “I was born on a day God was sick".]

[Rubén Dario (January 18, 1867 -- February 6, 1916) was a Nicaraguan poet and journalist and champion of the Modernist Movement in Spanish poetry. Neruda and Vallejo recognized him as a key influence on their early work. Dario remains especially beloved among readers of Spanish poetry.]

[The Black Heralds (1919) and Trilce (1922) are the only collections of poetry published during Vallejo’s lifetime. All the rest has been gathered posthumously, with the help of Georgette Vallejo, the poet’s widow.]

[It is unlikely that Vallejo was acquainted with the writings of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), but the Peruvian’s work bears some striking resemblance to this master of anxiety and absurdity.]

[Vallejo was devoted to his mother, a figure of protection and care in several of his poems. Her death in 1918 was a severe blow. His mother’s features display the poet’s Chimu heritage.]

We associate Peru with images of colorful clothing, strikingly odd hats, brilliant mountain ranges, and llamas. A complete picture would include salt mining (pictured here) and poisonous work in the silver and nitrate mines. Vallejo grew up in the midst of all of this. Yet his poems, unlike those of Neruda, only rarely mention any of this and hardly depict nature at all. Despite his origins, Vallejo was an urban writer with little nostalgia for a lost paradise.

[Young Vallejo traveled in a crowd of writers and intellectuals in the city of Trujillo. A figure encouraging suspicion, Vallejo was imprisoned for 105 days, a shock that changed him forever. In the late 1920s in the struggle for the Spanish Republic, Vallejo became a Communist, traveled to Moscow, and wrote a primer on the emergence of the Soviet state.]

[Augusto B. Leguia, was President of Peru from 1919-1930. He brought order to a chaotic political scene, declaring a revolution and re-writing the nation’s constitution. He then ruled as a dictator, disregarding the liberal constitution he had authored. The ruling interests did well in those years, and Peru to this day continues to struggle over the proper distribution of its natural wealth.

[Lima, Peru, where Vallejo lived for a time, was a modern city where middle class people preferred modern European costumes and streetcars over colorful shawls and llamas.]

[The Paseo Pizarro in Trujillo, Peru" a crowded Street in the picturesque city where Vallejo, a country-boy, first experienced the city.]

César Vallejo was born in the remote mountain village of Santiago de Chuco in 1892. He was the youngest of twelve children. He received a degree in Literature in 1915 from the University of Trujillo. In 1921, he was imprisoned, and wrote his masterpiece, Trilce (1922) while incarcerated. Soon after his release, Vallejo left Peru never to return. He died in Paris in 1938.

Before Peru was a nation with territorial boundaries, it was a Spanish dream of wealth and plunder.

The Andean region, with its picturesque mountains, people, and creatures was a maze of mines (silver, salt, guano, nitrates) and a few gleaming cities. At one time in Europe, something splendid was called “the real Peru." By the time César Vallejo was born in 1892 that golden age was gone, along with Simon Bolivar’s quest for independence (1808-1830). What remained was squalor, political terror, and the violence of mines draining the life from its people.

César Vallejo would seem unlikely to become a notable innovator in the history of Spanish poetry and later a member of the Paris art scene. His grandfathers were Catholic priests, his grandmothers, Chimu “indians". The youngest of twelve children, César was raised in a strict Catholic family. Vallejo was culturally adrift, a child of Europe in education, Chimu in appearance, and Peruvian. A talented student, he was constantly leaving school for lack of funds. He studied Literature and European philosophy, but also medicine. Brilliant and broke, Vallejo worked briefly as an accountant at the mines, a witness to the harshness of miners’ lives and the cruelty of the owners’ peonage system. Tutoring the pampered children of the wealthy was humiliating. Vallejo fell in love in the wrong places, with the daugters of families who could see only his Chimu features. When his beloved Otilia’s pregnancy became evident, she was whisked off to safety by her family.

In 1921 life turned full against him. His mother had died, as had several of his dearest siblings. His poetry was hooted off the stage in a local theater. And then, he was arrested as a political terrorist and tossed into prison, without formal charge or sentence. In that grim setting, Vallejo translated the alienated and deranged voice of modernity into Spanish. Vallejo’s masterpiece, Trilce (1922), is one of those eruptions of new style and sensibility that go unnoticed and then change everything. Vallejo fled Peru forever in 1923, and found his way to Madrid and Paris where he joined such luminaries as Lorca, Dali, Buñuel, Neruda, and Picasso. His caricature -- that sad fellow, chin propped on palm -- has become an image of pain of the mid-1930’s, the defeat of culture and dignity in the Spanish Civil War.

Vallejo has been compared with Charlie Chaplin this famous pose of existential gloom
To understand what is special about Vallejo’s work, it may help to start with a poem by Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, himself an innovator and inspiration for Neruda and Vallejo.

Buey que vi en mi niñez echando vaho un dia
bajo el nicaragiense sol de encendidos oros,
en la hacienda fecunda, plena de la armonia
del trópico; paloma de los bosques sonoros
del viento, de las hachas, de pajaros y toros
salvajes, yo os saludo, pues sois la vida mia.

Pesado buey, tú evocas la dulce madrugada
que llamaba a la ordeña de la vaca lechera
cuando era mi existencia toda blanca y rosada;
y tú, paloma arrulladora y montañera,
significas en mi primavera pasada
todo lo que hay en la divina Primavera.


Ox of my childhood, steaming in
the burning gold of Nicaragua’s sun,
on rich plantation fields of tropical
harmony; dove of woods, with sounds
of the breeze, of axes, of birds, and wild
bulls, I salute you both, you are my life.

Great ox, you evoke the sweet morn
hat calls the cows for milking,
when all my life was white and rose;
and you, cooing mountain dove,
mark in the springtime of my past
all that is of the divine Springtime.

[All translations by Stephen Zelnick]

Here’s what most poetry readers expect -- rhyme, easy hexameters, and poetic words. Organized by contrasting weighty ox and mercurial dove, “Far Away" is a masterpiece of compression and craft. The song notes the loss of our “white and rose" life to a sour world of experience and assures us that childhood’s blessings are preserved in memory and heaven’s prospect. Memory and hope enhance what seems lost, an old theme, gracefully realized. Vallejo’s “Black Heralds" is otherwise:

Hay golpes en la vida tan fuertes . . . ¡Yo no se!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos;
la resaca de todo lo sufrido se empozara en el alma


Son pocos; pero son . . . abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro mas fiero y en el lomo mas fuerte
Seran talvez los potros de barbaros atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte

Son las caidas hondas de los Cristos del alma,
de alguna adorable que el Destino Blasfema,
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema

Y el hombre....pobre...¡pobre!
Vuelve los ojos,
como cuando por sobre el hombro
nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos,
y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa,
en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes . . . ¡Yo no se!


There are blows in life so fierce … I don’t know!
Blows as if from God’s hatred; and even before;
rom suffering’s undertow imposed on the soul
I don’t know!

They are rare, but real … carving dark trenches,
frightful in our faces and deep in our loins,
sort of like the torture racks of barbarous Atillas
or the black heralds Death sends us.

They are the sheer Christ cliffs of the soul,
the adorable one whom destiny blasphemes,
These bloody blows, sizzling bits of bread
tuck burning to the oven’s door.

And man! … that poor fellow!
turns to look
as when a touch on the shoulder
gets our attention;
he turns his crazy eyes,
and sees it all
vividly, a pool of condemnation,
in one single glance.

These fierce blows in life … I don’t know!

“Black Heralds" is a harrowing poem. The images are photographically specific and erupt without structural permission -- that bit of bread left smoking on the oven’s door; or the casual tap on the shoulder to remind us of our guilt. It lacks rhyme, and has no cohering reason. Most shocking, the poem frustrates our wish for consolation. It is supposed to sum up neatly, like those honored sonnets, with a sestet’s worth of problem and an octet’s of solution. Vallejo’s “I don’t know" is a blank, urban gesture, an off- hand shrug. This is a speech from a Beckett play -- irregular, built on erupting thoughts and grim reflections. Vallejo’s urban immediacy rejects sonorous poetry for its urgent voice.

“The Grown-ups" is autobiographical, naming Vallejo’s lost siblings and depicting his mother’s death as abandonment. The poem resembles a Kafka monologue, where the speaker knows the truth but chatters on to evade his fears. The line “obedient, and without a choice" sums up the absurdity. Instead of lyric lament, Vallejo gives us neurotic narrative, dark warnings peeking out from behind the child’s sweet imaginings: lollipop ships eclipsed by the horror image of passers-by doubled over in pain and “twanging" their terror along the darkened streets. The odd word “gangueando" haunts us.

Las personas mayores

a qué hora volveran?
Da las seis el ciego Santiago,
y ya esta muy oscuro.

Madre dijo que no demoraria.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel,
cuidado con ir por ahi, por donde
acaban de pasar gangueando sus memorias
dobladoras penas,
hacia el silencioso corral, y por donde
las gallinas que se estan acostando todavia,
se han espantado tanto.
Mejor estemos aqui no mas.
Madre dijo que no demoraria.

Ya no tengamos pena. Vamos viendo
los barcos ¡el mio es mas bonito de todos!
con los cuales jugamos todo el santo dia
sin pelearnos, como debe de ser:
han quedado en el pozo de agua, listos,
fletados de dulces para mañana.

Aguardemos asi, obedientes y sin mas
remedio, la vuelta, el desagravio
de los mayores siempre delanteros
dejandonos en casa a los pequeños,
como si también nosotros
no pudiésemos partir.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel?
Llamo, busco al tanteo en la oscuridad.
No me vayan a haber dejado solo,
y el único recluso sea yo.



The grown-ups

When will they come back?
Blind Santiago, the church bell, already
tolls six and it’s very dark.

Mother said she would not be late.


Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel,
take care where you go, along where
people pass twanging their memories
doubled over in pain,
towards the silent coops, where
the hens, still settling down,
have been rudely startled.
Better we left, but
mother said she would not be long.

Still, we shouldn’t worry. We’re going to
launch the boats -- And mine the prettiest!
with which we play all the blessed day,
without quarreling, just as it should be:
they have sat still in the pond, ready,
to transport candy for tomorrow.

We await the grown-ups’ return, obedient
and without a choice, their
apology always settling all,
leaving us little ones at home
as if we also
could not leave.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel?
I call, groping about in the dark.
They wouldn’t have left me here alone,
for then the only prisoner would be me.

(Trilce, III)

“The suit I wore tomorrow" continues this drama of maternal abandonment and of hope fragmented in pain. Time disorganizes, mother becomes lover becomes god, everyday acts and objects acquire existential significance, and sentiment dislodges from context. In place of a poem shaped into consequent meaning, we have a deranged dream, where Vallejo’s beloved Otilia Villanueva merges with the caring mother before acquiring the force of a protective god, clung to with dwindling faith.

The logic of time breaks down from the opening lines, as do the identities in this Freudian dream. The laundress is a sustaining source of life itself, washing his clothes pure with her blood; but she is also his beloved Otilia and Christ, who alone washes away injustices with His blood. And all this is figured, as in a mad dream out of Oliver Sacks, as a suit of clothes, a public display that hides and exposes our psychic drama.

The second stanza is clotted with the close specifics of tailoring, the speaker’s wandering consciousness unable to resist distraction. In place of the anxiety faced directly, we have the technical detail of finishing work applied to a linen handkerchief. My translation, simplifies terms like “falsillas encañona" (with the idea of “false or deceptive detail added from underneath") and “emplumar" (literally “to feather"), terms a tailor would grasp readily. This distraction cannot, however, stave off the plaint of misery “qué sera" de mi (what will become of me), the fear that the caretaker has abandoned him, a terror he cannot suppressed.

The “laundress of my soul" is the source of care and abundance, the “wheat-brown goodness" of grain and the “brown-berry" fruitfulness he hopes will feed his life. The poem concludes in shrill self-assurance, not only that she is capable of “ironing out all the chaoses" but that she is ever near and ready to tend his needs. The wish, however, is bound by qualification -- if she comes, he is sure she can accomplish utterly impossible things, tasks that would challenge the gods, let alone a mother armed only with iron and bleach.

For Vallejo, our inner life is devilled by uncertainty and tests our faith. We are tossed into life without cause or purpose and tormented by drives and emotions that overwhelm our efforts at rational ordering. At the heart of this cruel joke is the sexual act and the inability of men to make sense of it. Like death, any way we choose to look at it leaves us baffled. In “Vusco Volvvver" language dissolves, enacting the absurdity of mind chasing nature and stumbling about in the effort to voice the unthinkable.

Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe.
I vant to rreturn blow for blow.
Sus dos hojas anchas, su volvula
Her two wide-folded leaves, her
vavulva que se abre en suculenta recepción
that opens up in succulent reception
de multiplicando a multiplicador,
from multiplied to multiplier,
su condición excelente para el placer,
her condition excellent for pleasure,
todo ava verdad.
all fully prepared.


Busco volvver de golpe el golpe.
I wann to rreturn blow for blow.
A su halago, enveto bolivarianas fragosidades
At her caress, to tempt bolivarian risks

a treintidós cables y sus múltiples,
at thirty-two tow-lines and their multiples,
se arrequintan pelo por pelo
arranged thread by thread about
soberanos belfos, los dos tomos de la Obra,
superb lips, two tomes of the collected Works,
y no vivo entonces ausencia,
and live, then, neither absent to thought
ni al tacto. nor to touch.

Fallo bolver de golpe el golpe.
Phallung to tretun blow for blow.
No ensillaremos jamas el toroso Vaveo
we never mount the bullish Drooel
de egoismo y de aquel ludir mortal
of egoism and that mortal chafe
de sabana,
of the bed-sheet,
desque la mujer esta
from what woman is …
¡cuanto pesa de general!
goodness, how much she weighs!

Y hembra es el alma de la ausente.
And female is the soul of absence.
Y hembra es el alma mia.
And female is my soul.

(Trilce, IX)

This phantasmagoria of explosive puns recalls James Joyce. The bent word unleashes possibilities hidden in the supposed reality to which language sentences us. In the opening two lines, we have three words that do not exist -- “vusco", “volvvver", and “volvula". While Spanish is meticulous with vowel sounds, its consonants vary. The b/ v distinction lands somewhere between. So “busco" becomes “vusco", a joke played throughout the poem. “Volver" means to return, or “turn again", so “volvvver" becomes a visual pun. “Volvula collapses “valve" and “vulva," an example of the poem’s strategy of confusing intimate bodily structures with machine parts. Later “Fallo" (I fail) implicates “falo" (phallus) in a stanza imaging the adventures of that slavering bullish apparatus in the “mortal chafe of the bed-sheet -- sabana (sheet) is also the savannah where “toro" is more at home and at ease.

The poem employs the language of engineering and mathematics, of mechanisms and machines, yet the terms are salacious and confusing -- does that say what I think it says? We are accustomed to clinical and clowning mentions of vaginas, but imagine the shock in a reticent Spanish community, church- ridden and unfamiliar with our smutty frankness. Vallejo had been a medical student, and his poems reflect his technical account of the body, but this poem goes further. Here the mind stumbles in figuring the force of the sexual body and the body’s shocking reality. This struggle culminates in the speaker’s surprise at the weight of the female body. This is not a comment about hefty women but about the dislocation of the pornographic imagination, where bodies become parts and sex becomes idealized and weightless, from the luxuriant fact of the female body.

Vallejo’s arrest and imprisonment shocked him. Although he later became an active Communist, in 1921 he was not political. He enjoyed the intellectual-artist crowd of the towns, but his bohemian appearance made him a subject of suspicion among the mine-owners, who targeted the long-haired fellow with dark features as an outside agitator. When a department store in Trujillo burned down, Vallejo was arrested. His imprisonment in a dank prison, among criminals and madmen, without trial or sentence terrified him. The world seemed accidental and deadly and himself frail and powerless. “The Four Walls†tells his story of despair.

Oh las cuatro paredes de la celda.
Oh the four walls of the cell.
Ah las cuatro paredes albicantes
Ah the four whitened walls
que sin remedio dan al mismo número.
that remorselessly number the same.

Criadero de nervios, mala brecha,
Nursery of nerves, evil arrangement,
por sus cuatro rincones cómo arranca
along its four corners as it rips
las diarias aherrojadas extremidades.
at my daily fettered limbs.

Amorosa llavera de innumerables llaves,
Loving jaileress of the countless keys,
si estuvieras aqui, si vieras hasta
if only you were here, here to watch
qué hora son cuatro estas paredes.
hour after hour these four walls.
Contra ellas seraamos contigo, los dos,
We would both oppose them,
mas dos que nunca. Y ni lloraras,
more than ever. And would you not shed tears,
di, libertadora!
Speak, my liberator!

Ah las paredes de la celda.
Ah, the walls of the cell.
De ellas me duele entretanto, mas
They bring me constant pain, even more
las dos largas que tienen esta noche
the two long walls that tonight seem
algo de madres que ya muertas
ghostly mothers who lead
a un niño de la mano cada una.
a child by each hand,
llevan por bromurados declives,
along bromidic cliffs.


Y solo yo me voy quedando,
And only I am left behind
con la diestra, que hace por ambas manos,
with my right hand, that does for both hands,
en alto, en busca de terciario brazo
raised aloft, in search of that third arm that has
que ha de pupilar, entre mi dónde y mi cuando,
tutored me, between my where and when,

esta mayoria invalida de hombre.
into this crippled manhood

(Trilce, XVIII)

These themes are familiar -- abandonment, the appeal to a rescuing mother, the sense of impending madness, loneliness, and the claim of being reduced to a “crippled manhood". Several other poems in Trilce and after, dramatize this helplessness, and recall Kafka’s theme of interrogation that was becoming more than a literary trope as the century devolved into its grim politics. “Payroll of Bones" dramatizes a moment of terror under interrogation by power not answerable to any standard of reason:

Nómina de huesos
Payroll of bones

Se pedia a grandes voces:
They demanded, shouting in mighty voices:
--Que muestre las dos manos a la vez.
--Let him show both hands at the same time.
Y esto no fue posible.
And this was not possible.
--Que, mientras llora, le tomen
--While he weeps, let them take
la medida de sus pasos.
the measure of his paces.
Y esto no fue posible.
And this was not possible.
--Que piense un pensamiento idéntico,
--Let him think an identical thought
en el tiempo en
at the same time in which
que un cero permanece inútil.
a zero remains useless.
Y esto no fue posible.
And this was not possible.
--Que haga una locura.
--Let him do something crazy.
Y esto no fue posible.
And this was not possible.
--Que entre él y otro hombre semejante
--Let a crowd of men resembling him,
a él, se Interponga una muchedumbre
come between him and another
de hombres como él.
man just like him.
Y esto no fue posible.
And this was not possible.
--Que le comparen consigo mismo.
--Let them compare him with himself.
Y esto no fue posible.
And this was not possible.
--Que le llamen, en fin, por su nombre.
--Let them call him, at last, by his name.
Y esto no fue posible,
And this was not possible.

[Many of Vallejo’s poems were unpublished and lack dates]

Among Vallejo’s associates in his Trujillo days were founders of the opposition who would, years later, replace Leguia’s regime.]

This Kafkaesque inquisition reduces the accused to a nameless, irrational thing, before the mighty voices of power that respect no standard of sanity or compassion. In “Y no me digan nada" (Don’t Say anything to me), the effort of the accused to fight back disintegrates into ludicrous comic gestures.


Y no me digan nada
Don’t Say Anything to Me

Y no me digan nada,
And don’t say anything to me,
que uno puede matar perfectamente,
since one can kill perfectly,
ya que, sudando tinta,
since, sweating printer’s ink,
uno hace cuanto puede, no me digan …
one can do much, don’t say anything to me …

Volveremos, señores, a vernos con manzanas,
We will meet again, good sirs, with apples
tarde la criatura pasara,
the creature will pass by late,
la expresión de Aristoteles armada
the expression of Aristotle armed,
de grandes corazones de madera,
with great hearts of wood, the expression
la de Heraclito injerta en la de Marx,
of Heraclitus joined to that of Marx,
la del suave sonando rudamente …
that of the smooth one sounding rude …
Es lo que bien narraba mi garganta:
That’s what my throat was telling so well:
uno puede matar perfectamente. one can kill perfectly.

Señores,
Good sirs,

Caballeros, volveremos a vernos sin paquetes;
Gentlemen, we’ll meet again without packages
hasta entonces exijo, exigiré de mi flaqueza
until then I insist, I’ll demand of my weakness
el acento del dia, que,
in the accent of the day, since,
según veo, estuvo ya esperandome en mi lecho.
as I see it, it was awaiting me already in my bed.
Y exijo del sombrero la infausta analogia,
I insist of my hat -- an unfortunate analogy,
del recuerdo of memory --
ya que, a veces, asumo con éxito,
still, at times, I assume with success,
mi inmensidad lloranda
my immensity of weeping
ya que, a veces, me ahogo en la voz de mi vecino
still, at times, my voice drowns in my neighbor’s
y padezco
and I suffer
contando en maices los años,
counting the years in kernels of corn,
cepillando mi ropa al son de un muerto
brushing my clothes to a dead man’s song
o sentado borracho en mi ataúd …
or sitting up drunk in my coffin …

The accused opens with threats, warning his tormentors of violence, in an impersonal gangster voice (“one can kill perfectly"). But his oration disintegrates into a clownish, baggy-pants harangue -- invoking the great philosophers, a back-pedaling defense of his rhetoric, and finally the admission of his powerlessness. Faced with the force of law, of police, and of the state, the citizen has no choice but be obedient or appear ridiculous, even to himself.

Vallejo’s complaint extends beyond social justice. Our culture fails to reconcile drives and passions, with tragic results. But there is a deeper ill, the failure of religious faith to stand against our humiliations and suffering. For Vallejo this “pain without end" results from “being born this way, without cause." This gentle poem of failed love runs off the rails and ends in existential despair.


Se acabó el extraño, con quien, tarde
It’s over with that stranger, with whom,
la noche, regresabas parla y parla.
late at night, you returned, jabbering.
Ya no habra quien me aguarde,
Now there won’t be someone waiting
dispuesto mi lugar, bueno lo malo.
to take my place … whatever.

Se acabó la calurosa tarde;
Finished the warm afternoons;
tu gran bahia y tu clamor; la charla
your grand bay, all the commotion -- the
con tu madre acabada
chatter with your all-too-perfect mother
que nos brindaba un té lleno de tarde.
who brought us tea full of afternoon.

Se acabó todo al fin: las vacaciones,
All came to an end; the vacations,
tu obediencia de pechos, tu manera
your obedient breasts, your way of
de pedirme que no me vaya fuera.
begging me not to rush off.

y se acabó el diminutivo, para
Done with all the little things; for me the
mi mayoria en el dolor sin fin,
great things bring pain without end,
Y nuestro haber nacido asi sin causa.
our having been born so, without cause. (Trilce, XXXIV)

In this tidy sonnet, a form unusual for Vallejo, perspective shifts confusingly. What ought to be a triumph, the rival discarded, invites instead an unpleasant reflection in which the victor realizes the emptiness of his prize. The courtship is a barren charade of pleasantries, of polite tea “full of afternoon." Even the sexual allure is obedient to recipe as is the little drama of her pleading. Instead, his victory brings cosmic disgust.

This theme of the fierce gravity of social convention, of lost souls condemned to mechanical ritual, receives Vallejo’s comic treatment in “Height and Hair":

Altura y pelos Height and Hair

Quién no tiene su vestido azul?
Who doesn’t have his corporate blue suit?
Quién no almuerza y no toma el tranvia,
Who doesn’t breakfast and take the train


Con su cigarrillo contratado y su dolor de bosillo?
With his assigned cigarette and his pocket
y su dolor de bosillo?
full of pain?
¡Yo que tan sólo he nacido!
I who was born so alone!
¡Yo que tan sólo he nacido!
I who was born so alone!

Quién no escribe una carta?
Who doesn’t write a postcard?
Quién no habla de un asunto muy importante,
Who doesn’t talk of “a very important matter",
muriendo de costumbre y llorando de oido?
dying by formula and crying by ear?
¡Yo que solamente he nacido!
I who only was born!
¡Yo que solamente he nacido!
I who only was born!


Quién no se llama Carlos o cualquier otra cosa?
Who is not named Carlos, or some damn thing?
Quién al gato no dice gato gato?
Who on seeing a cat does not say “kitty, kitty"?
Ay! yo que tan sólo he nacido solamente!
Aie! I who only was born so alone!
Ay! yo que tan sólo he nacido solamente!
Aie! I who only was born so alone!


Vallejo’s is a familiar romantic complaint, the alert and sensitive soul, appalled at the mechanical responses of the conventional world. His mockery, however, is enjoyable, as in “Who is not named Carlos, or some damn thing/ Who on seeing a cat does not say “kitty, kitty?" This is a 19th C. theme (Wordsworth, Melville, Dostoyevsky, et. al.), the lonely artist/philosopher stranded among wax figures incapable of discovering their souls. But Vallejo finds a way to treat this in a crisp little comedy.

The spirit has been tricked into empty imitation; far worse, “Hope cries amidst cotton" offers a chill image of the struggle for faith in a world of accident, injustice, and pain:

Esperanza plañe entre algodones
Hope cries amidst cottons

Aristas roncas uniformadas
A persistent hoarse rasp of
de amenazas tejidas de esporas magnificas
menacing tissue from splendid spores y con porteros botones innatos.
with built-in porters and messengers.
¿Se luden seis de sol? Do they scratch at six in the morning?
Natividad. Callate, miedo.
So it is born. Be silent, and fear.

Cristiano espero, espero siempre
Like a Christian I wait, I wait always
de hinojos en la piedra circular que este
on bended knee here on this circular rock
en las cien esquinas de esta suerte
in the hundred corners of luck
tan vaga a donde asomo.
so vague wherever I show up.

Y Dios sobresaltado nos oprime
And God, shocked, suddenly bears down
el pulso, grave, mudo,
upon the pulse, heavy, mute,
y como padre a su pequeña,
and like a father to his little daughter,
apenas,
barely,
pero apenas, entreabre los sangrientos algodones
just barely, opens up the bloody cotton
y entre sus dedos toma a la esperanza.
And from between his fingers plucks hope.
Señor, lo quiero yo ...
Lord, I want this …
Y basta!
That’s all!

This is a scene Vallejo, the medical student, likely witnessed in hospitals in Peru crammed with victims of tuberculosis, the dread disease that took his brothers and sister. Mentions of Christianity are rare in his poetry, but here the speaker prays on bended knee, placed on the earth, “this circular rock", for no cause and where luck always fails. He imagines God the Father plucking hope from the bloody cotton and comforting his little daughter. The prayer is terse but certain.

Vallejo writes occasionally about being a poet. In one of his interrogation poems, he threatens his tormentors with printers’ ink, his writing a weapon against madness. “Que me da" reflects the uncertainty of his powers and his confusion, wielding his craft with only limited control, in a state of ongoing absurdity, in a middle state in which he is only partially alive and awake and in the world.

Qué me da?
What Gives?

Qué me da, que me azoto con la linea
What’s got into me, that I whip myself with the line
Y creo que me sigue, al trote, el punto?
and believe the period trots along stalking me?

Qué me da, que me he puesto
What’s got into me, that I have placed
en los hombros un huevo en vez de un manto?
an egg on my shoulders instead of a cloak?

Qué me ha dado, que vivo?
What’s gotten into me, that I’m living?
Qué me ha dado, que muero?
What’s gotten into me that I’m dying?

Qué me da, que tengo ojos?
What’s got into me, that I have eyes?
Qué me da, que tengo alma?
What’s got into me, that I have soul?

Qué me da, que se acaba en mi mi prójimo
What’s got into me, that my neighbor ends up in me
y empieza en mi carrillo el rol del viento?
and the role of the wind begins in my cheek?

Qué me ha dado, que cuento mis dos lagrimas,
What’s gotten into me, that I consider my two tears
sollozo tierra y cuelgo el horizonte?
to be the sobbing earth and the hanging horizon?

Qué me ha dado, que lloro de no poder llorar
What’s gotten into me, that I cry at being unable to cry
y rÃÁo de lo poco que he reÃÁdo?
and laugh at how little I’ve laughed?

¿Qué me da, que ni vivo ni muero?
What’s got into me, that I am neither alive nor dead?

In his early and best known work, Cesar Vallejo is a morose clown, mixing his dreadful certainties of darkness with the casual chatter of everyday. His art is compact and tense, in language impatient with fancy dress. This is no languid tea-party filled with afternoon. He does not hide his distress in romantic notions of nature and lost gardens, of sonorous language and classical evocations. We are creatures ill- made who strive for order and consequence, and both the struggle and the failure take form out there in the brusque language of the streets and in the swarm of gestures of thought that stage the interior drama of our fractured being.

In the Paris years that follow, Vallejo turns to the European crisis, his promise of Communism, and the bloody struggle in Spain to construct a human future. But that is another story for another time.



Bibliography:

Brosens, Peter and Jessica Woodworth. Altiplano: Fragments of Grace. Bo Films, 2009. [This lovely film evokes the beauty and pain of the Andean “High Plains".]
Eshelman, Clayton and Jose Rubia Barcia. César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry. University of California Press, 1980.

[Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, this extraordinary collection rescues Vallejo’s unpublished works and puts them in good order. The translations are excellent and bold and reflect the hard work in reconstructing Vallejo’s difficult language and local usage.]

Gonzalez Vlaña, Eduardo. César Vallejo’s Season in Hell. Translation by Stephen M. Hart, et. al. Axiara Editions, 2015.

[A novel that reconstructs Vallejo’s experiences during his Peruvian years, and especially his imprisonment. Sources for these events are scant, but this powerful book is imaginative and convincing.]
...
Malanga, Gerard. Malanga Chasing Vallejo. Three Rooms Press. 2014.

[Malanga’s translations, like my own, attempt to make Vallejo more accessible, and sometimes sacrifice his complexity in order to offer an easier reading experience. Malanga’s work is intelligent and graceful.]
Smith, Michael and Valentine Gianuzzi. César Vallejo: The Complete Poems. Shearsman Books, 2012. [This is now the definitive collection and translation in English and includes not only the posthumous work but Vallejo’s published work also. The translations are precise and often creative. The book’s apparatus is particularly helpful.]



Pic [Santiago de Chuco, some 100 miles east of Trujillo, is the mountain village where César Vallejo was born and raised.]

Autumn 2015

All Rights Reserved--2007-2025