César Vallejotranslated from the Spanish by Clayton Eshleman
César Vallejo's first book, Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Heralds, 1918), marks the turn, in Hispanic poetry, from the symbolist aesthetic of Rubén Darío and the early Juan Ramón Jiménez, to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness which eventually stretched the Spanish language beyond its grammatical possibilities. The title of the collection pays homage to Darío's poem "Los heraldos" ("The Heralds") and to the darkness of Baudelaire whom Vallejo had read in the influential translation of Les fleurs du mal by Eduardo Marquina. In The Black Heralds a symbolist idiom is giving way to a new aesthetic whose intensity is palpable in the first line of the book, one of the most memorable in Latin American poetry:
"Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes . . . Yo no sé!""There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don't know!"
The full pathos of the line is not in the words that can be recited but in the silence of the ellipsis. One feels the breath knocked out of the poetic voice, or at least his inability to finish a sentence expressing the impotence of a suffering humanity. This is a world where love is miserable, and no God can save or console.
In The Black Heralds, Vallejo struggles vainly against a malaise resulting from his desires. In dark gestures of defiance he strikes against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith. This is a tragic vision--perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish language literature--in which salvation and sin are one and the same. Vallejo's railings against our fate are nuanced by alternating feelings of pity, isolation, and guilt: responses to the affliction his poetic voice might have witnessed or caused, for he is not innocent and does not feel blameless. That being said, in Vallejo's religious rhetoric the human soul is not awaiting Christ's salvation. On the contrary, and with an intended tone of blasphemy, a Christ "falls" each time the soul is battered by the blows of destiny.
Vallejo's poetic voice seeks but fails to find salvation in sexuality, and in his commiseration with the hungry or with the indigenous peoples of the Andes. In poetic lines that Samuel Beckett incorporated into Lucky's only speech in Waiting for Godot, Vallejo's God is hateful or indifferent when distant, and as impotent as any human when he empathizes. Anticipating Kafka, Vallejo's poetic voice insists, "I was born on a day/ when God was sick." With the emphatic repetition of this line at the end of the book, the image of the omnipotent deity has been exorcized from Vallejo's poetic imagery. In Trilce (1922), his next book of poems, there is no divinity to argue against, and the tragic vision subsides, but the malaise that informed his theocide intensifies, pushing language beyond grammar and lexicon into compelling dissonances and asymmetries already perceptible in his first collection. In The Black Heralds Vallejo's poetic voice is all alone, but in his longing for attachment, and nostalgia for family bonds that have been lost, one can also detect intimations of the collective angst and compassion that will epitomize his posthumous Poemas humanos (Human Poems). The language of religion will return towards the end of his life, but in a different key, in his final collection of poems. In España, aparta de mi este cáliz (Spain, Take This Cup from Me, 1937), as a Christ-like figure, the atheist poet expresses his anguish and solidarity for the Republicans in the heat of the Spanish Civil War.
The Peruvian poet is immediately accessible on an emotional register, even when his lines become impossible to paraphrase which--as Clayton Eshleman has demonstrated--is not the same thing as impossible to translate. Eshleman renders Vallejo's paradoxes with ease, and his linguistic unconventionalities with instinctual acumen. His translation of "Espergesia" as "Epexegesis" captures the power of this impossible word which some interpreters have considered to be a neologism and others an elusive archaism. The fourteen poems below are a selection from a new translation of The Black Heralds which will be included in Eshleman's forthcoming The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2006), the result of four decades of work, and a crowning achievement in the life of a poet.
--Efrain Kristal
The Black Heralds
There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don't know! Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them, the undertow of everything suffered welled up in the soul . . . I don't know! They are few; but they are . . . They open dark trenches in the fiercest face and in the strongest back. Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas; or the black heralds sent to us by Death. They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul, of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny. Those bloodstained blows are the crackling of bread burning up at the oven door. And man . . . Poor . . . poor! He turns his eyes, as when a slap on the shoulder summons us; turns his crazed eyes, and everything lived wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his look. There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don't know!
Pilgrimage
We walk together. Sleep gently laps our feet; and everything is displaced by wan harsh renunciations. We walk together. Dead souls, who, like us, crossed for love, appear in stiff shrouds with sick opal footsteps and undulate within us. Beloved, we go to the fragile edge of a mound of earth. A wing passes anointed in oil and in purity. But a blow falling I know not where sharpens each tear into a hostile tooth. And a soldier, a great soldier, wounds for epaulets, cheered by the heroic evening, displays at his feet, laughing, like a hideous rag, the brain of Life. We walk together, closer together, undefeated Light, sick footstep; together we pass the mustard yellow lilacs of a graveyard.
Efrain Kristal teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Clayton Eshleman's most recent collection of translations is Conductors of the Pit, versions of Rimbaud, Neruda, Vallejo, and Artaud, among others (Soft Skull Press). University of California Press will publish his Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, in the fall of 2006.
