November 2006
VOL XIV, Issue 11, Number 164
Editor: Klaus J. Gerken
Production Editor: Heather Ferguson
European Editor: Mois Benarroch
Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Oswald Le Winter
Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Pedro Sena
ISSN 1480-6401
INTRDUCTION
Clayton Eshleman
A Translation Memoir
CONTENTS
Selected Poems from The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo
Translated by Clayton Eshleman and to be published in December 2006
by University of California Press
THE POEMS
OH BOTTLE WITHOUT WINE! OH WINE THE WIDOWER OF THIS BOTTLE! ...
I STAYED ON TO WARM UP THE INK IN WHICH I CROWN ...
THE BOOK OF NATURE
I HAVE A TERRIBLE FEAR OF BEING AN ANIMAL ...
GUITAR
A MAN IS LOOKING AT A WOMAN ...
TODAY A SPLINTER HAS GOTTEN INTO HER ...
LET THE MILLIONAIRE WALK NAKED, STARK NAKED! ...
SERMON ON DEATH
POST SCRIPTUM
Order information
Bibliography
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN: A TRANSLATION MEMOIR
For nearly forty-five years, I have been translating, off and on, the poetry
of César Vallejo. His writing has become the kelson in the ship of poetry I
have attempted to construct. Here I would like to offer an overview of this
translational companionship and to evoke some of the experiences that occurred
because of it. Finally, I would like to say what this companionship has meant
to me, as a poet and as a human being.
*
While I was a student at Indiana University in 1957, a painter friend, Bill
Paden, gave me a copy of the New Directions 1944 Latin American Poetry
anthology. I was particularly impressed with the poetry of Pablo Neruda and
César Vallejo. At the same time, I read Angel Flores' translation of Neruda's
Residencia en la tierra, and upon comparing his version with those of H.R. Hays
and Dudley Fitts in the anthology, I was intrigued with the differences.
Without knowing any Spanish, I began to tinker with the versions. During the
summer of 1959, with a pocket Spanish-English dictionary and two hundred
dollars, I hitchhiked to Mexico. The following summer I again returned to
Mexico, rented a room in the back of a butcher's home in Chapala, and spent
the summer with Neruda's poetry, as well as writing most of the poems that
were to appear in my first book, Mexico & North in 1962.
In 1960, I edited the English Department sponsored literary tri-quarterly,
Folio, where I printed some Neruda versions I had done with friends in Mexico
City, and four Vallejo versions, cotranslated with another graduate student,
Maureen Lahey. I had become aware of poetry in translation almost as soon as
I became aware, in 1956, that poetry existed at all.
I finished a Master's Degree in 1961, and took a job with the University of
Maryland's Far Eastern Division, teaching literature to military personnel
stationed in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Before leaving, almost as an afterthought,
I packed the copy of Poesía de America #5, Homenaje a César Vallejo, that I
had found in a Mexico City bookstore.
The following year, with the help of Gary Snyder in Kyoto, my first wife
Barbara and I moved to Kyoto where for the next two years I studied and wrote,
making a living teaching English as a second language at various Japanese
companies. Having completed a small collection of Neruda translations (published
in San Francisco by George Hitchcock's Amber House Press as Residence on Earth),
I decided to investigate the Vallejo poems in the Mexican journal.
The first poem I tried to read was "Me viene, hay dias, una gana uberrima,
politica..." It was as if a hand of wet sand came out of the original and
"quicked" me in-I was quicksanded, over my head. Or was it a spar Vallejo
threw me? Each move I tried to make drew me farther in, or farther out. I
could not tell where the focus lay, between Vallejo's poetry and my desire to
write poetry, or in that part of me that wanted to evade the hard work of
doing my own poetry. And how much of this difficulty had to do with my
inability to read complex Spanish? I had been able to read Neruda with the
help of a dictionary and my friends. With Vallejo, I was lost. Yet to turn
away from him was to be more lost, found out by my inability to express
anything that was "my own."
In this poem, Vallejo was claiming that he desired to love, and that his
desire for desire led him to imagine all sorts of "interhuman" acts he desired
to perform, like kissing a singer's muffler, or kissing a deaf man on his
cranial murmur. He wanted to help everyone achieve his goal, no matter what
it was, even to help the killer kill-and he wanted to be good with himself in
everything. These were thoughts that, had I had them myself, I would have
either dismissed or so immediately repressed that they would have evaporated.
But now I realized that there was a whole wailing cathedral of desires,
half-desires, mad-desires, anti-desires, all of which, in the Vallejo poem,
seemed caught on the edge of no-desire. And if so, what made him reach
desiring desire? The need to flee his body? A need to enter his body? To
enter another body? I did not know what he meant, but trying to read him made
me feel that I was in the presence of a mile-thick spirit. So I kept at it.
In the afternoon I would ride my motorcycle downtown and work on translations
in the Yorunomado coffee-shop. I would always sit by the carp pond on the
patio. There I discovered the following words of Vallejo: "And where is the
other flank of this cry of pain if, to estimate it as a whole, it breaks now
from the bed of a man?" I saw Vallejo in a birth bed in that line, not knowing
how to give birth, which indicated to me a totally other realization, that
artistic bearing and fruition were physical as well as mental, a matter of
one's total energy. I was learning that I had to become a sexual traveler as
well as a mental one. For most of 1963 and the first half of 1964, everything
I saw and felt clustered about this feeling; it seemed to be in a phrase from
the I Ching, "the darkening of the light," as well as in the Kyoto sky, gray
and overcast yet mysteriously luminous.
As I struggled to get Vallejo's involuted Spanish into English, I increasingly
had the feeling that I was struggling with a man more than with a text, and
that this struggle was a matter of my becoming or failing to become a poet.
The man I was struggling with did not want his words changed from one language
to another. I realized that in working on Vallejo's Poemas humanos I had
ceased to be what I was before coming to Kyoto, that I had a glimpse now of
another life, a life I was to create rather than to be given, and that this
other man I was struggling with was the old Clayton who was resisting change.
The old Clayton wanted to continue living in his white Presbyterian world of
"light"-not really light, but the "light" of man associated with
day/clarity/good and woman associated with night/opaqueness/bad. The darkness
that was beginning to make itself felt in my sensibility could be viewed as
the breaking up of that supremacy "light."
In the last half of the only poem I completed to any satisfaction while
living in Japan, I envisioned myself as a kind of angelless Jacob wrestling
with a figure from an alien alphabet, trying to take its meaning from him. I
lose the struggle and find myself on a seppuku platform in medieval Japan,
being condemned by Vallejo (now playing the role of a "karo," or overlord)
to disembowel myself. I do so, cutting my ties to the "given life," and
releasing a visionary figure of the imagination, named Yorunomado (in honor
of my working place), who had to that point been chained to an altar in my
solar plexus. In early 1964, the fruit of my struggle with Vallejo was not a
successful linguistic translation but an imaginative advance in which a third
figure had emerged from my intercourse with the text. Yorunomado then became
my guide in the ten-year process of developing a "creative life," recorded in
my book-length poem, Coils (1973).
I was close to completing a first draft of the Poemas humanos in March 1963
when I had a strange experience. After working all afternoon in Yorunomado, I
cycled over to the pottery manufacturer where I taught English conversation
once a week. Whenever I had things to carry on the cycle, I would strap them
with a stretch-cord to the platform in back of the seat. That evening I
strapped on the poem-filled notebook, my dictionary and a copy of the
original, when I left the company. It was now dark and the alley was poorly
lit. I had gone a half block when I heard a voice in Japanese cry: "Hey, you
dropped something!" I stopped, swerved around, to find the platform empty-even
the stretch-cord was gone! I retraced my direction on foot-nothing. I looked
for the person who had called out. No one was there. While I was walking
around in the dark, a large skinny dog began to follow me. I was reminded of
the Mexican pariah dogs and that gave an eerie identity to this dog. Was it
Peruvian? Was it-Vallejo? I went back the next morning when it was light out
and of course there was not a trace of the things I had lost.
In the following year, I completed three more drafts of the book. Cid
Corman went over the second and third drafts and to Cid I owe a special debt,
not only for the time he put in on the manuscript but what I learned about
the art of translation from him. He too lived in Kyoto at this time, and used
another coffee-shop, The Muse, as his "office" every evening. If you wanted
to see Cid, you visited him there. At this time he was translating Eugenio
Montale and Basho's last hike journal, which included some of his most famous
haiku poems, Back Roads to Far Towns. I spent an evening with Cid about once
a week.
Previous to talking with him about translation, I thought that the goal of
a translating project was to take a literal draft and interpret everything
that was not acceptable English. By interpret I mean to monkey with words,
phrases, punctuation, line breaks, even stanza breaks, turning the literal
into something that was not an original poem in English but-and here is the
rub-something that because of the liberties taken was also not accurate to
the original itself. Ben Belitt's Neruda translations or Robert Lowell's
Imitations come to mind as interpretative translations. Corman taught me to
respect the original at every point, to check everything (including words
that I thought I knew), to research arcane and archaic words, and to invent
English words for coined words in the original. In other words, to aim for a
translation that was absolutely accurate and up to the performance level of
the original (at times, quite incompatible goals). I learned to keep a notebook
of thoughts and variations on what I was translating, while I was working,
to keep this material separate, for there are impulsive urges in every
translator to fill in, pad out, and make something "strong" that more
literally would fall flat, in short, to explain a word instead of translating
it. By reinterpreting the original, the translator implies that he knows
better than the original text does, that, in effect, his mind is superior to
its mind. The "native text" becomes raw material for the colonizer-translator
to educate and re-form.
During these years I was undergoing a double apprenticeship: to poetry and
to translation. Since I was so psychically affected by Vallejo, and was
turning him into a figure in my own poetry, it was very important to keep
this use of him and his work out of the translating proper.
*
I returned to Bloomington, Indiana, in the fall of 1964 and lived there until
the end of the following summer at which time Barbara and I went to Peru. At
this point a few textual details need to be mentioned concerning Poemas humanos.
The poems that made up this manuscript were left by Vallejo at the time of his
death in April 1938 in a heavily, hand-corrected typescript. When his widow
Georgette published them in 1939 there were many errors and the poems were
presented out of chronological order. These errors were repeated and amplified
in subsequent editions mainly because Georgette would not cooperate with
publishers, leading to some pirated editions. By the spring of 1965, I was
working from four textually differing editions of Poemas humanos, having seen
neither the first edition or the worksheets.
Instead of shaping up as I worked along, the whole project was becoming a
nightmare. I was having dreams in which Vallejo's corpse, with muddy shoes, was
laid out in bed between Barbara and myself. By this time I had gotten in touch
with Georgette Vallejo and explained that I did not see how I could complete
the translation effectively unless I came to Peru and examined the worksheets.
I hired a lawyer to draw up a contract, and mailed it to her along with samples
from my fourth draft. I received one reply from her that did not respond to
any of my requests. But I was determined to go, and with Barbara several months
pregnant, and a few hundred dollars, we left in August. Once in Lima, I got a
job editing a new bilingual literary magazine to be called Quena at the
Peruvian North American Cultural Institute and we moved into a small apartment
next to a grade school playground on Domingo Orue in the Miraflores district.
Georgette Vallejo was a small, wiry middle-class French woman in her late
fifties. Supported by the Peruvian government, she lived rather spartanly,
yet not uncomfortably, in an apartment also in Miraflores appointed with
pre-Incan pottery and weavings. I was in a very delicate position with her,
because I not only needed to see the first edition and the worksheets, but
also needed her permission to be able to get a publishing contract. I had not
been in her apartment for fifteen minutes when she told me that my translations
were full of "howlers," that Vallejo was untranslatable (she was at this time
working on a French translation of his poetry), and that neither the first
edition nor the worksheets were available to be seen.
The months that followed were stressful and cheerless. Because I was working
for the Institute (which turned out to be attached to the American Embassy in
Lima), most of the Peruvian writers and critics that I met thought I was an
American spy. I only realized who I was really working for when I turned in
the 300 page manuscript for the first issue of Quena to my boss at the Institute.
He told me that translations of the poems of Javier Heraud could not be published
in the magazine because, although they were not political themselves, Heraud
after visiting Cuba had returned to Peru and after joining a guerrilla movement
in the jungle had been killed by the army. Because his name was linked with
Cuba and revolution, my boss told me, the Institute did not want to be involved.
I refused to take the translations out of the manuscript and was fired.
One bright spot in the situation was that at the end of 1965 I met Maureen
Ahern, an American with a PhD from San Marcos University, who was then married
and living with her family on a chicken farm in Cieneguilla, about twenty miles
outside of Lima. Maureen agreed to read through my sixth and seventh drafts of
the manuscript with me, so I began spending a full day each week at her place,
riding out and back with her husband Johnny who worked in Lima. While this
arrangement for the most part worked out very well, a near disaster occurred
in early March, a week after my son Matthew was born. The night that I was to
go to Maureen's I stayed home because her husband was unavailable. Around 9 PM,
Barbara began to bleed from her vagina, and after attempting unsuccessfully to
staunch the flow I realized that if I did not get her into a hospital immediately
she was going to bleed to death. I raced out of our apartment and ran through
the halls of the building across the street screaming for help. A door opened,
a doctor came out, we bundled her into the back of his Volkswagen, and sped to
the nearest clinic. We saved her life, barely. Had I gone to Cieneguilla that
evening...
One afternoon someone knocked on our door, and I opened it to be told by a
stranger that Georgette Vallejo wanted to see me in her apartment that evening.
When I arrived, I found there a small group of Peruvian writers and intellectuals,
such as Javier Sologuren, Carlos Germán Belli, and Emilio Adolfo von Westphalen.
Georgette explained she had assembled everyone to try to determine what poems I
could be given permission to translate. This turned out to be a ridiculous and
impossible task, with the men arguing for hours over why X poem could be
translated and Y poem could not. At one point, when they all agreed that a
particular poem could absolutely not be translated, Georgette cried out, "but
I just translated that poem into French!" Nothing was resolved, and after the
writers left, I found myself sitting there alone with her. She asked me if I
would like a pisco, and brought out a bottle. We began drinking and I recalled
that the editor of Perú Nuevo, a press that had published a pirated edition of
Poemas humanos, had told me that Georgette and César had never been formally
married, and because of this Georgette did not have any legal control over the
estate. I think I blurted out: "Well, I really don't need your permission it
turns out, as Gustávo Valcárcel told me you and Vallejo were never actually
married!" At this point, she jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and began bringing
in shoeboxes of memorabilia, looking for the marriage certificate. She couldn't
find it. But the next morning, of course, she was furious over my confrontation.
I never saw her again.
When we 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 upon Mme. Vallejo's signature.
I wrote to Maureen and asked her if there was anything she could do. She offered
to go and 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
fulltime, battling illness and trying to save a floundering marriage.
Seaver was now sending letter after letter to Mme. Vallejo trying 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 everything was off.
But Maureen kept after her and one day, Américo 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, for 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 one, Grove must destroy mine and publish the other one. Seaver
told me that he had had it with her. So I wrote Maureen that unless a signed
contract appeared within a month, the whole project would be off. Maureen
continued to plead with her. One day Georgette said that if Johnny would type
up the contract she wanted, she would sign it. He did, she signed it, and a
couple of weeks later Seaver called me and said 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 had called her up, extremely upset, saying that
she thought the contract Johnny had typed up was "only a gesture," and that
she had signed it so that Maureen would not be "upset," and that she had never
intended, at any point, to sign a legal contract! Grove went ahead and Human
Poems was published in the spring of 1968.
*
In 1970, I took a job at the new California Institute of the Arts outside
of Los Angeles, and my present wife Caryl and I moved to the San Fernando Valley.
I had done a little work on Vallejo's sheaf of poems on the Spanish Civil War
(written in 1937 and 1938, while he was working on Poemas humanos) in the
mid-1960s, and after making a new draft of a translation of España, aparte de
mi este caliz, I once again found myself looking for someone to check it with.
I was introduced to José 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,
scrupulosity and literary intelligence, that I suggested we work together as
co-translators.
We completed a translation of Spain, Take this Cup from Me and Grove Press
published it in 1974. While José and I were working on the these poems, I showed
him the 1968 translation of Human Poems, which he carefully went over, penciling
in the margins around 2000 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 (other than during the year that
Caryl and I were in France). The University of California Press brought out
César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry in 1978, including what had
previously been called Human Poems along with Spain, Take this Cup from Me.
There were some good scholarly reasons for a retranslation as well, and I
have presented these in the Note on Human Poems.
In 1988 I arranged with Paragon House in NYC to bring out a selection of my
translations of poets who could be thought of as "conductors of the pit,"
conductors and inductors of the abyss, as it were, versus the symphony.
Conductors of the Pit included selections from Arthur Rimbaud, Vallejo,
Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, and Vladimir Holan. When making the Vallejo
selection, I got involved, once again, in revising previous versions, this time
the ones that I had done with José. 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 at one time
choice X is going to look better than choice Y. Not only this, but in
continuing to read Vallejo scholarship over the years, I have occasionally
picked up a lead on a particular word that has made me re-think the word and
sometimes revise my version of it.
Up to the late 1980s, all of my translational attention to Vallejo had been
confined to the European poetry. However, I had been circling around his second
book, Trilce (1922), for many years, realizing in the 1960s 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, so I teamed up with Julio Ortega
(one of the few Peruvian writers in Lima in the 1960s 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 that I should finish Trilce
on my own. And by then I needed his, or someone's help, even more than I had
needed it in the beginning. There are still many words in this book that have
gone uncommented upon 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 of his
choices in English without being able to dodge a single word. This is
especially true in the case of Trilce, with intentionally misspelled words
(often encasing secondary puns), neologisms, arcane and archaic words.
At this point I contacted Américo Ferrari who was then teaching translation at
a university in Geneva. He is the Vallejo scholar who had inspected my manuscript
at Grove Press in the late 1960s. Ferrari had brought out an edition of Vallejo's
Obra Poética Completa in 1988, and I figured he knew more about Vallejo's poetry
than anyone else. I asked him if he would respond my questions, and he agreed to.
I would write him in English and he would respond in Spanish. He was willing to
go to the library and research words he thought he was familiar with but when
confronted by my questions became unsure. We had a wonderful exchange and around
two years later, after doing up to thirty versions of the most complex poems, I
had something that I thought was publishable. Marsilio brought out a bilingual
edition of Trilce, with an Introduction by Ferrari, in 1992. They let it go out
of print, and Wesleyan brought out a second edition, with around one hundred word
changes, in 2000.
At that point, I felt once more that my involvement with Vallejo had come to an
end. The only poetry of his that I had not translated was Los heraldos negros
(1918), his first book, which had always struck me as more conventional by far
than Trilce 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 will inevitably have to change some or
much of its meaning. If you translate it for meaning alone, there is a chance that
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 of the
years I had put in on this body of work had brought me very close to "a complete
poetry of César Vallejo," and that it would be appropriate to review all of my
previous translating, and to add to it a version of Los heraldos negros. Once I
began to work on The Black Heralds, I found them more interesting than I had
thought they were, and since they were relatively easy to render, I took some
pleasure in what could be thought of as 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 as sound 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. José Cerna-Bazán, author
of Sujeto a cambio / de las relaciones del texto y la sociedad en la escritura
de César Vallejo, has inspected my Trilce version word for word and proposed
around a hundred changes, nearly all of which I have accepted. At the end of my
Introduction to the 1968 Grove edition of Human Poems, I wrote "My work is done."
Assuming that Vallejo is not writing poems in his Montparnasse tomb, I now should
be able to make such a statement stick.
*
With an overview in mind, it is worth noting that Vallejo's poetic development
is quite unusual. Based on 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 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 Los heraldos negros. In
moving from Lima to Paris, the poet hit the aesthetic honey head of the European
colonial world at the moment it was being rocked by political revolution in Russia.
Given the non sequitur shifts in Trilce's compositional procedure, it is possible
to see him 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 Antonin
Artaud did: an amusing parlor-game, more concerned with pleasure and freedom than
with suffering and moral struggle. The advance in the European poetry is into 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. His anger breaks any
wholeness into warring fragmentation, and its only redeeming quality is that it is,
paradoxically, the weapon of the poor, almost 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 life. Poetry thus becomes
the imaginative expression of the irresolvability of the contradictions of man as
an animal, divorced from nature as well as 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 than influence through
reading 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 via 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 that of 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 redefine the "political" poem. With one or two exceptions, they
are without political position or agenda in the traditional sense. Yet they are
directly sympathetic, in a way that does not remind us of other bodies of poetry,
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 men and
women that it is as if the dualisms of colonial/colonized, rich and poor, fuse
at a level where the human animal aware of his fate is embraced in all his
absurd fallibility. Whitman comes to mind, from time to time, in terms of his
adhesive bond with others, but Whitman used his "democratic vista" to express
an idealism that is foreign to the world Vallejo saw around him growing up in
Peru, and the even darker world he encountered as a poor man in Paris, whose
barely hanging on imploded facing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
I think that the key Vallejo lesson today may lie in a poet learning how to
become imprisoned, as it were, in global life as a whole, and in each moment
in particular. All of 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 to also
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 psyche as it really is not-weighing all affirmation against, in an
American's case, our imperial obsessions and one's own intrinsic dark.
Ypsilanti, March 2005
Selected Poems from The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo
Translated by Clayton Eshleman
César Vallejo
Oh bottle without wine! oh wine the widower of this bottle!
Afternoon when the dawn of the afternoon
flamed fatally in five spirits.
Widowhood without bread or grime, finishing in hideous metalloids
and in oral cells ending.
Oh always, never to find the never of so much always!
oh my good friends, a cruel deceit,
partial, piercing our truncated
volatile, frolicful grief!
The sublime, low perfection of the pig,
gropes my customary melancholy!
Adz sounding in dreams,
adz
asinine, inferior, betrayed, lawful, thief,
lowering and groping what used to be my ideas!
You and he and they and everyone,
nevertheless,
inserted at the same time into my shirt,
into my shoulders wood, between my femurs, little sticks;
you particularly,
having influenced me;
he, futile, reddened, with money,
and they, winged drones of another weight.
Oh bottle without wine! oh wine the widower of this bottle!
16 September 1937
I stayed on to warm up the ink in which I drown
and to listen to my alternative cavern,
tactile nights, abstracted days.
The unknown shuddered in my tonsil
and I creaked from an annual melancholy,
solar nights, lunar days, Parisian sunsets.
And still, this very day, at nightfall,
I digest the most sacred certainties,
maternal nights, great-granddaughter days,
bicolored, voluptuous, urgent, lovely.
And yet
I arrive, I reach myself in a two-seated plane
under the domestic morning and the mist
which emerged eternally from an instant.
And still,
even now,
at the tail of the comet in which I have earned
my happy and doctoral bacillus,
behold that warm, listener, male earth, sun and male moon,
incognito I cross the cemetery,
head off to the left, splitting
the grass with a pair of hendecasyllables,
tombal years, infinite liters,
ink, pen, bricks and pardons.
24 September 1937
THE BOOK OF NATURE
Professor of sobbing-I said to a tree-
staff of quicksilver, rumorous
linden, at the bank of the Marne, a good student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
between the evident water and the false sun,
his three of hearts, his queen of diamonds.
Rector of the chapters of heaven,
of the ardent fly, of the manual calm there is in asses;
rector of deep ignorance, a bad student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
the hunger for reason that maddens him
and the thirst for dementia that drives him mad.
Technician of shouts, conscious tree, strong,
fluvial, double, solar, double, fanatic,
connoisseur of the cardinal roses, totally
embedded, until drawing blood, in stingers, a student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
his precocious, telluric, volcanic, king of spades.
Oh professor, from having been so ignorant!
oh rector, from trembling so much in the air!
oh technician, from so much bending over!
Oh linden, oh murmurous staff by the Marne!
21 October 1937
I have a terrible fear of being an animal
of white snow, who supported father
and mother, with only his veiny circulation,
and that, this splendid day, solar and archiepiscopal,
day that thus represents the night,
it lineally
eludes this animal to be happy, to breathe,
to transform himself and to have money.
It would be a great pity
if I were a real man to that degree.
A folly, a most fruitful premise
to whose occasional yoke the spiritual
hinge of my waist succumbs.
A folly... Meanwhile,
it's like that, this side of the head of God,
in the tabula of Locke, of Bacon, in the livid neck
of the beast, in the snout of the soul.
And, in aromatic logic,
I have this practical fear, this splendid
lunar day, of being that one, this one perhaps,
to whose nose the ground, the alive folly
and the dead folly smell of death.
Oh to roll about, to exist, to cough, to bind,
to bind the doctrine, one's temple, from shoulder to shoulder,
to move away, to weep, to let it go for eight
or for seven or for six, for five, or to let it go
for the life that holds three powers.
22 October 1937
GUITAR
The pleasure of suffering, of hating, dyes my
throat with plastic venoms,
but the bristle that implants its magic order,
its taurine grandeur, between the first string
and the sixth
and the mendacious eighth, suffers them all.
The pleasure of suffering... Who? Whom?
who, the molars? whom society,
the carbides of rage in the gums?
How to be
and to be here, without angering one's neighbor?
You are worthier than my number, man alone,
and worthier than all the dictionary,
with its prose in poetry,
its poetry in prose,
are your eagle display,
your tiger machinery, bland fellow man.
The pleasure of suffering,
of hoping for hope at the table,
Sunday with all its languages,
Saturday with Chinese, Belgian hours,
the week, with two hockers.
The pleasure of waiting in slippers,
of waiting contracted behind a stanza,
of waiting empowered with a sick pintle;
the pleasure of suffering: hard left by a female
dead with a stone on her waist
and dead between the string and the guitar,
crying the days and singing the months.
28 October 1937
A man is looking at a woman,
is looking at her immediately,
with his sumptuous homesickness
and he looks at her two-handedly
and he knocks her down two-chestedly
and he moves her two-shoulderly.
I ask myself then, overpowering
my enormous, white, zealous rib:
And this man
hasn't he had a child as a growing father?
And this woman, a child
as a builder of her evident sex?
Because I see a child now,
a centipede child, impassioned, energetic:
I see that they do not see him
blow his nose between them, wag his tail, get dressed;
because I accept them,
her in an augmentative condition,
him in the flection of golden hay.
And I exclaim then, without ceasing even once
to live, without turning even once
to tremble in the joust I venerate:
Happiness followed
belatedly by the Father,
by the Son and by the Mother!
Round familiar
instant, that no one any longer feels or loves!
From what an aphonic, dark red dazzle
the Song of Songs is performed!
From what a trunk, the florid carpenter!
From what a perfect axial, the fragile oar!
From what a hoof, both forehoofs!
2 November 1937
Today a splinter has gotten into her.
Today a splinter has gotten into her close, striking her
close, hard, in her way
of being and in her now famous penny.
Fate has pained her terribly,
all over;
the door has pained her,
the girdle has pained her, giving her
thirst, afflixion
and thirst for the glass but not for the wine.
Today, secretly, the smoke of her dogma
poured out of the poor neighbor of the air;
today a splinter has gotten into her.
Immensity pursues her
at a superficial distance, at a vast linkage.
Today on one cheek, north, and on one cheek, east
came out of the poor neighbor of the wind;
today a splinter has gotten into her.
Who will buy, in these harsh, perishable days,
a bit of coffee with milk,
and who, without her, will descend her path until giving birth?
Sad are the splinters that get into her
all at once,
exactly there precisely!
Today a flame quenched in the oracle
entered the poor neighbor of the voyage;
today a splinter has gotten into her.
The pain has pained her, the young pain,
the child pain, stabbing pain, striking her
in the hands
and giving her thirst, afflixion
and thirst for the glass but not for the wine.
The poor, poor little thing!
6 November 1937
Let the millionaire walk naked, stark naked!
Disgrace for whoever builds his death bed with treasures!
A world for whoever greets;
an armchair for whoever sows in the sky;
sobbing for whoever finishes what he makes, keeping the beginnings;
let the spur-wearer walk;
no duration for the wall on which another wall is not growing;
give to the wretched all his wretchedness,
bread, to whoever laughs;
let the triumphs lose, the doctors die;
put milk in blood;
add a candle to the sun,
eight hundred to twenty;
let eternity pass under the bridges!
Scorn whoever gets dressed,
crown feet with hands, fit them in their size;
let my personality sit next to me!
To weep having fit in that womb,
blessed is he who observes air in the air,
many years of nail for the hammer stroke;
strip the naked,
make the cape put on pants,
let copper gleam at the expense of its plates,
majesty for whoever falls from the clay into the universe,
let the mouths weep, the looks moan,
prevent steel from enduring,
thread for the portable horizons,
twelve cities for the stone path,
a sphere for whoever plays with his shadow;
a day made of one hour for the husband and wife;
a mother for the plow in praise of soil,
seal liquids with two seals,
let the mouthful call roll,
let the quail be,
let the race of the poplar and the tree be;
let the sea, contrary to the circle, defeat his son
and weeping, gray hair;
leave the asps alone, gentle sirs,
furrow your flame with seven logs,
live,
raise the height,
lower the deepage deeper,
let the wave accompany its momentum walking,
the crypt's truce succeed!
May we die;
wash your skeleton daily;
pay no attention to me,
a lame bird for the despot and his soul;
a dreadful stain, for whoever goes it alone;
sparrows for the astronomer, for the sparrow an aviator!
Give off rain, give off sun,
keep an eye on Jupiter, on the thief of your gold idols,
copy your writing in three notebooks,
learn from the married when they speak, and
from the solitary, when they're silent;
give the sweethearts something to eat,
the devil in your hands something to drink,
fight for justice with your nape,
make yourselves equal,
let the oak be fulfilled,
the leopard between two oaks be fulfilled,
let us be,
let us be here,
feel how water navigates the oceans,
take nourishment,
let the error be conceived, since I'm weeping,
accept it, while goats and their young climb the crags;
make God break the habit of being a man,
grow up...!
They're calling me. I'll be back.
19 November 1937
SERMON ON DEATH
And, finally, passing now into the domain of death,
which acts as squadron, former bracket,
paragraph and key, huge hand and dieresis,
for what the Assyrian desk? for what the Christian pulpit,
the intense tug of Vandal furniture
or, even less, this proparoxytonic retreat?
Is it in order to end,
tomorrow, as a prototype of phallic display,
as diabetes and as a white bedpan,
as a geometric face, as a deadman,
that sermon and almonds become necessary,
that there are literally too many potatoes
and this watery spectre in which the gold blazes
and in which the price of snow burns?
Is it for this, that we die so much?
Only to die,
must we die each instant?
And the paragraph that I write?
And the deistic bracket that I raise on high?
And the squadron in which my skull broke down?
And the key which fits all doors?
And the forensic dieresis, the hand,
my potato and my flesh and my contradiction under the bedsheet?
Out of my mind, out of my wolvum, out
of my lamb, out of my sensible horsessence!
Desk, yes, my whole life long; pulpit,
likewise, my whole death long!
Sermon on barbarism: these papers;
proparoxytonic retreat: this skin.
In this way, cognitive, auriferous, thick-armed,
I will defend my catch in two moments,
with my voice and also with my larynx,
and of the physical smell with which I pray
and of the instinct for immobility with which I walk,
I will be proud while I'm alive-it must be said;
my horseflies will swell with pride,
because, at the center, I am, and to the right,
likewise, and, to the left, equally.
8 December 1937
Clayton Eshleman's translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, with
a Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, an Introduction by Efrain Kristal, and a
Chronology by Stephen Hart, will be published December 2006 by University of
California Press.
Copies can be ordered online at http://www.ucpress.edu .
Toll-free phone is 800 777 4726. When ordering enter the following code in
the special instructions box: 06D3136. The cloth edition is 704 pages,
bilingual, and costs $49.95 plus $4.00 shipping charge.
Other publications by Clayton Eshleman include:
POETRY
Mexico & North (1962)
Indiana (1969)
Altars (1971)
Coils (1973)
The Great Wall (1975)
What She Means (1978)
Hades In Manganese (1981)
Fructure (1983)
The Name Encanyoned River (1986)
Hotel Cro-Magnon (1989)
Under World Arrest (1994)
From Scratch (1998)
Everwhat (2003)
My Devotion (2004)
PROSE
Antiphonal Swing (1989)
Companion Spider (2002)
Juniper Fuse, Upper Paleolithic Imagination &
the Construction of the Underworld (2003)
TRANSLATIONS
Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth (1962)
César Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry (with José Rubia Barcia, 1978)
Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry (with Annette Smith, 1990)
Michel Deguy, Given Giving (1984)
Bernard Bador, Sea Urchin Harakiri (1986)
Aimé Césaire, Lyric & Narrative Poetry 1946-1982 (with Annette Smith, 1990)
Antonin Artaud, Watchfriends & Rack Screams (with Bernard Bador, 1995)
César Vallejo, Trilce (1992, 2000)
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (with Annette Smith, 2001)
EDITOR
Folio (Bloomington, Indiana, 3 issues, 1959-1960)
Quena (Lima, Peru, 1 issue edited, suppressed by the North American
Peruvian Institute, 1966)
Caterpillar (NYC-Los Angeles, 20 issues, 1967-1973)
A Caterpillar Anthology (Issues #1-12, 1971)
Sulfur (Pasadina-Los Angeles-Ypsilanti, 46 issues, 1981-2000)
Clayton Eshleman's Official Website may be found at:
http://www.claytoneshleman.com/
All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.
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Klaus J. Gerken.
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