the play to radical revisions that yielded outstanding results. The first published edition, included in Teatro completo (1979), misconstrues the structure of the play as the author had envisioned it and renders that version unreadable. The most accurate version, Teatro completo III (1999), edited by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban and Cecilia Moreano, incorporates Vallejo’s handwritten changes and restores the integrity of the text.
In The Tired Stone, a stonemason named Tolpor falls in love with Kaura, a ñusta (princess), which is a sin, and this sets the tragedy in motion. When he realizes that he can neither have nor deny his love and that he has angered the gods, in response to which the Conquest is resumed in an attempt to pacify them, Tolpor selflessly heads off to war. But when he fights his enemies to save his people in search of Death instead of Glory, Fame ends up claiming him and, by popular demand, he ascends to the throne, without Kaura, who was displaced during the battles. No sooner does he receive the sacred tassel, than Tolpor renounces it, blinds himself, and goes to the countryside to live the life of a beggar, where years later he runs into Kaura. But, on account of his blindness, he can’t tell that it’s she, and because he’s transformed into a beggar, she doesn’t realize it’s he.
The confluence of the aesthetic and political visions—that the poor ensure the well-being of the people and that individual love is inferior to the love of a collective—epitomizes Vallejo’s late writings in which his ideals of indigenism fuse with those of socialism.97 The central axis of The Tired Stone is the protagonist’s ethically negative concept of hubris, which arises from the dynamic of his destructive passions. The paradox that unites determinism and free will drives the tragic climax of his actions off a cliff and sends him falling into the traps of Fate and the world of Fault, where he demands his own punishment, giving way to the path of self-sacrifice and expiation.98
Two years before he wrote the play, Vallejo was already wondering, “What laws and interests, what instincts or ideals, moved [the Incas]—in war and peace—to manifest a destiny whose historical essence and meaning seem to contain extraordinary kernels of wisdom and organization?”99 Resources that the author appears to have used in response to those questions and in the creation of the play include the essay “Saycuscca-Rumi: Tradición cusqueña” by Eleazar Boloña (his thesis advisor at La Universidad de La Libertad) and the chapter “Tres torreones, los maestros mayores y las piedra cansada” from the Comentarios reales de los Incas by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as the anonymous classical Quechua play Ollantay. Moreover, Sacsayhuaman, one of the primary settings and symbols of Vallejo’s play—that architectonic structure under construction and being built by collective labor—can be read as an Andean translation of Vladimir Kirshon’s half-assembled locomotive in The Rails Are Humming, which we know Vallejo deeply admired.100
But aside from these sources, certain themes and movements of The Tired Stone seem to have been inspired by the writings of Sophocles, for example, in act 1, scene 5. There Tolpor, who has committed the sin of falling in love with a princess and, entranced by that love, wanders in front of the sacred Coricancha temple without removing his shoes, which clearly echoes the opening scene of Oedipus at Colonus, where Oedipus and Antigone wander into the sacred bronze gateway to Athens owned by the revered god Poseidon. Where the Greek and the Peruvian diverge is in the trajectory of their tragic heroes. For Sophocles, the king falls into disgrace for the sake of his people; for Vallejo, the serf ascends to the throne involuntarily and when he realizes that this power has cost him his love he renounces the throne and blinds himself, which prevents him from seeing that love at the end. Thus, the blindness of Oedipus (for his ignorance) and Tolpor (for his hubris) is their final punishment and revelation—what they know but can’t see is the ironic consequence of expiation.101
3
Despite the apparent breadth of the present volume, these Selected Writings paint César Vallejo’s oeuvre with very broad brushstrokes. One need only consult the fourteen volumes of the Obras completas published by the PUCP (1997–2002), which amasses approximately six thousand pages, to realize just how much of this writer’s work there really is left to translate. For years, one major problem translators faced was finding trustworthy sources on which to base their work, but the scholarship that has been carried out, especially in the past fifteen years, has resolved this and created an immense foundation of newly set texts informed by an expansive field of investigation.
In the English-speaking world, Vallejo’s poetry initially appealed to the poets and readers of the Deep Image movement and later on attained certain resonance with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and critics. Moreover, the dedication with which Clayton Eshleman has worked and reworked his versions, compiling his notes and presenting bilingual versions, has not only given Anglo readers an excellent point of entry to Vallejo’s poetic world, but has also provided future translators with a solid foundation for the creation of new versions. The most difficult poetry requires continual retranslation, which becomes ever more urgent over the passing of time. Does Vallejo’s poetry still need to be translated? Of course it does, but not nearly as urgently as the rest of his oeuvre.
Beyond the genre of poetry the field is wide open. The two most pressing tasks are the translation of Scales and The Tired Stone. The short stories of Scales and the tragic drama of The Tired Stone are essential to Vallejo’s oeuvre, and, beyond the field of bilingual specialists, they have stayed under the radar of most Anglo readers. Their linguistic complexity and poetic intensity—the exuberance and exaltation of the early and late aesthetics, respectively—mark pinnacles in Vallejo’s narrative prose and writing for the stage. Added to this, there are multiple Castilian versions of both works, and a comparative reading, as Eshleman showed us with the poetry, is sure to illuminate the author’s compositional strategies.
With these short but essential volumes in translation, we’ll be in a position to compile and publish complete editions, akin to the series released by the PUCP. The order of urgency for these compendia would be Complete Plays, Complete Articles and Chronicles, Complete Narratives, Complete Reportage and Books of Thoughts, and Complete Letters. On account of the size of these volumes and the availability of the Castilian versions, these English editions need not be bilingual but will require annotations and commentaries to catalog translation problems, historical references, and Vallejo’s idiosyncrasies that may otherwise be presumed errors.
Complete editions of Vallejo’s writings will help us better understand his poetry, but they will also relocate the oeuvre of one of the most influential twentieth-century writers to a more mainstream sphere, which seems appropriate in view of the author’s lifelong endeavor to avoid artistic secularism. The dark corner of modern literature that Vallejo’s writings have inhabited is the consequence of our having focused so much attention on his poetry alone, without opening our eyes as enthusiastically to his writings in other genres, or without opening our eyes to them at all. The lack of translations from these modalities has seduced readers into seeing him as an aggregate of (rather than alternative to) the European avant-garde, by representing him solely as a poet, as a poet of poets, when the breadth of his writings clearly shows us that he was a complete intellectual, a blue-collar journalist, an incisive critic, a masterful emulator, a ruthless humorist, a fearless dramatist, a passionate socialist, and a devout antifascist. The reconfiguration of Vallejo’s writings doesn’t diminish his poetry, which is his greatest literary accomplishment, but it does allow us to evaluate him in a new light, since it’s one thing to write that poetry and that poetry alone, but it’s something quite different to write brilliantly and prolifically in other genres in addition to writing that poetry.
Joseph Mulligan New Paltz, NY
NOTE ON THIS EDITION
The translations presented in this volume have been based on the Obras completas published by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú: Poesía completa I–IV (1997), edited
