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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The materialization of this book would never have been possible without the dedicated work of the contributing translators: Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Suzanne Jill Levine, Nicole Peyrafitte, Michael Lee Rattigan, William Rowe, Eliot Weinberger, and Jason Weiss. Without their good will and expertise, this publication of so many pages of previously untranslated texts and the compilation of preexisting translations would still exist only as an idea. My deep gratitude to them for sharing this vision and making it a reality.
Special thanks are due to Clayton Eshleman, who suggested I take on this project. He was its first supporter and provided crucial suggestions regarding the structure of the book. My thanks as well go to Pierre Joris, who, for the past ten years, has been my mentor and an invaluable guide in my search for an understanding of poetics and translation.
I am grateful to Suzanne Jill Levine, who was an adviser on this project and, in addition to translating, provided feedback on the structure of the book and helped facilitate a collaborative review of the selection by Jorge Luis Castillo, Michelle Clayton, Efraín Kristal, José Antonio Mazzotti, Eliot Weinberger, and Jason Weiss, all of whom deserve my utmost thanks for their work toward developing a balanced range of writings.
I should also express my gratitude to Ernesto Livon Grossman, whose views on the Latin American experimental tradition—in a conversation that has lasted over a decade—have profoundly shaped the way I’ve come to frame Vallejo’s writings. My thanks are also due to James Sherry, who edited my translation Against Professional Secrets (Roof Books) and helped me see the trajectory of Vallejo’s previously untranslated prose.
A thousand thanks to Stephen Hart, who generously reviewed the biographical material of the introduction; Gustavo Faverón Patriau, whom I consulted on several occasions about problems in interpretation; Cory Merril, who helped determine the transliteration of Vallejo’s Russian vocabulary; and Odi Gonzáles, who analyzed and commented on Vallejo’s Quechua vocabulary, offering modern standard spellings.
Michael Lee Rattigan also deserves singular recognition for the magnitude of his contribution of previously untranslated magazine articles and letters and for his constant support and selfless dedication in our collaborative translation process. I must also thank poet and translator Mario Domínguez Parra, who, over the past three years, has weighed in extensively on some of the most intricate translation problems that arise in the texts presented here. His dedication to helping preserve the idiosyncrasy of Vallejo’s writing contributed in a major way to these translations and the notes that follow them. Finally, this volume would never have been possible without the support of my wife, Beatriz Sosa Matta, who has enthusiastically encouraged my work and shared in the discovery entailed by retracing Vallejo’s steps down his many winding roads.
Some of my translations have appeared in Literal Magazine, Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems and Poetics, and Asymptote Magazine. Some early versions of Michael Lee Rattigan’s translations appeared in the Black Herald. Eliot Weinberger’s contribution was first published in Sulfur. Clayton Eshleman’s translations have been widely published over the past fifty years, in magazines, journals, and a trove of books. We are grateful to the University of California Press for allowing us to reprint his most recent versions in The Complete Poetry (2007).
INTRODUCTION
César Vallejo is by far the most well-known Peruvian writer, yet he’s also the most obscure. Since his rise to fame in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of books, essays, academic theses, and dissertations have been written on his poetry and literary persona. Numerous editions of his poems have appeared in the original Castilian and in translation, as comprehensive volumes and as anthologies.1 With the stamp of his name, a line from his poems, or the titles of his books, magazines have been launched, conferences have been held, publishing houses have been formed, high schools have been created, and even soccer clubs have taken to the field. A survey of Vallejo’s complete writings, however, shows us that the poetry accounts for only one-sixth of the whole. For the past fifty years, Hispanic scholars, such as Jorge Puccinelli, whose argument I paraphrase, have embarked on the heuristic work of “tracing down and recovering the disjecta membra of a vast literary corpus,” which proved vital, since “to cut off the limb of a tree is to deprive it of life, which resides in the unity of the organism—it is to isolate a fragment from the whole to which it is inextricably bound.”2
More often than not, Vallejo’s readers in English translation sever the tree limb and, onto an already truncated representation, they graft a contrived avant-garde branch, which they’re convinced belongs there because they’ve already seen it in his contemporaries. But can we blame these readers for this confusion, or must we, his translators, assume responsibility, since we’re the ones who’ve known enough to shudder at his poetry’s intensity, but out of professional interest or genric prejudice have consciously or unconsciously ignored the rest of his oeuvre? Few times in the history of Western literature has the representation of such a multifaceted figure been so one-dimensional.
The following compendium reconfigures César Vallejo’s oeuvre. It’s an opportunity to reformulate an understanding of the writings and persona of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. In the following introduction, I sketch out Vallejo’s biography to show where and in whose company he was during specific historical moments and during the composition of certain texts, before moving on to characterize the works or collections of writings from which the selections have been drawn, with the aim of elucidating the oeuvre, specifying its publication history in relation to the author’s writing process, and synthesizing predominant aesthetic features that let us better understand his ideas. Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some brief remarks on the English translation work that lies ahead.
1
High in the Andes of northern Peru, where the cordillera rises ten thousand feet above sea level in a distance of about 350 miles, in the Department of La Libertad there’s a place called Santiago de Chuco. On March 16, 1892, on Calle Colón 96 in that town, a forty-two-year-old mestiza named María de los Santos Mendoza Gurrionero (1850–1918), wife of Francisco de Paula Vallejo Benítez (1840–1924) and mother of eleven, gave birth to her twelfth and final child, whom she named César Abraham.3
Santiago de Chuco doesn’t only mark César Vallejo’s birthplace but also exposes his outlier status ab initio. Both his parents were born and raised in Santiago, and before it became the provincial capital (when it was still a district in the province of Huamachuco), his father had been governor. Additionally, his paternal grandparents were the Galician priest José Rufo Vallejo and his Chimú concubine Justa Benítez; and his maternal grandparents, the Galician priest Joaquín de Mendez and his Chimú concubine Natividad Gurrionero, placing young César in a typical context of mestizaje in the Andes.
Perched on the limb of the new millennium, many of us in North America or Western Europe struggle to imagine what it must have been like to live in Santiago de Chuco a century ago. Even a journey today to that highland town is likely to be misleading; for eyes accustomed to the comfort, commodities, and technologies of developed cities and countries, a journey to Santiago will feel like a trip back in time. But the truth is that this little mountain town has already modernized extensively. According to the 1940 census, in Santiago de Chuco many houses were still lacking utilities that had started to become mainstays in other less remote homes—utilities as basic as electricity and potable water. If we take into account that as late as 1940, out of 957 households, as few as 147 had running water, 130 had drainage,
