A Special APr Supplement

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2005 by Kristal, Efrain

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 Ramon 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 Dario'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 visionperhaps 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 Espana, aparta de mi este caliz (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