Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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
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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 by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban; Narrativa completa (1999) and Teatro completo I–III (1999), edited by Silva-Santisteban and Moreano; Correspondencia completa (2002), edited by Jesús Cabel; Ensayos y reportajes completos (2002), edited by Manuel Miguel de Priego; and Artículos y crónicas completos I–II (2002), edited by Jorge Puccinelli; as well as the Obras completas published by Banco de Crédito: Obra poética (1991), edited by Ricardo González Vigil, and Artículos y crónicas (1918–1939) desde Europa (1997), edited by Jorge Puccinelli.
The poems translated by Clayton Eshleman have been drawn from The Complete Poetry published in 2007 by the University of California Press, which contains translations that supersede the translator’s many previous versions that have appeared in print over the past fifty years. Due to the large number of discrepancies over the setting of many of Vallejo’s poems, this work is carefully cataloged by editors, as is the case with Eshleman’s versions. Readers are encouraged to reference his notes and commentary in The Complete Poetry.
The formatting and style of the source text, including abnormalities such as irregular capitalization, have been replicated—to the extent possible—in the following translations, except for the thesis, plays, and letters. In Romanticism in Castilian Poetry we adhere to basic norms in the presentation of analytic prose by not italicizing quoted poems, as the author did, and by offering block quotes for larger portions of text. These conventions are designed to increase the readability of the text and not to lead the reader into believing that the author was revolutionizing the form in Castilian when he was not. This is always a risk with Vallejo, since in many other places, he is in fact formally subversive.
Due to the unfinished state in which all the theatrical works remained at the time of Vallejo’s death, certain editorial decisions are required (even to set the Castilian version). As evinced by the facsimiles reproduced in Teatro completo III, where we find typescripts of La piedra cansada that Vallejo himself edited by hand, we observe that he left-aligned the play and in parentheses placed stage directions, which he could not italicize, since this function wasn’t available in his typewriter technology.
The editions of the plays edited by Silva-Santisteban and Moreano justify the dialogue and stage directions, and center-align the name of the speaker on the line preceding the dialogue. Moreover, in those editions the stage directions have been italicized. We’ve preferred to set the text flush left throughout (character names, dialogue, and stage directions) and place the stage directions in italics. In an attempt to elucidate certain portions of the dramatic movement, we’ve blocked out stage directions that don’t pertain to the speaker of that same line. This format, as in Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)—as translated by Eric Bentley for Grove Press in 1966—has been used to clarify how the plays are intended to be performed.
Regarding Brothers Colacho, three editions have