Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
Aguirre, Teatro completo (1979), published by PUCP; a French typescript held by the PUCP Library; and a Castilian typescript held by the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. A comparative reading of the three documents and the explanations offered by Silva-Santisteban lead us to believe that, while the latter two are very similar in terms of their content and stage of development, the Castilian version at the Biblioteca Nacional can be considered the most finished product and is the source of the translation we present. It’s divided into three acts, five scenes, and fifteen movements. Through the transformation of the three versions, if this supposition holds true, we see Vallejo improve the composition not only by editing but also by translating.
Although Georgette de Vallejo has stated that The Tired Stone was written in its entirety in December 1937, Silva-Santisteban has identified dubious modifications to scenes in the typescript that obstruct the plot of the play. At the end of act 2, a page is cut in half and another is pasted on top of it, such that page 20 repeats itself; on page 25 there’s the handwritten note “Cuadro onceavo” and on page 29, the note “Cuadro doceavo.” These notes contain egregious morphological errors—“onceavo” for “undécimo” (eleventh) and “doceavo” for “duodécimo” (twelfth)—which Vallejo simply could not have made. His wife Georgette, a native French speaker and infamous meddler in Vallejo’s papers, is the primary suspect. When we compare the version published by Georgette in Teatro completo (1979) against the versions published in Visión del Perú, edited by Washington Delgado, where he presents pages from the typescript with handwritten corrections, it appears that Georgette deliberately omitted Vallejo’s revisions, which most likely were made during January 1938. Silva-Santisteban has incorporated Vallejo’s handwritten changes, and the present translation is based on his version, as it appears in Teatro Completo III (1999).
Moreover, the plays Death and The Final Judgment were originally written in French and then translated to Castilian by Georgette de Vallejo. Over the years the French version of The Final Judgment went missing, which has forced us to render our English version from her Castilian. Death, on the other hand, has been translated from the original French version, as it appears in César Vallejo, su estética teatral, by Guido Podestá.
The epistolary documents present the double difficulty of their tone and multiform layout. Vallejo’s tone in his letters is overtly cordial and strikingly affectionate, yet a literal translation into English tends to turn this into saccharine verbosity. A more interpretative approach, like the one we’ve taken here, can modulate the tonality to produce a similar effect but to a different degree. Bearing in mind that the most loyal translation is never the most literal, we’ve deliberately attenuated Vallejo’s tone in his letters so that it’s evidently affectionate and noticeably intimate, but not distractingly so. With regard to the format, the PUCP’S compendium of the letters reproduces the manuscripts and typescripts exactly as the texts appear in the originals, including, when available, facsimiles. We, on the other hand, have standardized basic elements of the letters, such as greetings, salutations, and the placement of the date, location, and signature, in an attempt to increase their readability, recognizing that the heteroclite nature of the present anthology already presents the reader with considerable challenges.
Moreover, we should clarify that Castilian was Vallejo’s default language; while living in Paris, he gained proficiency in French to the extent that he successfully translated from French, published some of his own articles in French, and drafted some of his plays in French. Although he didn’t know Quechua or Russian, this didn’t stop him from scattering words from those languages (the spelling and transliteration of which he often imagined) throughout his writings as he saw fit. In the following translations, French words have been left in French, with a note for the first instance of a word or expression that’s not generally understood among modern readers of literature in English. In a few cases, we’ve corrected the French spelling to avoid confusion.
Although one may be tempted to think that César Vallejo, this native Andean, imbued a text like The Tired Stone with authentic Quechua while living in Paris, recent scholarship has confirmed that his Quechua is relegated to a modernist imagination, far from demonstrating accurate usage and correct modern spelling. Rather than updating these Quechua words, we’ve copied them verbatim, and for the first instance of words or phrases identifiable to modern Quechua scholars, we have included an endnote with a corrected spelling and definition. In addressing the Quechua vocabulary, I sought the assistance of NYU Professor Odi Gonzales and asked him to comment on a vocabulary I had selected, which admittedly doesn’t encompass every instance of Quechua in these translations. With regard to the usage of Russian words, since the transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin differs orthographically when it comes into the Castilian and English languages, we’ve offered new English transliterations of the Russian words and names in Vallejo’s vocabulary. The first instance of a loan word or phrase is accompanied by an annotated explanation.
Finally, we’ve included endnotes in which we offer commentaries on the translation of neologisms, obscure historical references, deliberate misspellings, drastically nonliteral renderings, and any idiosyncrasy that might otherwise be presumed a typographical error in the process of printing or an overlooked mistake in the translated composition. The notes and commentaries are meant as a reminder to the reader that the text is, in fact, a translation and as encouragement to seek out the original Castilian versions we’ve chosen to omit in order to present the reader with a wider selection.
TRANSLATORS
| [CE] | Clayton Eshleman |
| [PJ] | Pierre Joris |
| [SJL] | Suzanne Jill Levine |
| [JM] | Joseph Mulligan |
| [NP] | Nicole Peyrafitte |
| [MLR] | Michael Lee Rattigan |
| [WR] | William Rowe |
| [EW] | Eliot Weinberger |
| [JW] | Jason Weiss |
BOOK ONE 1915–1919
FROM Romanticism in Castilian Poetry
INTRODUCTION
More than a century ago, German thought laid the groundwork for critical science in art. The Schlegel brothers,1 who indisputably represent this epiphany, share the glory of having founded the best instrument thus far for scientifically registering the diverse manifestations of fine arts in our times. Since then, art criticism has stopped limiting itself to a superficial analysis of form and a more or less incomplete consideration of a specific technique to become the profound, wide-reaching judgment that stems from a scientific vision seen through a prism, the multiple facets of which direct many lights toward a central, high, and vigorous conclusion in harmonious theory. That is to say, the critic of today is the master who corrects, the chisel that files down the works of other activities, but who corrects and files in accordance with the models that he has come to obtain as ideals by dint of an eager drive toward perfection. And it will not be hyperbole to attribute this elevated, integrating mission of improvement to contemporary criticism, if at the outset we disinherit the belief of certain didactic publicists that art criticism has no transformative bearing on the work of art that it considers.
Every science like every man, every thought like every device, can stand a bit more sunlight or some possibility of progressive force so that life may advance down the road of civilization toward ever brighter horizons. On the contrary, it is also possible that they may constitute a negative element of progress, which in the final analysis is a reactionary tendency at the heart of their apparently ecstatic temerity. And under the laws of existence, it is necessary to evaluate in fair terms exactly what in every work concerns the interests of the common endeavor in