You said that somehow this helped you to understand that if you give something to humanity you"ll get something else back even more beautiful.
Your memory is wonderful, and this is exactly right. I learned much from that in my childhood. This exchange of gifts-mysterious-settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit.
The interview took place
June 12, 1966, in New York.
Selected Poems of CeSAR VALLEJO.
WHAT IF AFTER SO MANY WINGS OF BIRDS.
Cesar Vallejo is not a poet of the partially authentic feeling, as most poets in the English tradition are, but a poet of the absolutely authentic. He does not hide part of his life, and describe only the more "poetic" parts. He lived a difficult life, full of fight, and in describing it never panders to a love of pleasantries nor a love of vulgarity. He had a tremendous feeling for, and love of, his family-his father, his mother, and his brothers-which he expresses with simple images of great resonance. There is a tenderness, as in Chaucer. His wildness and savagery exist side by side with it. The wildness and savagery rest on a clear compa.s.sion for others, and a clear intuition into his own inward directions. He sees roads inside himself. In the remarkable intensity with which he follows a thought or an image, there is a kind of heroism. Like a great fish, he follows the poem wherever it goes in the sea.
II.
Cesar Vallejo was born March 15, 1892, in a small mining town in Northern Peru. His family had Indian blood on both sides. The poem called "To My Brother Miguel" describes the mood of the house-a Catholic house, with devotions and prayers. About the family, James Wright has written: His home town was small and provincial, with an ancient and living tradition of large, affectionate families who were of necessity mobilized, as it were, against the physical and spiritual onslaughts of death in its ancient and modern forms: disease, undernourishment, and cold on the one hand ; the officials of the tungsten mines on the other he is always returning to poems about his family, poems which in their intensity and daring are more beautiful than any other poems on the subject that I have seen.
He went off at eighteen to the university in Trujillo. After studying and working on and off for several years, he graduated there when he was twenty-three. He was already at work on a book. He supported himself after graduation teaching in primary schools. He worked on his book another three years, and it was published in Lima in 1919. He called it Los Heraldos Negros, suggesting hors.e.m.e.n, maybe riding black horses, who come with messages, messages from death. It is a staggering book, sensual, prophetic, affectionate, wild. It has a kind of compa.s.sion for G.o.d, and compa.s.sion for death, who has so many problems, and it moves with incredible leaps of imagination. I think it is the greatest single collection of poems I have ever read.
The next year he went home for a visit, and got involved, without intending to, in a provincial political feud. His politics were known, and his imprisonment may have been revenge for those. His sentence was three months in a jail in Trujillo. There he wrote some of the poems for his second book, Trilce. Trilce is difficult, even for people who read poetry a great deal. The poems are like flashes of light in a room already light. The a.s.sociative thinking in them takes place with incredible speed, and most are oblique, surrealist, interior, like willows, "almost air." Their surrealist airiness is at the opposite pole from Neruda"s dense Residencia poems, which are borne down by his entangled, intestinal, jungle surrealism. The Trilce poems are so difficult that very few of them have been translated into English.
The year after it was published, Vallejo lost his teaching job in Lima, and decided to go to Paris as a stringer for a Trujillo newspaper. After all, the surrealists lived in Paris. Once there he was poor right away, and despite occasional translating and newspaper jobs, his poverty returned on and off for the rest of his life. There were many South American intellectuals in Paris, and in any case the French tended to regard all South Americans as second cla.s.s citizens. The poverty he experienced was not a playful bohemian poverty, but something permanent, a state that he could not get out of. He felt close to others at the bottom of the ladder, and he has a number of compa.s.sionate poems written to and for French wh.o.r.es that he knew. His "Poem To Be Read and Sung" appears to be one of them. He remained in Europe for fifteen years and never returned to America. Somewhere I read that he developed elaborate theories on how you could step off a subway car without wearing out the soles of your shoes; how to cross your legs so as not to wear out your trouser knees. He read much French poetry, and met Artaud and others. When the Depression came, he thought as much about the problem of poverty as about the problem of poetry, and evidently more about other people"s poverty than his own. He took the Communist movement seriously, and was a committed Marxist. In 1928 he went on a visit to Russia, and the next year interviewed Mayakovsky in Moscow. In 1930 the French deported him and his French wife, Georgette.
They went to Spain and so Vallejo experienced Spain in the early Thirties, when Lorca and his generation were writing their fantastically rich surrealist poems. In Spain Vallejo wrote a novel, a book of essays, and two plays. None of his reporting or essays or plays from this period have been translated.
In 1932 he returned to Paris, and except for short visits to Spain, lived in Paris with Georgette until his death six years later. Franco"s invasion of the Spanish Republic in 1936 affected his life profoundly. During these years Vallejo worked constantly for the Republic, gathering money and support, writing. A small book of his poems about the Civil War, called Espana, aparte de m esta Cliz (Spain, Take This Cup from Me), written shortly before he died, was printed in Spain, as Miguel Hernndez" poems were, by the Republican soldiers themselves.
His third large collection of poems, following Los Heraldos Negros and Trilce, is the volume called Poemas Humanos. It is not clear when the poems making up Poemas Humanos were written. During his last year, he spent some months preparing the collection for publication; he rewrote many, and possibly wrote a number of new ones. If a poem we have translated here has a date following it, the date is that of the final draft of the poem, and was marked on the ma.n.u.script by Vallejo himself sometime in September, October, November, or December 1937. Whether the undated ones were written at that time, or years before, and if written years before, were considered unsalvageable, or already finished, no one seems to know. At the start of the Poemas Humanos group I have put some prose poems which apparently belong to an unfinished book called Codigo Civil, but which are always published with Poemas Humanos poems, though written during his earliest years in Paris.
He exhausted himself in the winter of 193738, working for the refugees, writing poems, anguishing over the beating the Left was taking in the Civil War, the deaths in Spain, the defeat of so much work by so many men. In the spring of 1938 Vallejo developed a fever the European doctors could not diagnose or treat, and he died in Paris on April 15, 1938, while it was raining. He was a Pisces, and had predicted years earlier: "I will die in Paris on a rainy day." His body was buried in Mont-rouge Cemetery ; several French writers and artists were at the graveside. His wife Georgette, who had helped him stay alive for years, later moved to Lima, where she still lives.
III.
I notice that contemporary English poets and critics want English poetry to be tied in to "history," by which they mean linguistic history, the various layers of meaning a given word has taken on, the encrustations an iambic line has taken on by floating face down through the centuries, the curious angles an idea has chipped into it by being misunderstood by dopes in the Elizabethan, in the Tudor . The outcome of this longing is that the word is never fresh, the line has fused vertebrae, and the poem does not convey thinking, but instead contains portraits of ideas, like those "Wanted" posters issued by police departments.
But Vallejo"s art shows us what it"s like not to go about recapturing ideas, but actually to think. We feel the flow of thought, its power like an underground river finding its way for the first time through some shifted ground-even he doesn"t know where it will come out.
Cesar Vallejo embodies the history of mankind, as Jung and Freud do, not by sprinkling the dust of the past on his words, but by thinking his way backward and forward through it.
He loves thinkers and refers to them again and again in his poems-Marx, Feuerbach, Freud, Socrates, Aristotle-at the same time he respects human suffering so much he is afraid that his thought and theirs might be too private: A cripple walks by giving his arm to a child.
After that I"m supposed to read Andre Breton?
In Poemas Humanos especially, Vallejo suggests so well the incredible weight of daily life, how it pulls men down ; carrying a day is like carrying a mountain. And what the weight of daily life wants to pull us down to is mediocrity. He hates it. I notice that women respond immediately to this horror of mediocrity in Vallejo, a horror women share, being often pushed by circ.u.mstances into monotonous, "one-stringed" living, without a trace of wildness. Vallejo wants life and literature to be intense or not at all.
And what if after so many wings of birds, the stopped bird doesn"t survive!
It would be better then, really, if it were all swallowed up, and let"s end it!
It is this marvelous intensity that is his mark for me. Many poets we all know are able to a.s.sociate with considerable speed when there are not many mammal emotions around-Wallace Stevens, for example, creates a philosophical calm in his poetry, inside of which he a.s.sociates quite rapidly-but when anger or anguish enter the poem, they become tongue-tied, or lapse into cliches. Vallejo does just the opposite. Under the pressure of powerful human feeling, of anger, or self-doubt, or compa.s.sion, he leaps about wildly, each leap throwing him farther out into the edges of consciousness, and at the same time deeper into the "depths." As he says, "Don"t we rise to go down?"
Robert Bly
THOUGHTS ON CeSAR VALLEJO.
When I first translated a poem by Cesar Vallejo, one summer night, I knew that I was in the presence of a personality as appealing as any I had met before. The man is a mystic who is skeptical, a fugitive deeply in love with his home, an isolated man who cannot put aside his painful communion with others. He expresses in masculine tones the ma.s.sed, present anger of the poor man. And more, there is something very ancient in this Vallejo which gives his voice a force a reader seldom confronts. It is the authority of the oral poets of the Andes, those fashioners of the "harawi," a mystical, inward-turning complaint. Its tones can still be heard in lyrics sung in the mountains of Peru and played on records in the homesick barrios of Lima. Born in the Andes of an Indian mother, Cesar Vallejo took this folk form in its essentials, discarding what was superficial and picturesque, and made it the echo chamber for a modern and surrealistic speech.
The art of Vallejo is a way of making disparate things live with each other: a young girl nurses the hour, a man points with a G.o.d-murdering finger, a man drowns the length of a throat, a stone walks crouched over in the soul. His ability to astonish with metaphor is matched by a talent for shifting from idiom to idiom. In poems like "Agape," the idiom has a primal simplicity. In, for instance, "The Weary Circles," the poem rises to piercing surrealistic metaphors, and then suddenly drops into the tough, blunt colloquial. Through his work the line springs from or opens into common images of simple and singular life: bread, the act of eating, of putting on your clothes, the pains in the bones, the weather of the day. His most grave poetry is seeded with the tags and catchwords of common speech, those small phrases which all men use to guard their helplessness before the incomprehensible. Other American poets have his ability to create startling metaphors, but no one that I know of has managed to express with such precision and such range the impossible relationship of a man to his own terrible self and his own terrrible times. He whimpers, he denounces, he poses, he sees through himself, he ruminates ; he does all the unimaginable things that everyone does. Compared with Vallejo, other poets seem afraid of the sound of their own voices.
He is at once the most immediate and the most isolated of poets, this man who is always talking to someone who cannot answer. He is certainly a poet of stature, and has been recognized for a long time as one of the greatest of the Latin Americans. Now his light begins to fall the length of the hemisphere.
John Knoepfle from The Black Riders (Los Heraldos Negros) 1918.
LOS HERALDOS NEGROS.
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes Yo no se!
Golpes como del odio de Dios: como si ante ellos, la resaca de todo lo sufrido se empozara en el alma Yo no se!
Son pocos, pero son Abren zanjas oscuras en el rostro ms fiero y en el lomo ms fuerte.
Sern tal vez los potros de brbaros atilas ; o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.
Son las cadas hondas de los Cristos del alma, de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones de algn pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.
Y el hombre Pobre pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada ; vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido se empoza, como un charco de culpa, en la mirada.
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes Yo no se!
THE BLACK RIDERS.
There are blows in life so violent-I can"t answer!
Blows as if from the hatred of G.o.d; as if before them, the deep waters of everything lived through were backed up in the soul I can"t answer!
Not many ; but they exist They open dark ravines in the most ferocious face and in the most bull-like back.
Perhaps they are the horses of that heathen Attila, or the black riders sent to us by Death.
They are the slips backward made by the Christs of the soul, away from some holy faith that is sneered at by Events.
These blows that are b.l.o.o.d.y are the crackling sounds from some bread that burns at the oven door.
And man poor man! poor man! He swings his eyes, as when a man behind us calls us by clapping his hands ; swings his crazy eyes, and everything alive is backed up, like a pool of guilt, in that glance.
There are blows in life so violent I can"t answer!
Translated by Robert Bly
LA ARAA.
Es una arana enorme que ya no anda ; una arana incolora, cuyo cuerpo, una cabeza y un abdomen, sangra.
Hoy la he visto de cerca. Y con que esfuerzo hacia todos los flancos sus pies innumerables alargaba.
Y he pensado en sus ojos invisibles, los pilotos fatales de la arana.
Es una arana que temblaba fija en un filo de piedra ; el abdomen a un lado, y al otro la cabeza.
Con tantos pies la pobre, y an no puede resolverse. Y, al verla atnita en tal trance, hoy me ha dado que pena esa viajera.
Es una arana enorme, a quien impide el abdomen seguir a la cabeza.
Y he pensado en sus ojos y en sus pies numerosos Y me ha dado que pena esa viajera!
THE SPIDER.
It is a huge spider, which can no longer move ; a spider which is colorless, whose body, a head and an abdomen, is bleeding.
Today I watched it with great care. With what tremendous energy to every side it was stretching out its many feet.
And I have been thinking of its invisible eyes, the death-bringing pilots of the spider.
It is a spider which was shivering, fixed on the sharp ridge of a stone ; the abdomen on one side, and on the other, the head.
With so many feet the poor thing, and still it cannot solve it! And seeing it confused in such great danger, what a strange pain that traveler has given me today!
It is a huge spider, whose abdomen prevents him from following his head.
And I have been thinking of his eyes and of his many, many feet And what a strange pain that traveler has given me!
Translated by Robert Bly
ROMERA.