A César Vallejo for the Twenty-First Century

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Notes

1. Outside the United States and Anglophonic literature, to this list of eminent poets should be added Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who published a German selection (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963) in the Afterword to which, “César Vallejo's Furies,” he discusses Vallejo's “naïveté” in the face of “tactical” communism (“Er wußte nicht, was Taktik war”) and the importance of an utopian and religious colour to his political beliefs; in this, one might add, he seems of the order of his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and even Walter Benjamin (Enzensberger's essay is reproduced in his Einzelheiten I & I [Hamburg: Spiegel, 2007], 280–90).

2. Clayton Eshleman, “A Translational Understanding of Trilce #1” (1993), in Companion Spider: Essays (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 153–60.

3. Various internet sources give Clemente Palma's opinion, and can be found in both Spanish and English.

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4^th ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 54 (#119).

5. Quoted in José Carlos Mariátegui, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realdad peruana (1928) (Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2007), 266.

6. In 1925, Diego published his “neo-traditional” Versos humanos, a title which might have stuck with Vallejo when striving to collate a volume of his poetry in the 1930s; Diego's might still have been current at the end of that decade, but would have been more so when Vallejo apparently devised “a Book of Human poems” in 1929 (Vallejo, Complete Poetry, 640) when the antithesis between “verses” and “poems,” so delineated in the transition from Georgianism to Modernism in Anglo-American writing, would have been telling. In his useful notes, Eshleman succinctly handles the issue of titles of editions of Vallejo's posthumous poetry. Diego wrote “Valle Vallejo,” a poem prologue to the 1930 edition of Trilce, picking up motifs from the poems.

7. Ferrari ingeniously remarks of the word “toz” which Eshleman takes as a neologism combining “tos” (cough) and “voz” (voice) (“Intensity and Height” [Complete Poetry, 495]) that the letter “s” was practically above the “z” on Vallejo's typewriter, and so a slip cannot be discounted; however, since “toz” makes a more interesting reading, he lets it stand. See César Vallejo, Obra poética, Edición crítica, ed. Américo Ferrari (Madrid: Allca XX 1997), 400.

8. Mariátegui, 7 ensayos, 260.

9. Quoted by Nathaniel Tarn as an epigraph in his Nowhere for Vallejo (1972).

10. Quoted in Ferrari's edition, 701.

11. In his Russia in 1931, Vallejo comments that the future city should be planned so that society ceases to be a “pack [ jauría] of gross individualisms, a brothel of bestial instincts” and takes on “an essentially human [humana] political and economic structure” (Lima: Editora Perú Nuevo, 1959, 23); in Soviet drama, the leading personages had been abolished, and the main protagonist was the mass (109).

12. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres completes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 86.

13. César Vallejo, The Mayakovsky Case (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 1982).

14. From the Preface to Imitations (1961).