Poetry: Ciaran Cosgrove reviews two collections by Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, who he says subverted the genre.
A somewhat cataclysmic mo-ment in aesthetics appears to have occurred in the early years of the 20th century. Punctiliously, one might even hazard an assertion that that moment of "rupture" as the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, called it, emerges simultaneously across cultures and continents. This is the moment of Cubism in painting when the fracture of representational form, already heralded by Cézanne, is taken a radical step further by Picasso and Braque; the moment too in the music of Schoenberg when tonality is subverted; and the moment in literature some few years later, exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and, a world away, in the same year, in the Spanish language, the truly ground-breaking and linguistically subversive collection of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), neologistically entitled Trilce, a hybrid word, perhaps conflating triste ("sad") and dulce ("sweet").
César Vallejo has some claim to be considered the most innovative and disturbingly creative poet in the Spanish language of the 20th century.
True, the Andalusian-grounded work of García Lorca, the plangently meditative poetry of Antonio Machado and the at times lyrical, at times epically immense, poetry of the Chilean Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda, may lay claim to a pre-eminent status. But no poet revolutionised Spanish syntax in verse so much as César Vallejo. It was as though he felt the need to push language to its very frontiers of expressive possibility. Normal syntactical patterns are ruptured; catachresis is rife; neologisms abound.
In his earlier collection, The Dark Heralds (1918), loss is the prevailing theme: loss of the mother figure, the irrecoverable loss of childhood innocence and religious certainties. But now in Trilce, four years later, the theme of loss is transmogrified into an aesthetic positive. Language in all its rebarbative excess and glory becomes the salvatory mechanism whereby art itself is the surrogate for the emptiness occasioned by the "fall" into adulthood and reflective angst.
As those of us who have for years wrestled with the recalcitrances of Trilce can attest, these poems are often complex, and, it seems, wilfully obscure. They are, too, a real challenge for the translator. In the books under review, Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi have risen magnificently to the task. Earlier translations such as those of Clayton Eschleman and the British Latin Americanist, Jean Franco, are here surpassed. Though the translators here wish to call their translations "versions", these are not "versions" in the Robert Lowell sense of original poems being used as springboards for entirely new poems in a new language. They satisfy Octavio Paz's criterion for the poem that is translated, that it should be an equivalente distinto (an "equivalent that is different and distinct") - but an equivalent nonetheless.
Vallejo left Peru for good in 1923, first for France and then for that Spain of the 1930s. Along with their Spanish counterparts, Lorca and Machado, the four finest Latin-American poets of the 20th century - Vallejo, Neruda, Paz and the Cuban, Nicolás Guillén - witnessed at first hand the trauma of the Spanish Civil War, and wrote poems about that trauma. It can be claimed with some confidence that the best work of these poets is not their "war poetry". That work came before, or, in Neruda's case, after the 1930s. No equivalent of the finest war poetry of Wilfred Owen, for example, can be found in the poems produced in and out of the Spanish war. But a large number of Vallejo's Spanish war poems, to be published only posthumously, must count amongst the finest poems of his entire oeuvre. Particularly, poems such as The Fact is that the Place . . . , Considering Coldly . . . or the title poem of the long sequence, Spain, Let This Cup Pass From Me, will certainly stand the test of time, and are here translated with some aplomb.
These two superbly produced bilingual volumes, replete with synthetic introductions, annotations and bibliography, are strongly to be recommended.
Vallejo's poetry is not known as it ought to be. I think this is because it is a poetry to be read, rather than heard. Its syntactic and lexical awkwardness suggests cacophony rather than any facile acoustic harmony. But this is poetry of its age, the atonal age of Schoenberg and abstract configuration on the canvas. It is a poetry that gives voice to an age of rupture and disharmony.
Weeks before he died, in September 2004, Edward Said, in company with his friend, the conductor and pianist, Daniel Barenboim, commented - and how acutely relevant his words are as we watch the continuing and tragic unfolding of events in the Middle East: "there are moments when music and poetry seem inadequate to the occasion of war, but at such moments, music and poetry must evoke that dissonance of a world gone awry". Vallejo´s poetry, excellently translated in these two volumes, is a poetry to be cherished in war and peace.
Ciaran Cosgrove is head of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin
Trilce By César Vallejo, edited and translated by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi Shearsman Books, 252pp. €21
Complete Later Poems 1923-1938 By César Vallejo, edited and translated by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith Shearsman Books, 419pp. €28