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INTRODUCTION

César Vallejo is by far the most well-known Peruvian writer, yet he’s also the most obscure. Since his rise to fame in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of books, essays, academic theses, and dissertations have been written on his poetry and literary persona. Numerous editions of his poems have appeared in the original Castilian and in translation, as comprehensive volumes and as anthologies.¹ With the stamp of his name, a line from his poems, or the titles of his books, magazines have been launched, conferences have been held, publishing houses have been formed, high schools have been created, and even soccer clubs have taken to the field. A survey of Vallejo’s complete writings, however, shows us that the poetry accounts for only one-sixth of the whole. For the past fifty years, Hispanic scholars, such as Jorge Puccinelli, whose argument I paraphrase, have embarked on the heuristic work of “tracing down and recovering the disjecta membra of a vast literary corpus,” which proved vital, since “to cut off the limb of a tree is to deprive it of life, which resides in the unity of the organism—it is to isolate a fragment from the whole to which it is inextricably bound.”²

More often than not, Vallejo’s readers in English translation sever the tree limb and, onto an already truncated representation, they graft a contrived avant-garde branch, which they’re convinced belongs there because they’ve already seen it in his contemporaries. But can we blame these readers for this confusion, or must we, his translators, assume responsibility, since we’re the ones who’ve known enough to shudder at his poetry’s intensity, but out of professional interest or genric prejudice have consciously or unconsciously ignored the rest of his oeuvre? Few times in the history of Western literature has the representation of such a multifaceted figure been so one-dimensional.

The following compendium reconfigures César Vallejo’s oeuvre. It’s an opportunity to reformulate an understanding of the writings and persona of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. In the following introduction, I sketch out Vallejo’s biography to show where and in whose company he was during specific historical moments and during the composition of certain texts, before moving on to characterize the works or collections of writings from which the selections have been drawn, with the aim of elucidating the oeuvre, specifying its publication history in relation to the author’s writing process, and synthesizing predominant aesthetic features that let us better understand his ideas. Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some brief remarks on the English translation work that lies ahead.

1

High in the Andes of northern Peru, where the cordillera rises ten thousand feet above sea level in a distance of about 350 miles, in the Department of La Libertad there’s a place called Santiago de Chuco. On March 16, 1892, on Calle Colón 96 in that town, a forty-two-year-old mestiza named María de los Santos Mendoza Gurrionero (1850–1918), wife of Francisco de Paula Vallejo Benítez (1840–1924) and mother of eleven, gave birth to her twelfth and final child, whom she named César Abraham.³

Santiago de Chuco doesn’t only mark César Vallejo’s birthplace but also exposes his outlier status ab initio. Both his parents were born and raised in Santiago, and before it became the provincial capital (when it was still a district in the province of Huamachuco), his father had been governor. Additionally, his paternal grandparents were the Galician priest José Rufo Vallejo and his Chimú concubine Justa Benítez; and his maternal grandparents, the Galician priest Joaquín de Mendez and his Chimú concubine Natividad Gurrionero, placing young César in a typical context of mestizaje in the Andes.

Perched on the limb of the new millennium, many of us in North America or Western Europe struggle to imagine what it must have been like to live in Santiago de Chuco a century ago. Even a journey today to that highland town is likely to be misleading; for eyes accustomed to the comfort, commodities, and technologies of developed cities and countries, a journey to Santiago will feel like a trip back in time. But the truth is that this little mountain town has already modernized extensively. According to the 1940 census, in Santiago de Chuco many houses were still lacking utilities that had started to become mainstays in other less remote homes—utilities as basic as electricity and potable water. If we take into account that as late as 1940, out of 957 households, as few as 147 had running water, 130 had drainage, and a mere 2 had electricity, then we must imagine a Santiago in 1892 when Vallejo was born there quite a bit less modern.⁴

We must also be careful not to assume that La Libertad at large had dodged the European influence that so radically changed so much of South America. Out of the approximately forty-eight thousand people in the department, as many as forty-six thousand were mestizos, and about forty thousand over the age of five were proficient only in the Castilian language, while a mere seventy or so individuals knew Castilian and Quechua; no one in the census is said to have known only Quechua or any other indigenous language. Therefore, the Santiago where César Vallejo was born and raised, as Luis Monguío suggests, contained “biological, linguistic, and Indo-Hispanic cultural fusion that extends to the majority … [He] was born in neither the Andalusian nor the indigenous Peru, but in the mestizo, cholo Peru.”⁵

So here we have Vallejo’s early stomping ground, a rural town of the Andes where the process of modernization seemed to lurk on the horizon but not fully arrive. Although there’s a lack of sufficient information to determine his early childhood education with detail and certainty, we do know that he was largely inspired by his grandfathers and, at an early age, is said to have wanted to follow in their footsteps and become a priest. We also know that he attended secondary school in Huamachuco, as Santiago didn’t have one, but apparently only in 1905 and 1906 and thereafter sporadically, probably coming in only to take exams, since his family couldn’t afford to send him full-time.

Nevertheless, when 1910 rolled around, the horizons of a now eighteen-year-old César began to widen as he moved from his highland hometown to the coastal city of Trujillo on April 2. There he enrolled in the Department of Humanities at La Universidad de La Libertad but didn’t even finish his first year on account of economic hardship, which led him to work for a stint in the Quiruvilca mines instead—an experience that eventually received literary expression in his novel Tungsten and his play Brothers Colacho. Desperately trying to carry out his studies, on April 11, 1911, he enrolled in the Department of Science at the same university but again dropped out for financial reasons, and this time found work from May to December tutoring the children of a wealthy land owner, Domingo Sotil.

César continued to live as a sort of rogue intellectual for the next few years, looking for a vocation. In 1912, for example, he took a job on a sugar plantation called Roma, nor far from Trujillo in the Chicama valley, which was “owned by the Larco Herreras, one of the two big families (the other being the Gildemeisters) who had come to monopolize the sugar industry in Peru after the war of the Pacific.” It’s not hard to imagine how strongly impacted the future champion of social justice would’ve been when he saw “hundreds of peons arriving at the sugar estate at the crack of dawn and working until nightfall in the fields, with only a fistful of rice to live on.”⁶ Vallejo was horrified by the way those workers’ lives “were dominated by alcohol sold to them on credit,” creating debts that rapidly accrued to the point that they’d surely outlive their debtors, and it was this “hideous process [that] devastated him and lit a fuse that burned until 1928, the year he suffered the implosion that resulted in his inability to conform with social conditions for the rest of his life.”⁷ We should also point out that Vallejo’s direct contact with these workers, who would’ve been native speakers of Quechua, can help explain where some of his surprisingly large Quechua vocabulary may have come from.

In 1913–14, Vallejo managed to reenroll in the Department of Humanities with the money he was earning from a job he’d landed teaching botany and anatomy at Centro Escolar de Varones in Trujillo. This proved to be a formative period in his life, since this return to the university also placed him in a literary environment that fostered his creative endeavors and shaped his artistic theories. The following year, he was adopted by Grupo Norte in the Trujillo counterculture, his “bohemia” as he referred to it fondly over the years. The group consisted of Eulogio Garrido, whose house was the central meeting place; Antenor Orrego Espinoza; Alcides Spelucín; Juan Espejo; Óscar Imaña; Macedonio de la Torre; Eloy Espinosa; Federico Esquerre; Leoncio Muñoz; Alfonso Sánchez Arteaga; Francisco Sandoval; Juan Sotero; and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. During this time Vallejo started taking courses in law and switched jobs, giving preference to a position at Colegio Nacional de San Juan, where, as it turns out, he ended up teaching a young man by the name of Ciro Alegría.⁸ Complicating this adventure into Trujillo’s literary underworld was the terrible loss of César’s brother Miguel, who died in Santiago.⁹

Later that year Vallejo earned his licenciatura in philosophy and letters at La Universidad de La Libertad with his thesis “Romanticism in Castilian Poetry,” a sweeping survey that demonstrates remarkable critical skill and foresight. In the thesis Vallejo saw José Manuel Quintana as “the father of revolutionary poets,” praised José María de Heredia for his innovative “Galician vocabulary and natural pomp,” and disputed the claim that in the work of José Zorrilla romantic poetry reached its apogee, because it was in José de Espronceda’s El diablo mundo that “the robust poetic temperament … exploded in a blast of asphyxia, thirsty for light and space.” With the thesis out of the way, over the next couple of years Vallejo started publishing poems from The Black Heralds in magazines and had an affair with María Rosa Sandoval, who inspired several of his early love poems. This was when he started reading magazines like Cervantes, Colónida, La Esfera, and España, which were crucial resources that fostered his production of experimental poetry.

From July to December 1917 Vallejo had a love affair with Zoila Rosa Cuadra, whom he nicknamed “Mirtho”—a name that resurfaced as the title of a short story in Scales published five years later. In the midst of this relationship, on September 22, 1917, to be precise, the Lima magazine Variedades took interest in one of his poems. Like many young writers who emerge from the peripheries, Vallejo had initially been ignored, and when the professional critics of Lima deemed it unfashionable to disregard his youthful voice, they acknowledged his presence by using him as a punching bag. “The Poet to His Lover,” which he’d submitted to Variedades and simply initialed, was published, accompanied by a rather unflattering cartoon and the following note from Clemente Palma:

Mr. C. A. V. Trujillo. You too belong to the lot that comes whistling the ditty which we attribute to everyone who keeps trying to tune their lyrical wind bags, i.e., the youth that has been dealt a hand to write kitsch poetic rubbish. And said ditty should let you rest assured that we shall publish your monstrosity. You have sent us a sonnet titled “The Poet to His Lover” which, in all honesty, would be more appropriate for the accordion or the ocarina than for poetry. Your verses are noxious twaddle and, until you remove your piece of junk from the wastepaper basket, we shall see nothing else than the dishonor you have done to the people of Trujillo, and if one day your neighbors discover your name, they will find a rope and bind you to the tracks like a tie on the Malabrigo railroad.¹⁰

By 1918 Vallejo’s situation started to change dramatically. After moving to Lima, he began graduate studies in January in the Humanities Department of La Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. The following month he met the visionary poet and founder of Colónida, Abraham Valdelomar, whom he came to see as one of the few guides for the literary youth of Peru. Since Vallejo was preparing for the upcoming publication of The Black Heralds, Valdelomar offered to write a foreword, but while visiting Ayacucho he tragically fell, broke his back, and died before he could do so. Vallejo delayed the release a few more months and printed the book with the biblical epigraph qui potest capere capiat (Matthew 9:12). In the brief time that the two men knew each other personally, Valdelomar managed to leave the kind of impression on Vallejo that only a mentor can and, aside from framing questions on the future of Peruvian poetry, one day in Lima Valdelomar introduced César to a young man by the name of Pablo Abril de Vivero, whose future in international diplomacy awaited him in Europe. No one could’ve imagined that this introduction would end up turning into the strongest of friendships (recorded in more than two hundred moving letters).

That May Vallejo’s spirits must have been high when he secured a teaching position at the prestigious Colegio Barrós. Yet here again we see the unfortunate pattern of hope and devastation continue to unfold: on August 8, 1918, María de los Santos Mendoza died of angina in Santiago. The death of his mother marked César for the rest of his life and became the inspiration of many compositions.¹¹ It’s difficult to emphasize enough the weight of this event on his writings. The mother figure seems to haunt the texts with absence, almost always appearing in spectral form, leading the author to contemplate union from divorce, to view wholeness from the fragment, and to conceive of being from the existential standpoint of orphanhood.

In October 1918 Vallejo rebounded from the tragedy and became romantically involved with a young woman named Otilia Villanueva, who appears to be the subject of many love poems in Trilce. According to Espejo, who was close to Vallejo during those years, the relationship lasted until August 1920. As it turns out, Otilia was the sister-in-law of one of Vallejo’s colleagues at Colegio Barrós, and when she was looking for commitment but he refused to marry her, he was scorned by the administration, since, in the eyes of aristocratic Lima, his failure to formalize the relationship diminished the dignity and social status of the young woman and her family. Vallejo was ultimately forced to resign in May 1919.

Yet, only a couple of months later, César saw his first major publication in print, The Black Heralds, released by Souza Ferreira in Lima on July 23, 1919. This forerunner of literary indigenism received a warm reception for its originality of style and thematic treatments of rural Peruvian life. Vallejo’s satisfaction with the monograph is reflected in two small but revealing documents: a dedicated copy of the book to his “brothers” in Trujillo (July 1919) and a second dedicated copy sent to his father in Santiago.¹² The Black Heralds was the crowning achievement of Vallejo’s literary youth, and after its release he lost his innocence, demolishing the limits of Hispanic literature rather than securing a place for his writing within those boundaries.

The sweetness of this literary success, however, didn’t last long, and on August 1, 1920, when Vallejo went to visit his brother in Santiago on the last day of the festival of Saint James, he got caught up in a town feud that had been fueled by the last elections. The general store of Carlos Santa María went up in flames, a bystander was shot, and two police officers were killed. Despite the fact that Vallejo had been helping the subprefect write up the legal report of the shooting, the Santa María family indicted him, Héctor M. Vásquez, Pedro Lozada, and fifteen others. Vallejo fled to Mansiche (on the outskirts of Trujillo), where he stayed with his friend Antenor Orrego. After being pursued for nearly two months, in a letter to Óscar Imaña from October 26, 1920, Vallejo started to recognize what was awaiting him: “Maybe in a few days the case will be solved, and will be solved in my favor. I find it hard to believe. But, maybe …” In that same letter he expressed his plans to travel abroad. On November 6 he was captured and imprisoned in Trujillo Central Jail, where he was held for the next three and a half months. In the dehumanizing conditions of that provincial prison—a dungeon that haunted him for years to come and saturated his next two books with the excruciating anguish of incarceration, the feeling of condemnation, and the imagery of confinement—Vallejo wrote some of his most celebrated experimental poetry.¹³ On February 26, 1921, with the help of his attorney, Carlos Godoy, in addition to a publicity campaign mounted by students at La Universidad de La Libertad and influential figures like poet Percy Gibson, César was released on bail.

Whether Vallejo was innocent or guilty remains to be proven with certainty, and several important factors must be taken into consideration. As Stephen Hart explains, “Legal accounts show that—despite an adroit campaign mounted by the Trujillo intelligentsia in defense of the poet—Vallejo was directly involved in the events leading up to the destruction of the Santa María premises.” In his reading of El proceso Vallejo by Patrón Candela, Hart reports that the proceedings “indicate that Vallejo was at the front of the crowd that gathered in the main square that afternoon and was heard inciting others to take part in the mayhem. He was seen holding a revolver, and in much of the evidence for the prosecution, he is mentioned as the instigator.”¹⁴

This new reading contradicts the traditional claim of his innocence and seems plausible, given Vallejo’s later commitment to social revolution; however, we must be careful not to confuse official records for irrefutable truth, since there’s certainly the possibility of bias in a case like this. For example, in a rural setting like Santiago de Chuco circa 1920, authorities would’ve sought a scapegoat at any cost (especially a bohemian cholo like Vallejo) to appease a member of the mercantile class or send a message to other bothersome miscreants of that irreverent counterculture. Furthermore, Vallejo had already started to garner renown as an emerging poet; so in the eyes of his provincial prosecutors, his move to the capital could’ve been perceived as class betrayal. Vallejo alluded to this prejudice in a letter to Gastón Roger, where he claimed he’d been indicted because he came “from the heartland,” and that in “this provincial environment” there was no way he’d receive a fair trial.

After his 1921 release, Vallejo returned to Lima and was appointed to a teaching position at Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Leaving the prison experience behind him as best he could, he managed to publish a surprising number of important texts in a remarkably brief span. On November 15, 1921, his short story “Beyond Life and Death” won first prize in a competition organized by Entre Nous—a text subsequently published in the magazine Variedades on June 17, 1922, and finally placed in Scales. Then, in October 1922 César delivered a poetry manuscript to Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría in Lima, with a prologue by Antenor Orrego. The book was titled Bronze Skulls and, at the last minute, Vallejo slipped a correction sheet into the galley to change the title to Trilce, a word that he’d invented. Despite the great anticipation, in the months following the book’s publication, as Vallejo himself remarked in a letter to Orrego, “only a handful of young still-unknown writers and several college kids have shuddered at its message.” To put it bluntly, the book initially went unnoticed. Five months later, in March 1923, César delivered another manuscript to the same publisher, this time a collection of prose poems and short stories that had been composed during the same period as the texts of Trilce. This book was titled Scales and—never one to miss out on an opportunity to flaunt his youthful flair and so thematically rhyme this book with its predecessor—these Scales were to be “Melographed by César Vallejo.” Almost immediately after the publication of Scales, Vallejo’s other early prose fiction, Savage Lore, was included in La Novela Peruana, a biweekly edited by Pedro Barrantes Castro in Lima.

By the time this flurry of literary success was outlining an aura around the now thirty-one-year-old, his days in Peru were numbered, and his sights were set on the City of Light. Before he left, he signed on as a correspondent for the magazine El Norte, which his Trujillo friends were about to launch. He communicated with Enrique Casterot, also from Trujillo, who gave him the address of a Peruvian musician who, at that time, was living in Paris and going by the name Alfonso de Silva.¹⁵ Vallejo didn’t have the money for a grand European vacation, even if he intended on working while abroad, and he was only able to take the trip thanks to Julio Gálvez (Antenor Orrego’s nephew), who exchanged his own first-class ticket on the steamship Oroya for two third-class tickets, keeping one and giving the other to his friend.¹⁶ In the days preceding his departure, Vallejo was visited by his brother Néstor, who said good-bye in Lima. The day before leaving for Europe, César wrote to Carlos Godoy and said that he “would’ve liked to stop in Salaverry” to visit him in person, but the boat unfortunately didn’t pass through that port. He also asked his attorney to oversee the development of the case from August while he was out of the country and to mind the well-being of his family. Joined by the selfless Gálvez, Vallejo boarded the Oroya on June 17, 1923, and headed up the western coast of South America toward the Panama Canal, where the ship was to reach Atlantic waters and take its eastbound course.

* * *

A little less than one month later, on July 13, 1923, to be exact, Vallejo arrived in Paris at 7 a.m. on the express train from La Rochelle. Filled with unreal expectations and a somewhat incomprehensible naivety regarding his personal finances, César tested the waters of Parisian intellectual life. Although most of his later poems didn’t reach the public until after his death, it was at this time that he started to write “extremely somber, straightforward, and deeply felt works [that] form a bridge between Trilce and the poetry Vallejo would write in the thirties when, having committed himself to Marxist ideology, he forced the teeth of the revolution into the gums of his personal life.”¹⁷ His first steps took him from rue d’Odessa, where he was lodged in the Odessa Hotel, near the Gare de Montparnasse, over to Montmartre. A few days later he attended the Paris premiere of Maeterlink’s play The Blue Bird, produced by Cora Laparcerie, and to his dismay the warm response it received, as he says in El Norte, was the result of “undeniable decadence in the sensibility, a consistent decadence, no longer the Byzantine hyperesthesia, but rather an alarming anesthesia” (February 1, 1924). Vallejo also went to and wrote in El Norte about la Rotonde, where he gawked at that “ambiguous hypogeum … a boisterous alveolus of cosmopolitan mange” (February 22, 1924), a polyglot crowd that filled the salons, where he saw Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and Guatemalan critic Enrique Gómez Carillo, plus Tristan Tzara, Max Jacob, and Pierre Reverdy.

A couple of weeks after his arrival in Paris, Vallejo made use of the contact information that Casterot had given him back in Peru, and on July 28 (Peruvian Independence Day), he and Gálvez strode into the Peruvian Embassy looking for a man by the name of Alfonso de Silva. This, of course, was the first of many meetings between César and Alfonso, whose friendship during 1923 was essential to Vallejo’s adjustment to life in Paris as a young insolvent foreigner. In a letter to Carlos Raygada, Silva describes this initial encounter:

Having only previously known each other by sight and like-mindedness (which is, after all, the most important), we shook hands and began to chat. I offered to guide him around and help him out with whatever I could, and so we decided to get together the following day, not without having shared some champagne to toast to the “missing Country.” … The next day we met up as we had planned and took a stroll around Paris.¹⁸

In the short time they spent together, Silva taught Vallejo how to be poor in Paris, and Vallejo, whose spiritual genealogy can be traced back to Dostoevsky, became intimately acquainted with suffering. Eventually, César recognized how poverty had worn down his friend, and on September 15, 1923, he wrote to Raygada, begging him to purchase Alfonso a ticket so that he could return to Peru. “Europe is like this,” he explains. “Sometimes it can give and other times it crumbles your soul from which it repossesses something that it gave and something it did not. Alfonso no longer has anything to take away from here. He must return.”¹⁹

Watching Silva’s mental and physical health decline must have weighed heavily on Vallejo, whose conviction to support himself was tested by a brutal interwar economy and his own contumacious ideals. His letters to Pablo Abril de Vivero, which spanned the 1924–34 period, attest to the constant financial hardship that befell Vallejo in Europe. This, no doubt, explains part of what motivated Abril, around that time, to start pushing the paperwork to get César a grant to study law in Madrid.

When Vallejo reached Europe, he hit the ground not running but scrambling, working anyway as a correspondent with El Norte.²⁰ His first years in Paris, precisely the period least known in his biography (after his early childhood education), are punctually registered in his chronicles published in that paper launched only five months earlier by his Trujillan brethren. To the surface rose figures of Peruvian literature and history that proved capital in that century: Antenor Orrego, Víctor Raúl and José Agustín Haya de la Torre, Alcides Spelucín, Juan Asturrizaga, Eloy B. Espinosa, Óscar Imaña, and Macedonio de la Torre. El Norte was well received for its opinion columns, unusual in journalism of that era, and it was distinguished by its courageous editors and their commentary on national and international affairs and their campaigns in defense of the interests of the country and the department of La Libertad.

At the time when Vallejo entered the world of journalism, it had become fashionable to follow a model of light, frivolous, impressionist reading, whose formal expression was epitomized by the articles of Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Ventura García Calderón.²¹ Contrary to this decadent aesthetic sauna, Vallejo’s chronicles are more closely relegated to those of Alejandro Sux, Manuel Ugarte, José Carlos Mariátegui, and J. J. Soiza Reilly. In the early chronicles his writing still bears traces of Trilce and Scales, where the text includes a metanarration of its own creation and the author looks for the perfect turn of phrase, the unimaginable expressions that would astonish his unsuspecting readers. This, of course, changed considerably as Vallejo became more comfortable with the genre and started to take stronger stances and embrace the directness of his extraliterary prose.

The article “Peruvian Literature: The Latest Generation,” published just a couple of months after his arrival to Paris, is early proof of his lucid generational awareness that he reveals throughout his European chronicles, without becoming smitten by a false devotion to a system that attempts to explain everything in function of age.²² The search for generational identity and the identification of worthy role models emerged in multiple articles and chronicles in which Vallejo distinguished two key concepts in his work: “indigenist will” and “indigenous sensibility.” It’s by distinguishing these two tendencies that, five years later, he reformulated the question of the “New” in terms of autochthony that, in the proclamatory article “Against Professional Secrets,” he so eloquently laid out: “Autochthony does not consist in saying that one is autochthonous but precisely in being so, even when not saying so.”²³ Perhaps this authenticity is what he sensed in the then recently deceased Abraham Valdelomar, whose leadership he clearly recognized for his generation. Although it isn’t celebrated internationally to the same degree that it is in Peru, Valdelomar’s work paved the way for an entire generation to explore new literary modalities and to salvage from the past what was still useful.

In September 1924, around the time Vallejo was introduced to Vicente Huidobro and Juan Larrea, Costa Rican sculptor Max Jiménez generously allowed him to stay in his studio at 3, rue Vercingétorix, where César posed for Spanish sculptor José de Creeft, whose bust of the Peruvian has become iconic. Vallejo wrote about the sculpture and whether or not portraiture truly exists. “I’m afraid you may say it does,” he chides. “I’m afraid you may say it doesn’t, that the portrait is already an extinct artistic genre, an aesthetic species that, like the milodon in zoology or like the bone pfeilstrecker in Barbarian sculpture, now belongs to archaeology.” But he uses the debate to wage a critique against ambivalence, since he’s most suspicious of those who lack the resolve to tell him whether “the portrait does or doesn’t exist in art.”²⁴

The following month, out of the blue, Vallejo suffered an intestinal hemorrhage and was hospitalized in la Charité hospital. Fifteen months in Paris and suddenly his life was flashing before his eyes. His stay in the hospital was long and drawn out, and during the fourth week, in a letter to Abril a fatalist Vallejo confessed his terrible suffering and confrontation with mortality:

There are hours more, perhaps much more sinister and terrible than the tomb itself. I didn’t know what they were until this hospital showed me, and now I’ll never forget them. In the process of recovery, I often cry for any reason at all. An infantile facility for tears keeps me saturated in an immense mercy for things. I often remember my house, my parents, and lost loves. One day I’ll be able to die, in the course of this hazardous life that has befallen me to live, and so I shall see myself, then just as now, an orphan of all family encouragement and even of love. But my luck has already landed. It’s written. I’m a fatalist. I think everything has been written.²⁵

A couple of weeks later, after the operation, César suffered a second hemorrhage, and this disturbing news he related to Abril in a letter written with a tone that testifies to the intensity of the spiritual challenge he was facing. With his life in peril, he claimed to believe in Jesus Christ again and insisted that he had rediscovered his religion, “taking religion as the supreme consolation in life. Yes. Yes. There must be another world of refuge for the many on earth who suffer” (November 5, 1924).²⁶ But neither two intestinal hemorrhages nor his recently rediscovered religion prevented him from discussing finances in that same letter. Vallejo explains that Mariano H. Cornejo, Peruvian minister to France in the 1920s, had begun a process to purchase him a ticket from Paris to Lima, but he wasn’t seriously considering a return to Peru, since Abril had all but secured his grant to study law in Madrid. Naturally, Vallejo didn’t want the ticket, but its cash value, on which he could survive until the grant came through—and this miraculously happened on March 16, 1925. It was three hundred pesetas per month and, although he never carried out formal studies, he diligently traveled to Spain in October 1925, July 1926, and June 1927 to collect his modest funds.

In 1925 Vallejo experienced a brief period of semistability when he started working in the Bureau des Grands Journaux Ibéroaméricains, a vast publicity organization directed by Alejandro Sux. Right around the time he took this job, he also began writing for the Lima magazine Mundial, headed by Andrés Avelino Aramburú.²⁷ All of a sudden Vallejo was no longer going to be writing articles for his bohemian friends in Trujillo, but for a vaster, more diverse readership. “For this new audience,” Puccinelli explains, Vallejo continued “to mold the new writing of his chronicles and articles,” allowing himself to explore the journalistic form only to “imperceptibly enter the same literary space as his prose poems and Human Poems, to which the articles and chronicles count as parallel texts.” Thus, we see how the modality of journalism played a central role in the maturity of Vallejo’s later writings: “[His] youthful concern for finding le mot rare is replaced by the search for le mot juste,” and this transformation was organically “impacted by his readings of Joseph Conrad.”²⁸

As it turns out, Joseph Conrad had passed away one year after César Vallejo arrived in Paris. An extraordinary homage to Conrad appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française (December 1, 1924), which, aside from a series of testimonies and critical studies, presented a selection of his works in French translation under the title “L’art et la morale de Conrad éclairés par quelques citations.” Over the course of his years in Paris, Vallejo gleaned this miniature anthology, translated his favorite phrases from French to Castilian, and scattered them throughout his own writings, allowing us to situate Conrad as one of Vallejo’s literary heroes.

In May 1926 César met a woman by the name of Henriette Maisse, and they became lovers in a relationship that lasted for about a year and a half. Soon after they moved in together at Hôtel Richelieu (20, rue Molière), the High Court of Trujillo issued a warrant for Vallejo’s arrest, making a return to Peru all the less likely. Later that year he took a brief trip to Spain to collect his grant money and, with coeditor Juan Larrea, he also launched the short-lived literary magazine Favorables-París-Poema. They put out the first of two volumes in July 1926. With a knack for agitation and a biting sense of humor, inside the cover of each copy they slipped a business card that read, “In the event of a discrepancy with our attitude, Juan Larrea and César Vallejo request your most resolved hostility.”

Aside from texts by the coeditors, Favorables-París-Poema contained contributions from Gerardo Diego and Tristan Tzara and even poems by Pierre Reverdy, translated by none other than Vallejo. Yet we must be careful not to imagine Vallejo completely integrated into European life with barely a foggy memory of his South American past. From Madrid in the middle of 1926, he made sure to stay in touch with Alejandro Peralta, a seminal figure of early twentieth-century Peruvian literature; Alcides Spelucín, Vallejo’s longtime friend from Trujillo who’d written El libro de la nave dorada; and even a young poet by the name of Emilio Armaza, who’d written a volume called Falo.²⁹ Additionally, the letters he wrote to Abril circa 1926–28 reveal “a total change that starts operating in Vallejo’s conception of art, literature, and the function of the artist. This conceptualization would take a hard left, which is why in his writings one will find a tone that is more political than literary.”³⁰

Back in Paris, in the winter of 1926, César Vallejo met Georgette Philippart, his future wife. The young girl’s mother, Mme Marie Travers, is said to have disapproved of the relationship. The following year, on March 10, Vallejo traveled again to Spain and again stayed for only a brief visit, which was also a parting of ways for him and Henriette, who moved out of Hôtel Richelieu. This was when César’s relationship with Georgette began to develop; however, on May 5, 1927, they got into an argument that sent him running back to Henriette with the hopes that she would forgive him, and she did. He left Hôtel Richelieu and went to live with her in Hôtel Mary. One month later he took yet another trip to Spain, where he was put up by Xavier Abril in his apartment on Calle de la Aduana in Madrid. There he met Juan Domingo Córdoba, who ended up traveling with him back to Paris just a few months later and whose accounts of their time together in Europe have proved to be essential material for the biographical study of our author.³¹

Vallejo’s health again declined in July 1928, and this time his doctor in Paris advised him to take a vacation in the country to recuperate. Accompanied by Henriette and Domingo Córdoba, he stayed at the house of Monsieur Nauty in Ris Orangis (Seine-et-Oise).³² He’d been in Paris for five years only to live a life of poverty and frustration. His success in literary publishing had been stunted by his open rejection of the prevailing trends. At a time when life was hard, his stubborn ideals made it harder. Yet, if the letters reveal sentiments of self-pity, nowhere in the writings of César Vallejo do we find a defeated attitude; a robust vivacity dominates his oeuvre—a gritty willingness to live and perhaps a perverse desire to suffer.

By the end of 1928, the ethical dilemma that had taken hold of Vallejo erupted into an all-out crisis. Change had become a necessity—radical change: revolution! In a letter to Abril written on October 19, Vallejo explained that he was leaving that day for Russia. Although his health had improved and he’d recovered his strength, his sense of purpose in life had become turbid with doubt, and it was this desire for clarity that drove him to the land of the Soviet:

I feel (perhaps more than ever) tormented by the problem of my future, and it’s precisely with the drive to resolve this problem that I’m setting off on this journey. I realize what my role in life is not. I haven’t found my path yet, but I want to find it, and perhaps in Russia I will, since on this other side of the world where I live, things move on springs similar to the rusty wing nuts of America. I’ll never do anything in Paris. Perhaps in Moscow I’ll find better shelter from the future.

* * *

On October 19, 1928, César Vallejo stepped off a Paris platform and onto a train headed for Moscow. This was the first of three trips that he took in the next few years. Despite his high hopes for finding a long-term solution to the worsening crisis tearing him apart, none of his trips to that young USSR lasted very long and, on this first occasion, he was back in Paris as early as November 13, 1928. Yet it’s astounding how many people he managed to interview and how many locations he visited in what turned out to be just under one month’s time. These raw materials transformed into a trove of new articles, a political report, and two books of thoughts.

The highlight of this trip took place in Leningrad, in late October, when Vallejo attended a meeting of Bolshevik writers, which became the central topic of chapter 8 of Russia in 1931. Two of the writers there (Sergei Kolbasiev and Vissarion Sayanov) were mentioned in the Peruvian’s oft-contended article “The Mayakovsky Case” from Art and Revolution:

At a gathering of Bolshevik writers in Leningrad, Kolbasiev said to me, “Contrary to what’s presumed abroad, Mayakovsky isn’t the greatest Soviet poet or anything of the sort. Mayakovsky is nothing more than a thespian hyperbolist. Before him are Pasternak, Biedny, Sayanov, and many others …”

I knew Mayakovsky’s work, and my opinion was in absolute agreement with Kolbasiev’s. And, a few days later, when I spoke in Moscow with the author of 150,000,000, our conversation confirmed Kolbasiev’s judgment for all of eternity. In reality, Mayakovsky isn’t the greatest Soviet poet. He’s merely the most published. If one read more of Pasternak, Kaziin, Gastev, Sayanov, Viesimiensky, the name Mayakovsky would vanish from many radio waves.

For years, questions surrounding this meeting riddled Vallejo’s readers; however, thanks to Alexander Batrakov, director of the Centro Cultural Ruso in Lima, and the late Manuel Miguel de Priego, we know quite a bit about this meeting that, for Vallejo, proved quite important. It took place in the house of Sergei Adamovich Kolbasiev (1898–1937), a Russian writer on maritime topics and member of the literary group Ostrovityane (Islanders). In his autobiographical novels he recounts experiences of his service in the Red Fleet. He was the author of the poetry collection The Open Sea (1922) and numerous narratives: The Rules of Group Navigation (1935) and Tales of the Wartime Seascape (1936), inter alia. He was arrested in 1937 and died in jail that same year. Also at the meeting was Vissarion Mikhailovich Sayanov (1903–59), born in the village of Ivanushkinskaia, in modern-day Kirensk Raion, Irkutsk Oblast, author of the poetry collection Komsomol Poetry (1928), Contemporaries (1929), and The Golden Olyokma (1934), as well as the novels Heaven and Earth, I–IV (1935–54) and The Lena, I–II (1953–55). During World War II he was a frontline correspondent and wrote In the Battles for Leningrad (1943) and then The Nuremberg Diaries (1948).

In addition to Kolbasiev and Sayanov, the other writers at this meeting included Boris Viktorovich Lipatov, Wolf Yosifovich Ehrlich, and Ilya Ivanovich Sadofiev.³³ Lipatov (1905–54), born in Yekaterinburg, participated in the civil war, and from 1926 he wrote for the stage and the screen. Among his screenplays is Tri Soldata, which he adapted with Aleksandr Ivanov from John Dos Passos’s realist novel Three Soldiers (1920). He also wrote the screenplay Treasure of the Wrecked Vessel (1935), inter alia. Ehrlich (1902–37) was a Russian-Jewish poet who authored the collection Wolf Song and others that glorify the revolutionary orthodoxy. For his part, Sadofiev (1889–1965) began to publish his poems in Pravda during the prerevolutionary period. Then in 1917 he became an activist in Protekult: in the second half of the 1920s he became the president of the Association of Leningrad Poets (a position he held when Vallejo was visiting). He’s the author of the poetry collections Dynamo Verses (1918) and Simpler Than Simplicity (1925), as well as the short story collection The Bloody Staircase (1925), which is saturated with heavy revolutionary dramatics.

From this meeting in Leningrad, Vallejo seems to have confirmed a suspicion he’d been contemplating in an array of magazine articles, namely, that the prevailing schools of poetry—such as dadaism, futurism, surrealism, ultraism, and creationism—all contained a similar, if not identical, contradiction. They wanted to patent a technique by which new art was to be created. Vallejo recognized the problematic of aesthetic secularism and exposed the sociopolitical underpinnings of those avant-garde platforms that, by dint of excluding themselves from the problems they were addressing, actually reinforced the kinds of divisions that writers like Kolbasiev, Sayanov, Lipatov, Ehrlich, and Sadofiev were fighting to destroy. In the Peruvian’s eyes, the European avant-garde appeared as a cult of decadence, the sign of decrepitude, whereas the Latin American avant-garde was imported posture, the sign of insincerity and self-deceit; and just like the romantics had surged out of the worn-out neoclassical mentality, so too did the moderns need to eschew the personally amusing fin de siècle parlor games and produce socially responsible art to get out from under the rubble left by decades of war. The Leningrad writers confirmed Vallejo’s hypothesis that, at a time when modernism was fully coming into itself, there was a viable alternative to the avant-garde.

Upon his return to Paris, during this socialist shift that soon became evident in his writings circa 1928, Vallejo took special interest in the performing arts, first as critic and then as creator. His affinity for the stage and screen is unambiguous with just a glance at such articles as “Avant-Garde Religions,” “Contribution to Film Studies,” “Vanguard and Rearguard,” and of course his unforgettable homage to and defense of one of his major inspirations in the genre, “The Passion of Charles Chaplin.” This last article in particular was centered on The Gold Rush and explained how misunderstood the U.S. film pioneer was at that time. Russians exited cinemas teary-eyed with the belief that he was a realist; Germans considered him from an intellectual perspective; the English thought he was a clown; the French were sure he was a comedian; and, as for Chaplin’s compatriots,

[they have not] perceived, even at a distance, the profound and tacitly revolutionary spirit of The Gold Rush. I’m lying. In a subconscious way, perhaps, the gringos have teamed up with Lita Grey to stone Chaplin, just like the other Philistines stoned Our Lord, equally unconscious of the historical meaning of their hatred.³⁴

Vallejo valued screen and stage performance for its effectiveness at transmitting to the masses the representation of human struggle and perseverance, shining the spotlight on social injustice and pressing a finger on an untreated wound so that even people who’d rather ignore it could no longer deny its existence. This was possible, according to the Peruvian, only in truly revolutionary works, since these don’t fall into the usual ideological traps of exploiting preestablished aesthetics and jumping on the bandwagon, which prohibits the production of sincere artistic expression. As an authentic visionary in an emerging field, Chaplin embodied the perfect revolutionary artist, because he didn’t require political propaganda to condemn systemic corruption, and the fact that he was wealthy and championed the poor proved that human solidarity could outrank class loyalty:

So it is, without a cheap protest against subprefects or ministers; without even uttering the words “bourgeois” or “exploitation”; without political adages or maxims; without childish messianics, Charles Chaplin, millionaire and gentleman, has created a marvelous work of revolution. This is the role of the creator.

Over time, unsuspected political platforms and economic doctrines will be yanked out of The Gold Rush. That will be the work of second-rate artists and imitators, propagandists, university professors, and candidates for the government of the people.³⁵

The Peruvian’s first stabs at writing for the performing arts (stage plays written in French: Mampar, Les Toups, and Lock-Out) fell flat on their face and made clear that drama wasn’t going to come as easily to the natural-born poet as verse had, but this didn’t stop him from trying and, in the last months of his life, he achieved astounding success.

In late December, as 1928 was winding down, Armando Bazán, Juan Paiva, Eudocio Ravines, Jorge Seoane, Demetrio Tello, and César Vallejo formed a Peruvian Socialist Party cell in Paris and soon thereafter informed José Carlos Mariátegui, who had founded the Peruvian Socialist Party in Lima on October 7, 1928. It was also around that time that César reunited with Georgette, and in January 1929 the couple rented an apartment together at 11, avenue de l’Ópera, in Paris—a street not far from where Vallejo internalized massive Parisian traffic jams in rue de Rivoli, which he interpreted as “the picturesque and, at once, tragic peripeteia of the political scene of history,” since the chauffeurs defended their fare-paying passengers (the “higher-ups”) instead of the pedestrians (the “underdogs”), and the pedestrians berated the chauffeurs, who were underdogs without realizing it, instead of seeking solidarity with them. “These two errors,” he concludes, “are the blunders and irony inherent in the drama, and they make it all the more bloody and painful.”³⁶

No matter how hard the left was that Vallejo took around 1928, it would be an error to dub him a “grammatical Marxist” and lay the issue to rest. A close reading of his articles and chronicles shows that he saw Marx’s ideas as essential developments in the transformation of philosophical thought, but that by no means did Marx represent a final solution to the problems that challenge humanity. Suffice a review of “The Lessons of Marxism” to drive this point home:

What a pitiful orgy of parroting eunuchs the traitors of Marxism get in on. Based on the conviction that Marx is the only philosopher of the past, present, and future, who has scientifically explained social motion and who, as a consequence, has once and for all hit the nail on the head of the laws governing the human spirit, their first vital disgrace consists of amputating their own creative possibilities at the root, relegating them to the condition of panegyrist parrots and parrots of Das Kapital.³⁷

For Vallejo, Marxian philosophy offered the promise of perpetual transformation, a concept visible in the Peruvian’s writings not only on a theoretical register, as is laid out in his articles and chronicles, but also in praxis throughout the pages of his poetry, fiction, and plays. For example, Vallejo satirizes this error of imposing a finalist nature on Marx’s transformative function of thought in act 1, scene 3, of The River Flows between Two Shores, where the young revolutionary, Ilitch, challenges his older conservative brother, Vladimir, to a reading duel, in which the former recites passages from his Marxist reader at the top of his lungs while the latter tries to drown him out by reading passages from one of his mother’s religious books.

In February 1929, at the age of thirty-seven, Vallejo started writing articles for El Comercio of Lima. Certain that he wanted to visit the Soviet Union again after he’d returned to Paris in mid-November 1928, Vallejo kept in contact with the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), and thanks to this organization he was able to organize a second trip in the fall of 1929. This time, he and Georgette traveled together, planning a sort of Europe-by-rail tour that had the following itinerary: Paris–Berlin–Moscow–Leningrad–Prague–Cologne–Vienna–Budapest–Trieste–Venice–Florence–Rome–Pisa–Genoa–Nice–Paris. Despite the apparent grandeur of this journey, it lasted only slightly longer than the first.

Akin to his first trip to Russia, on this tour, short as it was, Vallejo obtained a wealth of information and interviewed many people, this time in factories, on farms, at industrial centers, in laboratories, on the street, in their homes—we’re talking about hundreds of people! The direct observations, the in situ reflections, and a great majority of the material he recorded ended up receiving concrete expression in magazine articles and the report Russia in 1931—a best seller in Spain and the most successful publication in the author’s lifetime.

One sequence of interviews occurred while Vallejo recorded a day in the life of a stonemason, observing the man’s family, workmates, workplace, his eating habits, his research at the Workers’ Club, and his view on sports. The Peruvian even joined him at a theater where the large diverse audience admired and was moved by the conflict in Vladimir Kirshon’s play The Rails Are Humming. With the objective voice of a journalist, Vallejo vividly recounted the experience in chapter 9 of that report as well as in an article called “New Russian Theater.”

Another momentous meeting transpired when the father of Russian futurism, Vladimir Mayakovsky, introduced César Vallejo to Sergei Eisenstein at a preliminary screening of The General Line. In that film, Eisenstein’s radical celebration of collective labor and mechanized agriculture along with the dramatization of the exploitation suffered by prerevolutionary workers was light-years ahead of what passed as cutting edge in Parisian cinemas. Next to Conrad and Chaplin, Russian film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein undoubtedly stands as one of Vallejo’s great contemporary inspirations, and his films received rigorous treatment by the enthused Peruvian in chapter 4, “Russia Inaugurates a New Era on the Silver Screen,” in Russia in 1931. “Labor is the father of human society,” he proclaims, after viewing The General Line, and he can’t help recognize “how far we are here from Hollywood and all its schmaltzy, decadent dressing rooms!”³⁸

Soon after César and Georgette had left Moscow, not without first visiting Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, Abril started placing Vallejo’s new chronicles in his biweekly review called Bolivar. The column was titled “A Report from Russia” and essentially constituted early iterations of chapters that later became Russia in 1931. In addition to his reportage and with the generous logistical support of Gerardo Diego, the second edition of Trilce was published on April 9, 1930, by José Bergamín, who wrote an insightful prologue at the author’s request. A letter from Vallejo to Diego (January 6, 1930) informs us that Peruvian placed his complete trust in the sensibility and skill of his Spanish colleagues and didn’t directly take the manuscript to press for the second edition.

The month after Trilce came out, César and Georgette traveled from Paris to Spain. We know that while they were there, Vallejo met with Gerardo Diego, Rafael Alberti, and Pedro Salinas in Café de Recoletos and also that he received 15,000 pesos in front-end royalties for the second edition of Trilce. It was also during this excursion that the Peruvian went to Salamanca with Domingo Córdoba to meet with Miguel de Unamuno, but the interview never happened. No matter what the reason may have been, it’s hard not to think that Vallejo must’ve seen this absence, at least in part, as confirmation of the harsh evaluation he’d dealt the Spaniard four years prior: it was just further “proof of his mediocrity.”³⁹

After a few weeks in Spain, César and Georgette returned to France, where they stayed until the end of the year, when they were hit with a disturbing surprise. On December 2, 1930, Vallejo received notification that he was being expulsed from France for his political activities and had until January 29 of the following year to leave the country. He and Georgette were out of France by December 29 and on their way back to Madrid. They arrived on New Year’s Eve and stayed at a modest home on Calle del Acuerdo. “When he left Paris,” Meneses explains, “despite the curse that city had cast on him, he seems to have shown optimism toward his future”—optimism that surpassed the realm of literature:

The possibilities of publishing in Spain and finding work with a fair wage became strong incentives. But four months later, the fundamental reason for residing in the Spanish capital had other motives. The monarchy had fallen and the Republic had been established. Vallejo began to see this new chapter in the pages of Spanish history as the Castilian translation of the rise of the Soviet Union.⁴⁰

Without the stigma of exile, Vallejo moved to Madrid and kept the company of Spanish intellectuals and artists, like Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Ibáñez, Damaso Alonso, Pedro Salinas, Leopoldo Panero, Corpus Barga, José Bergamín, and Gerardo Diego. He joined the Spanish Communist Party and began teaching in clandestine cells. He also started writing for La Voz and was commissioned to translate two novels from French to Castilian, one by Henri Barbusse, which he titled Elevación, and the other by Marcel Aymé, which he titled La calle sin nombre.⁴¹ Since these works have been disregarded because they were carried out pro panis lucrando and because of their sensitive political thematics, Vallejo’s translation methodology has virtually gone unstudied, which is an oversight that must be addressed because an analysis of this modality, among other things, could reconcile the contradiction that arises out of his own translations and the contentious position he took against the practice of literary translation just two years earlier.⁴²

On March 7, 1931, Vallejo’s social realist novel Tungsten was published by Editorial Cenit in Madrid just over a month before King Alfonso XIII abdicated and the Spanish Republicans came to power. According to Georgette, César said to her that a revolution that spills no blood isn’t a real revolution.⁴³ In July 1931 Vallejo’s report Russia in 1931 was published by Ulises in Madrid, and despite being reprinted twice in four months and attaining best-seller status, the author didn’t see much of the revenue it brought in, although it was enough to mobilize again, and again he returned to Eastern Europe.

Vallejo took his third trip to Russia in the autumn of 1931. He departed from Madrid on October 11 and, after crossing Europe by rail, reached the Polish-Russian border five days later. Starting from Moscow, he began an impressive southbound journey, through present-day Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, with the following itinerary: Tula–Kiev–Kharkov–Dnieprostroi–Donetsk–Rostov–Tiflis–Elista–Volgograd–Voronezh. The delegation he was with continued toward the Caucasus region, but Vallejo split off and returned to Moscow on the twenty-seventh and to Madrid at the beginning of November.

During this third and final trip to the Soviet Union, Vallejo was pleased to find that the infrastructural development he’d witnessed two years earlier had already made significant progress. The social organization of the Soviet seemed to be on the upswing, and what progress he saw was aggrandized by his own hopes for its success. Nor was the Peruvian the sole intellectual from the Americas to think that the Soviet socialist structure could overtake the capitalist system of the West with its bottomed-out economies and to suspect that the news reaching Western Europe and the Americas propagandized Soviet reality.⁴⁴ On this trip he visited a Workers’ Club and transcribed discussions on a host of topics, from salaries to working conditions, literature, theater, music, food, living quarters, and so on. Without any other recording devices than his notebook, Vallejo annotated his travels and registered as many conversations as he could in preparation for his next book on Russia.

Back in 1928, and then again in 1931, César visited numerous Russian prisons and, after that three-year lapse, he confirmed an astounding decrease in criminality: a 70 percent drop according to his figures. He was also fascinated by Zernograd (literally, City of Grain), a then entirely socialist population of ten thousand inhabitants, covering an area of 463 square miles. There, mechanized agriculture had taken hold in 1929 and, as Priego explains, in this process Vallejo had great dreams of a massive population where hunger would no longer exist:

In terms of the rise of production, Vallejo’s dreams, incarnated in his lyric poetry, rest on this: the mechanization of agriculture and, consequently, socialist rationalization, which could end up flooding the universe with wheat in only a few years; yet, unfortunately, this did not happen, because that most powerful country of hopes ended up purchasing almost all the wheat it needed from abroad.”⁴⁵

So, as 1931 was nearing its end, there was César Vallejo, standing in the Soviet countryside, fathoming the future of many cities of grain and marveling at the feats of modern agriculture. Filled perhaps with the optimism that this very kind of collective labor would soon spread throughout the world or perhaps with a memory of the poverty he’d seen in his own highland region of the Andes in what must’ve seemed like another lifetime—and without the historical vantage point from which he might glimpse the imminent failure of the socialist experiment and Stalin’s heinous purges—there he stood, gazing into the vast fertile landscape between the Black and Caspian Seas, as he took inventory of livestock and, with notebook in hand, carefully counted out those “225 oxen, 325 cows, 220 calves, 2000 rams, and 4000 hogs, raised to feed the population.”⁴⁶

* * *

Vallejo’s return from the Soviet Union placed him back in Spain, where he began writing his second book of reports, Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan, which unfortunately wasn’t published until more than thirty years later. Yet, in addition to his reportage and with still kindled admiration for his Soviet heroes—Eisenstein on-screen and Kirshon onstage—Vallejo further developed his dramatic writing and actively tried to stage his plays. In January 1932 Federico García Lorca took him to see Camila Quiroga about staging Moscow vs. Moscow, but she turned it down. Lorca insisted that heavy editing would be in order before they could offer it elsewhere, in response to which Vallejo agreed and complained that he lacked the skills to edit his work to suit the taste of the general public.⁴⁷

On January 25, 1932, when Georgette returned to Paris to arrange for César’s return, she discovered that her apartment had been sacked by the police.⁴⁸ The Peruvian stayed in Madrid until February 12, when he crossed the border illegally and reunited with her in Paris. He was told that they could stay in France as long as he refrained from participating in political activities and reported to the prefecture on a monthly basis. Despite showing up at the prefecture only a couple of times, he regained legal status in France in August 1933, but his political activity didn’t wane. For example, just the following year, on February 6, 1934, he attended a leftist demonstration against Croix de Feux in Paris.⁴⁹ This antifascist thread became increasingly pronounced in the later years of the author’s life when the theme of social justice saturated all his poems and plays.

In 1934 César and Georgette got married in Paris, eight years after they first met. This was also the year that he went back to Tungsten and adapted that novel into a full-length farce, Brothers Colacho, which he continued to edit through 1936. The drastic changes that occurred through three versions attest to Vallejo’s struggle with playwriting, but also to his perseverance, since the last (so as not to call it the final) version indeed contains outstanding improvements that produce striking social and ethical critiques through the mode of farce. In addition to the play, he also worked on the poems that eventually were collected in Human Poems.⁵⁰

For the first few years of his marriage to Georgette (1934–36), César scaled back his journalistic contributions and communicated less frequently with his faraway friends, or at least that’s what his surviving writings lead us to believe. Of those that have been preserved, less than ten letters were written in this three-year lapse. He wrote no articles in 1934 and, in 1935–36, he wrote only five. Yet, curiously, in these few articles we observe the resurgence of Vallejo’s interest in Peruvian politics, society, history, and, especially, the prehistory of Latin America. For sure, he was distancing himself from the world of journalism and reportage, giving priority to his growing body of poetry, of which he was trying to publish a third volume. On Christmas Day of 1935, he wrote to Larrea and, among other things, asked him whether José Bergamín had received, via Rafael Alberti, poems that he wanted him to publish—likely some of the undated prose pieces that found their way into Human Poems.

In Spain of 1936, political tensions were reaching their boiling point. On July 12 Falange members murdered Lt. José Castillo of the Assault Guards Police Force and Socialist Party. The following day leading Spanish monarchist and prominent parliament member José Calvo Sotelo was arrested by the Assault Guards and shot without a trial. Five days later uprisings rocked Spanish Morocco and, soon thereafter, reached mainland Spain. Before the planned coup of 1936 had even been completed, the Popular Front, the National Confederation of Labor, and the International Workers Association armed the people. The Spanish civil war had broken out.

Over the next months, through a series of letters and telegrams with Juan Larrea and Juan Luis Velázquez, a deeply troubled Vallejo, who was by no means well off, discussed the ethical complexity of being so committed to Republican Spain from the comfort of his Parisian armchair: “Never have I measured my human smallness as I do now. Never have I been so aware of how little an individual can do alone. This crushes me.” Having witnessed the aftermath of the October Revolution and the Russian civil war, it was evident to Vallejo that “at moments like this, each person has his role, no matter how humble, and our gears must shift and submit to the collective cog.”⁵¹

Presumably it was for that reason that Vallejo left Paris on December 15, 1936, to visit Barcelona and Madrid, and why, while in Madrid, he reached the frontlines of the war, where he interviewed volunteers for the Republic. As a staunch supporter of the Republicans, Vallejo was interested in publicizing their heroic feats; but to his surprise, one volunteer explained in good socialist fashion that “no one knows the names of the heroes” and, more important, “no one cares too much about them.” Each volunteer of the Republic “does what he can, without concern for glory … in the army of the people. Either they’re all heroes, or there are no heroes left.”⁵² This notion that no individual can be more valuable than the whole pervades Vallejo’s writings across genres and modalities and was accentuated in the poetry he started writing upon his return to Paris, on December 31, which crowned his poetic corpus with Spain, Take This Cup from Me, composed in an astonishing sermonic lyrical mode, as we see in “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic,” which carries all the weight of his poetic maturity:

The same shoes will fit whoever climbs

without trails to his body

and whoever descends to the form of his soul!

Entwining each other the mutes will speak, the paralyzed will walk!

The blind, now returning, will see

and throbbing the deaf will hear!

The ignorant will know, the wise will not!

Kisses will be given that you could not give!

Only death will die! The ant

will bring morsels of bread to the elephant chained

to his brutal gentleness; aborted children

will be born again perfect, spatial

and all men will work,

all men will beget,

all men will understand!

Just over three decades after it had begun, Vallejo’s literary production was reaching its peak in 1937, while he was back in Paris. He continued to work on Human Poems and in a frenzy had embarked on Spain, Take This Cup from Me, which incarnated his political commitment to Republican Spain, whose destiny in his eyes was also the destiny of the world. “At this point,” Clayton Eshleman suggests, “it is possible to watch Vallejo build what might be called a ‘popular poetry,’ incorporating war reportage, while at the same time another branch of his poetry was becoming more hermetic than ever before.”⁵³ It was also around this time that the Peruvian revisited that novella he’d written more than ten years earlier—Toward the Reign of the Sciris—and transformed it into the three-act tragedy, The Tired Stone. Writing in a creolized Castilian-Quechua tongue, he saturated the language with an exalted tone and socialist themes that crystalized in an unprecedented poetic creation.

On June 26, 1937, Vallejo wrote to his compatriot, Luis Alberto Sánchez, regarding his participation in the Second International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture.⁵⁴ Sánchez was unable to attend, and Vallejo jumped at the chance to take his place as the sole Peruvian delegate. Shortly thereafter, he took his last trip to Spain to visit the frontlines of the war again and to attend the congress in mass protest against fascism. The 1937 congress was held in Valencia (July 4), Madrid (July 5–8), and Barcelona (July 11), with closing ceremonies in Paris (July 16–17). More than one hundred antifascist writers from all over the world participated. While Vallejo was there, he delivered the speech “The Writer’s Responsibility,” in which, ghosting Conrad’s famous lines, he criticized his contemporaries for being ashamed of what they do, since it is precisely writers who are “responsible for what happens in the world, because we have the most formidable weapon—the word.”⁵⁵

After leaving Spain and returning to Paris, Vallejo produced an astonishing amount of work in a very short period. From September 4 to December 8, 1937, he wrote the dated poems of Human Poems and Spain, Take This Cup from Me, which he typed on René Mossisson’s typewriter in Ernesto More’s hotel room on rue Daguerre.⁵⁶ As if that weren’t enough, he also submitted The Tired Stone to a rigorous revision, drastically modifying the structure of the play, which resulted in a more cogent plot and a more coherent premise. The Vallejo writings that come down to us from this 1937–38 period bear unmistakable pathos, the poet’s most exalted tone, linguistic originality that doesn’t get hung up searching for le mot rare, and an autochthonous sensibility in praxis that the Peruvian had been demanding for fifteen years. Aside from the sheer volume of that production, the consistency and quality of those works continue to make his readers shudder, from aspiring writers who’ve recently discovered them to professional critics and translators who’ve pored over them for decades.

In early March 1938 “the years of strain and deprivation, compounded by heartbreak over Spain, as well as exhaustion from the pace of the previous year, finally took their toll,” and César Vallejo started experiencing abdominal pain so acute it kept him in bed.⁵⁷ As days went by, the gravity of the situation started to sink in. The pain was persistent, the symptoms, worsening. “A terrible surmenage has laid me up in bed for the past two weeks,” he explained to Luis José de Orbegoso in a tone of desperation: “The doctors don’t know yet how long I’ll continue like this.” The reality was that he was going to need a “lengthy treatment,” which he simply couldn’t afford.⁵⁸ On March 24, 1938, the Peruvian Embassy had Vallejo transferred to the Clinique Générale de Chirugie (Villa Arago). The team of doctors, which included renowned specialist Dr. Lemiére, ran various tests but couldn’t find a way to effectively treat the illness or, perhaps, identify what the problem truly was. On April 15, 1938, which turned out to be a Good Friday, the fascists swept down the Ebro Valley in Spain and cut the loyalist army in two, right around the time that in the Villa Arago clinic of Paris, César Vallejo cried out in delirium, “I am going to Spain! I want to go to Spain!” and at 9:20 a.m. he died.⁵⁹ The death certificate states that the cause of death was acute intestinal infection.

The following day Georgette had a death mask made, and two days later Vallejo was buried in the Cimetière Montrouge, the communist cemetery of Paris. At the service, homilies were given by Louis Aragon, Antonio Ruiz Viliplana, and Gonzalo More. For someone like Vallejo, who could never seem to catch a break in life, it’s sadly fitting that his headstone erroneously listed his birthdate as 1893. Additionally, in 1970, when a new generation of scholars, poets, and translators had begun to formally analyze Vallejo’s controversial politics and aesthetics, Georgette had his remains transferred from Montrouge to his final resting place in the noble Cimetière Montparnasse (division 12, line 4 north, no. 7), not far from Baudelaire’s grave, where, according to the widow, her husband wished to be buried. The engraving on the headstone corrected his birthdate, states his name, and, without mentioning that he was a poet or writer, displays the anomalous epitaph that she had written: “J’ai tant neigé / pour que tu dormes / Georgette.”⁶⁰

2

We now turn our attention to Vallejo’s writings themselves to specify details of their publication history with the aim of elucidating the breadth and depth of his oeuvre. We also highlight predominant aesthetic features in each of the works and in the compilations of letters, notebooks, articles, and chronicles from which the translations have been drawn, to give the reader a sense of the whole that we aim to synthesize in this anthology. It should be noted that neither in the following characterizations nor in the translations themselves do we cover absolutely all of Vallejo’s writings. For a rigorous registry of the writings in toto and a wealth of research sources, readers are encouraged to reference critical bibliographies.⁶¹ Our agenda here is to analyze Vallejo’s writings in condensed form and establish an essential overview for readers facing these texts for the first time. Although Vallejo’s writings are generally not easy to access, they are by no means inaccessible, and the presumption that they are, as he might argue, is more revealing of a strategic problem with the reading than of a technical problem with the writing.

* * *

César Vallejo’s first complete work was Romanticism in Castilian Poetry, completed in and published in Trujillo by Tipografía Olaya (1915). With this undergraduate thesis, he obtained his licenciatura in philosophy and letters at La Universidad de La Libertad under the advisory of Eleazar Boloña, to whom he dedicated the volume. In his analysis Vallejo sounds the roots of the Spanish romantic movement and locates foreign influences from Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Walter Scott, Goethe, Schiller, Andrés Chenier, Germaine de Staël, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset. Inspired by the notion that poetry must not only reflect but refract questions that stir the human spirit, Vallejo sees Spanish romanticism as a vital response to neoclassical satire—the sure sign of decrepitude—which Juan Pablo Forner, José Francisco de Isla, Tomás de Iriarte, Félix María Samaniego, and Nicasio Álvarez de Cienfuegos breathed through their works with bitterness and irony.

For Vallejo, Spanish romanticism began with José Manuel Quintana, whose poetry “hoists up above his philosophically sweet and penetrating lines, as from the bow of daydream’s golden ships, the flag of his race and his century.” José María de Heredia, in turn, had a tendency to “exteriorize his inner life”—as when his heart is broken by a thunderstorm—since “this lugubrious preoccupation that roused in his soul the beautiful, the great, the ineffable, which does not fit into pseudo-realist, reasoned and serene poetry of the neoclassical period,” forged a space for romantic poets to project new philosophical ideas and possibilities for social change.⁶²

In the poetry of José de Espronceda, Vallejo admires the poet’s sincerity, the absence of “a personality to engage his surroundings, as in the French romanticism of Victor Hugo,” and the presence of “the firm gaze with which the poet pierces himself [which] engendered the instability that was throbbing through all spheres of activity in his century, thereby giving origin to doubt and skepticism.” Espronceda is the figurehead of Spanish romanticism not because he inaugurated an intellectual movement (he did not) but because he acknowledged his predecessors, and when his time came he took the flag of the rebellion, “raising himself up with it to a height he had not reached before.” Espronceda’s technical ability in El diablo mundo and his willingness to break from the hendecasyllable that had become the romantic go-to meter (along with the romance) was proof of the poet’s authenticity and confidence in his creations.

The case of José Zorrilla is different, since the author of Don Juan Tenorio, working within the realm of legend, incorporated popular motifs and phraseological expressions rooted in contemporary Spanish society. Vallejo suggests that this was a main reason for the resounding reception of his work and the popularity it still preserved in the early twentieth century, since those expressions were recognizable by Zorrilla’s readers who, in this way, were also authors. Thus, the Peruvian had no choice but to dispute Spanish critic Alberto Lista’s claim—that in Zorrilla “an incorrect expression, an improper word, an impossible Gallicism or neologism warns us that we are stuck in the mud”—by explaining that “to the chagrin of the Aristarchuses of the world …, rather than being transgressions …, those breaks with the academic rules of language have become the greatest merits of his work.” Zorrilla’s nonconformity was justified by the fact that morphology, “the true legislator and motor for the transformation or disappearance of words is not the fanciful will of writers but of society.”⁶³

Romanticism in Castilian Poetry shows Vallejo’s early generational awareness; his ability to perceive the intimate relation between philosophies and aesthetic trends through the course of major historical transitions; his affinity for the idiosyncratic writer, the authentic outlier detested by traditionalists; and the autonomous exaltation of deeply felt poetry. The bitterness and irony of neoclassical poetry revealed the decay of that era and the romantics’ need for new modalities of thought and art. This notion of salvaging from the past only what is essential and discarding dead weight in the name of transformation crosscuts Vallejo’s oeuvre and becomes the principle axis of his eventual critique of the European and Latin American avant-garde.

This brings us to Vallejo’s first book of poems, The Black Heralds, which was written in 1916–18 during the high tide of the Trujillo bohemia and stands as a testament to the hybridity of the author’s cultural identity and the autochthony of his poetic voice that dominates this early collection. Published in Lima by Souza Ferreira in 1918 and released on July 23, 1919, it’s divided into six sections: “Agile Soffits,” “Divers,” “Of the Earth,” “Imperial Nostaligas,” “Thunderclaps,” and “Songs of Home.” The Black Heralds is generally celebrated for its linguistic originality, tonic authenticity, treatment of Andean reality, and the potent emblem of nostos that resurfaces in multiple forms throughout the poetic movement.

Vallejo inherits from the romantic tradition the dark side, inspired by the Satanism and Cainism of Byron and Espronceda, which would later manifest itself as a feeling of accursedness, as seen in Baudelaire.⁶⁴ The Peruvian’s early poetics are of this genealogy and, while it’s true that he seems to pay homage to Darío with impressively composed Alexandrine sonnets, silvas, and an overall mastery of very complex meter and rhyme, he also breaks away from this and uses it as a springboard to produce a poetic form that would accommodate his thematic content: crisis. This subversion of traditional form is a function of the expulsion of authority. “Vallejo projects his inner struggles onto an order that exceeds his individuality but cannot save him: ‘I was born on a day / when God was sick.’ … The omnipotent deity has been purged from Vallejo’s poetry.”⁶⁵

In The Black Heralds Vallejo dramatizes individual experience and elevates it to the category of myth, now with moral guilt before a cruel and vengeful God—“There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know! / Blows as from the hatred of God” (“The Black Heralds”)—now with the curse of unintelligibility and the threat of a meaningless existence—“So life goes, a vast orchestra of Sphinxes / belching out its funeral march into the Void” (“The Voice in the Mirror”)—now looking for lucidity in pain—“I am the blind corequenque / who sees through the lens of a wound” (“Huaco”).

The linguistic originality of The Black Heralds, which indigenists saw as a forerunner of their movement, plays out through Vallejo’s incorporation of a Quechua vocabulary within his Castilian verse. Since he was not a native speaker of Quechua, but probably acquired it through reading and being in proximity to native speakers into his twenties, his employment of Quechua and pre-Incan words and phrases signals a unique synthetic feature of his writing—one that summons forth the native voice as a deliberate project. Thus, “Imperial Nostalgias” takes us to “a lake soldering crude mirrors / where shipwrecked Manco Capac weeps,” and in “Ebony Leaves” we find “the mood of ancient camphors / that hold vigil tahuashando down the path,” or in his “Autochthonous Tercet” the sounds of a “yaraví” and “[q]uenaing deep sighs [of] the Pallas” evoke the hybridity through sound. Perhaps this trademark feature appears most clearly in “Huaco,” where the poet proclaims that he is “Incan grace, gnawing at itself / in golden coricanchas baptized / with phosphates of error and hemlock.”

The Quechua voice in The Black Heralds counts as Vallejo’s first step toward a poetics of mestizaje, a project he continued to modify through the development of later works, such as Toward the Reign of the Sciris and The Tired Stone. This sign of miscegenation is indicative of the direction Vallejo’s writing would take and of the optics through which he would cast his critical eye on European culture in the years to come. By inscribing Andean reality into the symbolist literary tradition, in The Black Heralds Vallejo stakes out a poetic space on the peripheries of a literature suffering the symptoms of cultural homogeny, thus foreshadowing the proliferation of a new sensibility, grounded fundamentally in Marxist dialectics.

Vallejo’s second book of poems, Trilce, was first published in 1922 in Lima by Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría with a prologue by Antenor Orrego and then again in 1930 in Madrid by Compañía Iberoamericana de Publicaciones with a prologue by José Bergamín. It collects seventy-seven poems composed 1918–22, each titled with a roman numeral. Prior to its 1922 publication—that golden year of high modernism—no book had been written in Castilian that was so obsessed with the arbitration of poetic inflection as was Trilce, with its bizarre mixture of traditional form and poetic subversion, its technical acrobatics, its view beyond the then prevailing symbolist trends, and an unabashed sentimentality toward the loss of the poet’s mother, which clashes with his anguish from being incarcerated in Trujillo Central Jail, where about one-third of the collection was written.⁶⁶

It’s hard to imagine where Hispanic literature would be today had Vallejo not written Trilce, a book that bears all the bravado of European avant-garde literature but refuses to adopt a consistent aesthetic and even goes so far as to mock the stylistically obsessed. So great has this book’s impact been on twentieth-century Hispanic poetry that when we consider any other modern literary work of radical innovation, we’re forced to ask if it came before or after Vallejo’s great poetic adventure. To put it frankly, even though Vicente Huidobro had already published El espejo de agua as early as 1916, Vallejo’s Trilce is the indisputable catalyst of the Latin American experimental tradition and “the most radical book in the Castilian language.”⁶⁷

Unlike Vallejo’s first and last collections, the poems of Trilce aren’t neatly packaged into a thematic sequence but appear more like a boiling kettle of great obsessions with the Origin, Incompletion, Imperfection, Orphanhood, and Death, which the poet stirs with masochistic perversity. In Trilce Vallejo evokes “a world whose two poles are immediate sensation and memory, the perception of incoherent diversity and the closed space of the irremediable.”⁶⁸ Armed with uncanny technical abilities and dizzying poetic intensity, Vallejo is determined to work within these two poles without placing his emotional content inside any imported form, and the strength of his conviction transforms into exhortations, rejections, repudiations, and even mockery. Thus, the opening line of the book—“Who’s making all that racket”—takes aim at the prolific hackneyed aesthetes of an imported French symbolist school and, in so doing, celebrates autochthonous expression and ushers in a new era of Hispanic poetry.

The drama of Trilce arises through webs of inner tensions in which disparate themes and figures are bonded by unorthodox techniques (hence, the famous “union of contraries”). The search for harmony is possible only because of the presence of dissonance that saturates the poems, and in that dissonance resides the fear that harmony may not be reached, that it may not be reachable or, as in poem LXX, that we may not be able to know if it has been reached or is reachable, since “we shudder to step forth, for we know not whether / we knock into the pendulum, or already have crossed it.” Poem XVIII, in turn, reconfigures the bildungsroman narrative to reveal adulthood itself as incomplete, which is why the narrator goes “in search of a tertiary arm / that must pupilate, between my where and when, / this stunted adulthood of man.” In poem XXXVI, considered by some to be the manifesto of the book, Vallejo’s absurd description of human existence, in which “[w]e struggle to thread ourselves through a needle’s eye,” leads him to evoke the Venus de Milo, the symbol of perfection that’s missing one arm, because this is the contradiction he sees “enwombed in the plenary arms / of existence, / of this existence that neverthelessez / perpetual imperfection.” As if he had taken Camus’s advice and imagined Sisyphus happy, at the end of the poem he proclaims, “Make way for the new odd number / potent with orphanhood!”

In a similar thread to Trilce is Vallejo’s first book of narrative prose titled Scales. Composed in 1919–22 and published in 1923 by Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, Scales belongs to Vallejo’s most experimental period and, like its predecessor, it teeters between gushing sentimentalism and radical innovation. It’s divided into two sections: Cuneiforms, which contains six brief narrative prose poems—the unforgettable “walls” that link Scales to Trilce—and Wind Choir, a section of short stories: “Beyond Life and Death,” “The Release,” “The Caynas,” “The Only Child,” “Mirtho,” and “Wax.”⁶⁹

Continuing the experimental thread with all the exuberance of the poetic and now-narrative adventure, Cuneiforms might as well be an appendix on Trilce, with its brutal descriptions of existence in prison and desperate encounters with mortality recounted in bold lines soldered by syntax that obeys the author’s meandering ruminations: “Some cartilaginous breath of an invisible death appears to mix with mine, descending perhaps from a pulmonary system of Suns and then, with its sweaty self, permeating the first of the earth’s pores.”⁷⁰ And in the asphyxiating space of the prison cell, nostalgia insufflates the writing by projecting memories onto the silver screen of the walls: “[A]ll this domestic morning-time aroma reminds me of my family’s house, my childhood in Santiago de Chuco, those breakfasts of eight to ten siblings from the oldest to youngest, like the reeds of an antara” (“Windowsill”).

Wind Choir enters the gothic world of fantasy and madness, of existential predicaments and nauseating feelings of responsibility. In “Wax,” for example, Vallejo places his protagonist Chalé under the Sword of Damocles at a craps table in a boozy Lima. In “The Release” (which could also be translated as “Liberation”) the convict Solís inadvertently drives to madness his dear fellow inmate Palomino, who’s sure he’s being stalked by the family of the man he is accused of killing, and Solís does so by excessively warning the paranoid man to beware of his paranoia. In “Beyond Life and Death” the anonymous narrator journeys home to the rugged countryside to join his family in mourning the loss of his mother, when he comes across a woman who’s convinced that he’s her son who’d died and has come back to life.

The characters of Scales find themselves in unbelievable situations, tempted to interpret their predicaments with supernatural justifications that are rivaled by dry pragmatic rationale. In these early fictions we see Vallejo’s romantic inheritance take on strange new life as it morphs into a fantastic world described with the dissident, bizarre language of his most radical poetic voice. In the thematics of Scales we perceive the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, but the language is shockingly innovative, light-years beyond Poe, and often tests the ability of the narrative mode to bear the weight of its poetic overhaul.

Not long after Scales had come off the press, Vallejo’s other early prose fiction, Savage Lore, appeared in La Novela Peruana, an illustrated biweekly edited by Pedro Barrantes Castro. Relegated to the first experimental phase of his writing, this ambitious novella takes place in a Santiago de Chuco that’s as gothic as it is Andean, a rural place where the unknown is master, an environment filled with inexplicable mysteries and bad omens that shimmer in the reflections of mirrors and pools of water. Like many of these writings, Savage Lore blurs the lines of genre: as fantasy fiction, it narrates the breakdown of the marriage of two peasants and the demise of the husband, Balta Espinar, at the hands of the unknown; as realist fiction, the story recounts the self-destruction of a deranged psychopath.⁷¹

Set in the sierra of northern Peru, a pastoral landscape of fields tilled by plows driven by the force of oxen, the heart of this fantasy narration shows a sort of superstition that’s not uncommon in that region. A hen crows, a mirror breaks, the sure sign of imminent catastrophe. Then a stranger appears, at first as a fleeting image. Balta wonders if his mind is playing tricks on him, but no. The stranger is implacable, and his presence is haunting. In drawn-out frenzied moments of suspicion, Balta starts to demonstrate (excessively) peculiar jealousy toward his wife, Adelaida. This drive toward self-destruction is either a symptom of Balta’s psychopathology or a portentous sign of imminent ruin.

With this gesture, as Ricardo Silva-Santisteban explains, Vallejo inscribes Salvage Lore in the literary tradition of the Double, among the works of E. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and so on. “The figure of the double, which Vallejo has undoubtedly borrowed,” he says, “fits all the criteria of the prototype whose own will leads him to try to destroy the character on whom he depends … The sinister scenario that Vallejo paints in Savage Lore is framed by the resonance of superstition which he integrates into fantasy fiction. He links a literary tradition (of the Double) … with oral culture of the northern Peruvian highlands, as is the superstitious element of the crowing hen that foretells the demise of the marriage.”⁷²

Vallejo’s interest in madness had already shown itself in Scales and, in the wake of Trilce, reveals that genealogy. Savage Lore, on the other hand, prefigures a new thread of narrative that is further developed in “Individual and Society” and “Reputation Theory” of Against Professional Secrets, giving us a glimpse at where the writing is headed. With regard to the theme, this early exploration of superstition would be superseded by an examination of ritual belief in a historical context, as occurred in his next work of prose fiction, Toward the Reign of the Sciris, and the later stage transcreation that it inspired, The Tired Stone.

Even though Toward the Reign of the Sciris wouldn’t be published until after the author’s death—in Nuestro Tiempo—Vallejo did extract some passages and place them in La Voz of Madrid: “An Incan Chronicle” and “The Dance of the Situa.” Set in the Inca Empire prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, this historical fiction was probably first drafted out in 1923, during the Lima–Paris journey, and then edited in 1924–28. As Vallejo himself admitted to Abril, he’d targeted the prevailing symbolist tastes of a wide readership, hoping the exotic aesthetic of pre-Hispanic America would garner mass appeal and lead to more lucrative work. It didn’t.

Although it’s one of the simplest narrations Vallejo wrote with respect to plot and character development, this novella showcases a hybrid language of Castilian and Quechua—a feature he’d only gestured at five years earlier in his indigenist forerunner The Black Heralds—which led him to implement extensive research into his shoot-from-the-hip narrative strategy. The bravado of the creolized Castilian-Quechua tongue is visible, at just a glance, in chapter 1. As the defeated Army of the Sun returns to Cuzco, Vallejo narrates the somber procession of “rumancha masters,” the unfurled rainbow standard “with holes left by a suntupáucar spike,” and angular heroes who carried on their “shoulders the dense mass of queschuar,” behind whom limped “lancers with enormous dangling arms wearing guayacán headpieces with tassels” and “an old apusquepay, with a protruding chin and serene eyes, wearing his yellow turban, tied by a piece of stretched bow string and feathers.”⁷³

Although Vallejo failed to crystalize the conflict of the novella, in chapter 3 we find the central (if underdeveloped) question that, in The Tired Stone, he transformed into masterful drama: is society more fruitful in times of war or peace? Once the Inca’s son and heir-apparent retreated from the north, the Inca called off the conquest because he now “yearned for peace and labor … [that] the sky unfurrow the brows of farmhands and herders; [that] the husband kiss his wife … The Inca now yearned for love, meditation, the seed, leisure, great ideas, eternal images.”⁷⁴ But pulling out of the war unleashes a series of foreboding events: a gigantic stone crushes scores of stonemasons, thunder rumbles during the quipuchica of the enigmatic Kusikayar, and during a ritual sacrifice an eviscerated llama leaps off the altar and scampers away. These events signal the anger of the gods, forcing the Inca to resume the war.

Our discussion now turns to Vallejo’s journalistic production, the evaluation of which has thus far largely been reduced to a finalist concept of work carried out strictly as a means of survival. This sort of finalist reduction, for which Vallejo himself held so much contempt, is a convenient way to ignore an entire genre en bloc without attempting to engage its complexity or the intertextuality of the articles and chronicles in relation to the rest of the oeuvre. The articles and chronicles don’t represent slag but the transformational process of absorbing raw material and recasting it in a way that necessarily modifies the original. Again, we are reminded of the principle: not reflection, but refraction. The articles and chronicles reveal the “con-text, inter-text, and sometimes pre-text” of other writings and help us understand the author in a much broader literary and historical framework.⁷⁵ Although in his lifetime Vallejo published in nearly forty magazines and newspapers worldwide, the majority of these texts appeared in four primary outlets: El Norte (1923–30), Mundial (1925–30), Variedades (1926–30), and El Comercio (1929–30). This journalistic work accounted for most of his earned income during the Paris years, which were grueling, as his letters to Abril and Larrea show, but the circumstance of their creation doesn’t preclude them from literary value. Quite the contrary, in his articles and chronicles—and in his books of thoughts—Vallejo employed a method of emulation that allowed him to level an integral critique of social norms, artistic trends, and political theories without falling into the trap of oppositional polemics. Before the eyes of unsuspecting readers, a chameleonic Vallejo entered the modality and composed highly poetic and critical texts about whatever topics he was assigned.⁷⁶

In synthetic nonsecular fashion, Vallejo wonders if it’s possible or even advisable for a poet like Paul Valéry to accept an invitation to clarity from a distinguished historiographer. He refuses to do battle with Vicente Huidobro’s superintelligence because his vote is for sensibility. He’s hopeful of inventor Georges Claude’s idea to harness the power of the sea but pragmatically encourages us to be patient since nature takes no leaps. He distrusts André Breton’s aesthetic proclamations, rejects Diego Rivera’s call for propagandistic art, and denounces Jean Cocteau’s artistic catechism, his pure angelic poets, and all professional secrets. In his articles and chronicles Vallejo lends an ear to the wheezing tombs and fine mummies of Lord Carnavon and the Carnegie Institute. He sees the sporting match as the sign of capitalist competition and exposes the record-holding faster, smoker, philatelist, bride, groom, divorcee, singer, laugher, do-gooder, and killer in whom the malice of man mixes together with the good sweat of the beast. He soberly wonders what laws and instincts drove the Incas—in times of war and peace—to manifest a destiny whose historical significance is marked by highly developed social organization. He immortalizes Charlie Chaplin’s supreme creations and insists that the United States is blind to their revolutionary meaning. He sings accolades to Sergei Eisenstein and Vladimir Kirshon for their daring screen and stage aesthetics and yet vituperates Marxist ideologues who have forgotten that even their own messiah’s brilliance must one day be synthesized into higher forms of thought.

Through a host of critical readings of contemporary sculpture, painting, music, film, literature, architecture, history, politics, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and sports, in his articles and chronicles Vallejo seeks a way out of artistic secularism by revolutionizing the journalistic form as a poetic space where he emulates the writing of other modalities and absorbs contents that he transforms and recasts as a species all their own. This innovative strategy, as poetic as it is critical, becomes visible only when we read his journalism.

In addition to the massive compilation of articles and chronicles that has shed so much light on Vallejo’s biography, his political orientation, and his literary production in genres other than journalism, over the past fifty years enormous gains have been made in the recovery of his epistolary documents. The compilation of letters, telegrams, and postcards between Vallejo and his family, friends, and colleagues began in 1960 with the work of Manuel Castañón, who compiled a series of letters dated between May 26, 1924, and December 27, 1928, documents delivered to him by Pablo Abril de Vivero, who explained that they had been part of a larger cache that burned during a Francoist bombing. After this initial publication, several compilations appeared as more epistolary documents surfaced and critical interest grew, fostered by Juan Larrea, who collected, rigorously dated, and published letters in Aula Vallejo, starting in 1961. This continued for the next forty years until 2002, when Jesús Cabel edited the Correspondencia Completa for the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, amassing a total of 281 epistolary documents.

Although Vallejo wrote to about forty-five different people, his main correspondents, in order of the frequency with which he communicated to them, were Pablo Abril de Vivero (117), Juan Larrea (39), Gerardo Diego (14), Juan Domingo Córdoba (12), Victor Clemente Vallejo (8), Ricardo Vegas García (8), Carlos Godoy (8), and Luis Varela Orbegoso (8). As for Vallejo’s family, there are only seventeen letters registered to date, eight of which correspond to 1912–22, and the remaining nine, to 1923–29. It’s clear that there must have been more addressed to his relatives, since he makes reference to documents that we don’t have: “Tell Mom, Dad, and Agüedita that I’ll write to them on Wednesday” (May 2, 1915); “I wrote to Dad during one of my worst bouts of fear” (December 2, 1918); and “I’ll write to Dad tomorrow” (July 14, 1923).

In the letters between Vallejo and Abril, which begin on January 31, 1924, and end on or around February 4, 1934, we learn about the extremity of Vallejo’s financial hardship and the resulting frustration and anguish.⁷⁷ It’s through this correspondence that he organized his entrance into mass-publication journalism as a means of cobbling together a living and diversifying the modality of his writing. In his letters from France, there’s an undercurrent of resentment in his feelings toward Peru; however, there’s also a tone of solidarity, especially when he speaks with marginal writers who hadn’t fallen into the grips of Lima’s aesthetic aristocracy or the importers of literary fads.

The letters from the Trujillo Central Jail are especially disturbing. There, Vallejo wrote an appeal to Gastón Roger, a journalist who immediately published it in La Prensa on December 29, 1920, along with another appeal, signed by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Vallejo kept correspondence with Juan Larrea from January 19, 1925, to February 14, 1938. These letters reveal an endearing friendship, reiterate Vallejo’s need for economic support, and give insight into his vision of Spain, highlighting his torturous ethical struggle leading up to and during the Spanish civil war.

One hundred years after Vallejo’s birth, his final letter was published in the magazine Oiga.⁷⁸ It was addressed to Luis José de Orbegoso precisely one month before Vallejo passed away. It’s a heart-wrenching plea for funds to cover the cost of a lengthy medical treatment. It turns out that Orbegoso, the excellent friend that he was, did in fact reply on March 25, 1938, wishing Vallejo a quick and complete recovery and including a check for the one thousand francs he’d requested. But neither the letter nor the check arrived in time and, what’s worse, Georgette was unable to receive the funds, since they’d been returned to Lima by the time she tried to collect them.

We now turn to Tungsten, first published in March 1930 by Cenit in Madrid. It counts as Vallejo’s only full-length novel and one of the five monographs published in his lifetime. Demonstrative of his political commitment, as evinced in his articles and chronicles from this period, Tungsten reveals Vallejo submitting his literary writing to the service of ideological propaganda in support of the Communist Party. Since literature was one of the most efficient means of ideological dissemination in the heat of 1930, it is understandable that Vallejo’s Tungsten riffed on Feodor Gladkov’s hit novel, Cement, which had been translated to Castilian by José Viana and published by Cenit in two editions in 1928 and 1929.

In view of Vallejo’s financial hardship, it seems plausible to suppose that, in addition to his ideological motivations, he’s likely to have wanted to capitalize on the aura of Gladkov’s immensely popular novel by situating Tungsten in the same marketplace and targeting its impassioned Spanish readers. We cannot underestimate the influence that social realism still had in 1930, and when we add to that the decade-long robust surge of Russian fiction in the era of the new political economy—The Naked Year (1922) by Boris Pasternak, Cities and Years (1924) by Konstantin Fedin, Red Cavalry (1926) by Isaac Babel, The Thief (1927) by Leonid Leonov, The Rout (1927) by Alexander Fadeyev, and We (1929) by Yevgeny Zamyatin—it’s no wonder why Vallejo allowed himself to commit what critical consensus calls a literary sin.⁷⁹

Whereas Cement celebrates postwar reconstruction in Russia, Tungsten scandalizes collusion in the exploitation of Andean workers: the Peruvian denounces U.S. Mining Incorporated for exploiting the indigenous Soras, abusing the workers in the mines, and creating a system of forced labor for their own profits and as a contribution to the U.S. war effort in Europe. The other side of this critique satirizes the servility of Peruvian bourgeoisdom, which generously lends its hand to the wealthy Yanks with hopes of winning their favor. In this way, with a forehand Tungsten smacks down the foreign imperialists who greedily exploit the naive indigenous workers and with a backhand hits the self-serving Peruvian upstarts who remain indifferent to the consequence of their vertical social aspirations. Their ascent to high society comes at the cost of their compatriots’ descent into misery. Such is the case with the protagonist Leónides Benites: as long as he’s under the spell of capital, he’s self-absorbed, and only when faced with his own mortality does he realize that no individual is worth more than the collective, which leaves him no choice but to join the revolution.

Following up Tungsten chronologically and also in the narrative thread is a text written in 1931—though not published until 1951—called Paco Yunque, the only children’s story Vallejo wrote. Oddly enough, it’s also couched in political ideology. It appears to have been written upon request of the Spanish publisher Cenit, which had just published Tungsten, but the manuscript was rejected on account of the violence with which the characters (most of them children) treat one another. Paco Yunque is easily the most formulaic text out of all Vallejo’s writings.

Although this children’s story was judged too violent for Iberian tastes in the early 1930s and has been disregarded by many readers for ideological reasons, it has nonetheless formed part of the national curriculum in Peruvian public schools since the early 1970s, while Juan Francisco Velasco headed the military dictatorship in 1968–75, after the coup d’état against President Fernando Belaunde. Under Velasco, an education reform was launched that made Quechua an official language and aimed to provide bilingual education to the indigenous peoples of the Andes and the Amazon (nearly half of the country’s population at the time). Although the increasingly intolerant dictator had his censors exile all newspaper publishers in 1974, he incorporated into the national curriculum works that championed the peasants’ struggle, and, in a strange turn of events, Paco Yunque became a perfect match for the dictatorship’s ideology.

The story’s protagonist is a poor country boy named Paco Yunque, who lives with his mother in the home of the Grieves, wealthy English landowners, whose son Humberto abuses Paco at school while revealing his own stupidity. Since Paco Yunque is afraid to stand up to Humberto, Paco Fariña, another boy whom Yunque just met, intervenes in an act of solidarity. The characters are easily recognizable figures that Vallejo uses to prove the premise that the rich are the blight of the poor; the poor don’t stand up for themselves out of fear and ignorance; and this cycle can be broken only by people who have the courage to intervene.

This brings us to Russia in 1931: Reflections at the Foot of the Kremlin, which was composed in 1928–31 from materials Vallejo collected during his first two trips to the Soviet Union. This political report was published in 1931 by Ulises in Madrid and quickly became a best seller. Many sections of it had been placed in El Comercio in 1929 and then in Bolivar in 1930 as a series of ten chronicles that bore the headline “A Report on Russia.” The book was press-ready in the first quarter of 1931, which is when the phrase “Russia in 1931” was added to the title to give it a greater sense of currency. The lengthy sixteen chapters aimed to provide contemporary readers a demystified description of Soviet reality, without filtering the author’s perception through the tinted filters of a partisan newspaper or magazine. In this terrain Vallejo’s Russia in 1931 is a forerunner of A Russian Journal (1948) by John Steinbeck.

As early as August 1927, Vallejo had revealed the method of the survey abroad employed by French journalists. Large-scale Parisian newspapers and magazines used to send their most famous journalists to foreign countries to report on events and interview officials, but well before they arrived those reporters already knew what they wanted to find; it was just a matter of locating the right person to prove their hypothesis. Vallejo’s objective was different, since he wasn’t interested in simply regurgitating more propaganda or even going to Moscow to smoke cigarettes with Anatoly Lunacharsky. He wanted to provide a technical interpretation of social organization in Soviet Russia by stripping his accounts of bias so that he could transparently record whom and what he saw and then carry out a nonpartisan analysis. Whether he achieved this or not is another question, but this was his agenda, as he laid it out in the introduction. The Russia Vallejo saw still lay under the rubble left by the October Revolution, which had been described by another best-selling American author of the same genre, John Reed, in his book Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). But whereas Reed narrated the destructive period of social upheaval during the end of the tzarist regime, Vallejo optimistically studied the peaceful construction of a new society at the beginning of the socialist experiment.

The Peruvian’s approach to evaluating the state of Russian social organization was the cross-sector interview, in which he recorded accounts of people from as many sectors of society as possible with the aim of achieving a sample representative of the whole. This method led him to speak with Boris Pessis, secretary of VOKS; Maria Schlossberg, a candy factory worker on the outskirts of Moscow; a German worker from Bremen, who showed him that no worker in Russia could be considered a foreigner; the director of the Commercial Textile Union, who explained defects, setbacks, and gaps in Russian technology; Aleksei Gastev, director and founder of the Central Institute of Labor (CIT); Valerian Muraviev, editor of the organization’s journal; a professor of the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow, who explained the system of salaries; and then with the director of a metallurgic facility, who put the Peruvian in contact with workers. After only the first five chapters, Vallejo crosses from the economic plane to infrastructure, production, labor, until finally reaching morality, and there he lingers for the remainder of the book.

Chapter 8 recounts Vallejo’s meeting in Leningrad with a group of Bolshevik writers: Sergei Adamovich Kolbasiev, Vissarion Mikhailovich Sayanov, Boris Viktorovich Lipatov, Wolf Yosifovich Ehrlich, and Ilya Ivanovich Sadofiev, inter alia. In chapter 9 he follows a stonemason around for a day only to end up at a theater, where he sees Kirshon’s play The Rails Are Humming. Vallejo marvels at the scenery with those larger-than-life sprockets and gears of a half-built locomotive, the socially diverse audience, and the revolutionary resolutions: A disenchanted worker is about to commit suicide, but “he’s still fighting. It’s time to sweat blood and ‘take this cup from me.’ As he lifts up the jar, a small hand suddenly stops him. It’s the hand of his son, who wasn’t sleeping. The boy’s action is of far-reaching historical significance.” The awakening son as hero crystallizes the revolutionary premise that the new generation will be the savior of the old. Finally, in the no less remarkable chapter 14, which is centered on film, Vallejo extols the achievements of Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line, in whose collaged scenes of exploitation, labor, and mechanized agriculture he perceives the future of revolutionary art in Russia as well as his own growing oeuvre.

Not long after finishing Russia in 1931, Vallejo began work on Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan, which was composed in 1931–32, though not published until as late as 1965 by Gráfica Labor in Lima. In a sense, it can be read as a sequel to Russia in 1931 with regard to its thematic concerns and methodology, but only to the extent that the first report focuses on Russian social organization during the socialist experiment, whereas the second studies the lifestyle such organization could afford. Vallejo divided this book of thoughts into two large sections, the first, consisting of thirty-two chapters, and the second, twenty-seven, all of which run considerably shorter than those from the first report.

The narrative device of this interwar Eurasian tour is the guide, a man named Yerko, the “servant”—a delicate term that Vallejo has us understand in the widest of senses, from the porter, to the waiter, to a political official. Obedience is the universal code here, and everyone obeys everyone else. Therefore, when Vallejo asks, “Has the revolution wiped out the servants?” the only possible response is “yes and no.” In Russia everyone is a servant, or no one is a servant to anyone. On their tour Vallejo and Yerko are accompanied by an anonymous Austrian Social Democrat, whose antisocialist perspective produces the conflicts necessary for lively dialectical debate.

Gathered in the Workers’ Club, Yerko and other comrades attend a night of the arts. A choir sings the “Internationale,” applauds the classical dances of an artist from the Moscow Opera, listens to musical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Liszt on the balalaika and piano, ballads played by Red Army veterans and a scene from another play by Kirshon. The discussion then turns to the topic of an article in Izvestia by the former commissioner of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, which gives rise to a debate about the newly formed French literary school, populism, and how it may or may not be relevant to current affairs in Russia.

As proof of Vallejo’s attempt at writing unbiased accounts of the socialist experiment, the chapter “Accidents on a Socialist Job” exposes some of the shortcomings of Soviet modernization. Among a group of trudging workers, Vallejo and his travel companion cross the bridge over the Dnieper, and when they reach the other shore, they find a woman unconscious on the ground. It’s unclear whether she’s dead or alive, and the other workers pass by without even noticing her, let alone stopping to see if she needs help. That same day the Peruvian sees a giant steel plate fall not far from him and flatten two workers. The delayed response to the accidents reveals the lack of infrastructure and the emotional detachment of the workers.

From climactic changes to the notion of comfort; from fashion to family life; from cuisine to social gatherings; from the role of passions to the role of reason; from religion to architecture; from hygiene to locomotion and sports, in Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan Vallejo reports on the quality of life and the progress of social organization during the early Stalin years. Rather than withdrawing from the less-than-perfect outcome of the revolution, falling into dissolution and then further dissolution, as a bitter anarchist might, Vallejo saw Russians in the early 1930s as the pioneers of a world they were making with their own hands.⁸⁰

In addition to his formal reportage, Vallejo wrote a book of thoughts in 1926–32, Art and Revolution, and, like so many of his works, it was published only posthumously, in 1973 by Mosca Azul Editores in Lima. Some of these texts, however, were published in newspapers and magazines as early as 1926. In this book we see Vallejo reconcile his literary aspirations with his commitment to the socialist revolution. He explores the revolutionary writer’s role in and to the benefit of society, and he decides that this writer is no longer the romantic poet worn out from heartfelt sighs in the privacy of his study; nor is he the lackadaisical bohemian dreamer ignorant to the consequence of his apathy; nor is he the avant-garde sectarian who seeks the “New” by exclusion and change by opposition. The revolutionary writer is open to all sectors of life and to these he goes boldly in search of concrete contact with social reality.

Given their thematic concerns and the context of their composition, the texts of Art and Revolution deliberately or coincidentally evoke certain essays of Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933). For example, when we read through such texts by the Russian as “Taneyev and Scriabin” (1925), “Chernyshevsky’s Ethics and Aesthetics” (1928), or “Theses on the Problem of Marxist Criticism” (1928), we get the sense that Vallejo is emulating his contemporary while exposing the political underpinnings of the aesthetics of prevailing writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If Lunacharsky’s Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923) reflects on the collective efforts of individuals who gave rise to the October Revolution, Vallejo’s Art and Revolution attacks intellectual puppets for declaring that artistic innovation comes from fixed doctrine rather than perpetual transformation.

In “Tell Me How You Write and I’ll Tell You What You Write,” Vallejo clarifies that artistic technique must be used not as a disguise but as an instrument of transparency. The technical problem that he locates in the schools of dadaism, futurism, surrealism, and populism is rooted to their attempt to critique the traditional (romantic, realist, symbolist) methodology of artistic production by opposing it with doctrine written as a bellicose manifesto established by an exclusive tribe of specialists. Vallejo doesn’t necessarily disagree with the vanguards in their social or aesthetic critiques, but in their approach toward developing on the flaws they found. He foresees the pitfalls of oppositional doctrine and demands self-inclusive solutions. In this sense, César Vallejo is far too cosmic to be considered avant-garde and proves to be an alternative to it.

Perhaps the two most disconcerting texts from Art and Revolution are “The Mayakovsky Case” and “Autopsy of Surrealism.” In the former Vallejo relates one of the interactions he had in Leningrad with Kolbasiev, who claims that Mayakovsky isn’t the best, but merely the most published, Soviet poet. Vallejo had already taken the same position as Kolbasiev in 1927, but now he enters precarious territory and offers an explanation of the Russian’s suicide: the result of a tragic disagreement between what he was saying in his poetry and what he was truly feeling and thinking.⁸¹ Mayakovsky was a highly skilled poet, who suffered not from an inability to craft good poetry but from denying himself the opportunity to do so with sincerity.

“Autopsy of Surrealism,” in turn, follows the debate between André Breton, specifically in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, who’d published a polemical pamphlet titled A Corpse that included essays by Desnos, Queneau, Leiris, Carpentier, Baron, Prévert, Vitrac, Morise, and Boiffard countering Breton’s initial attacks. In his Autopsy Vallejo describes how that movement’s critical and revolutionary spirit transitioned to anarchism and then, once the surrealists noticed that Marxian methodology seemed as interesting as that crisis of consciousness they’d been promoting, they went out, bought new clothes, and became communists. It was surrealism’s feigned adoption of Marxism that led to the movement’s atrophy and eventual demise. It realized that it couldn’t embody the truly revolutionary spirit of the age and, once it had lost its social prestige—its only raison d’être—the agony commenced, there was some gasping, and the death knells tolled.

Also straddling poetic and critical modalities is another book of thoughts, composed in 1923–24 while Vallejo was taking his first steps in Paris, and then in 1928–29 when he took the hard left toward Marxism: Against Professional Secrets. In step with his poor publication record, this gem was released only in 1973 by Mosca Azul. Essential to this book is Vallejo’s reportage, which sent him interviewing scores of people across interwar Russia, attending theatrical and musical performances in Paris, looking at society as a complex conglomeration of sectors that are irremediably bound, and noticing the tendency of prevailing avant-garde writers to create innovative literature behind closed doors. Many of the texts in Against Professional Secrets were early drafts of longer pieces the author had placed in magazines.

The phrase “Contra el secreto professional” first appeared as the title of a 1927 magazine article that Vallejo published in Variedades and seems to be his way of rebuking the idea of sectarian literature, which he saw epitomized in Jean Cocteau’s Le secret professionnel (1922). In that article Vallejo levels an attack on avant-garde literature and enumerates several formulas that Latin American poets were appropriating from the European tradition. As an alternative to this, he invokes a new attitude, a “new sensibility,” one that denounces the gross plagiarists of literary trends, because “their plagiarism prevents them from expressing and realizing themselves humanly and highly” and because they imitate foreign aesthetics about which they gloat with insolent rhetoric that they create out of autochthonous inspiration. The closer we read this book, the more apparent it becomes that Vallejo modulates styles to demonstrate a chameleonic strategy that allows him to adopt romantic, symbolist, surrealist, socialist, realist, scientific, and even existentialist modalities. What makes this tactic so compelling is that, by emulating these literary tendencies, he implicates himself in his own critique, widens the scope of his project, and shapes a collaborative poetics instead of the usual oppositional polemics.

From “The Motion Inherent in Matter,” a scientific description of the phenomenon of parallelism; to the gothic account “Individual and Society,” which resembles the tales of Poe; to the surrealist fragments in “Negations of Negations”; to the Kafkaesque “Reputation Theory” and the Borgesian “Masterful Demonstration of Public Health”; to the desperate romantic confessions in “Languidly His Liqueur” and even the Biblical parable in “Vocation of Death,” Against Professional Secrets takes us on an aesthetic journey through nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe, only to reveal that the poetic vehicles that have transported us are as arbitrary as they are exploitative. These meditations are at once an attack on the European avant-garde and an appeal to Latin American writers to quit the practice of aesthetic importation. By moving art from the realm of aesthetics to that of ethics, passing through the political economy, Vallejo lays the foundation for a poetics of human solidarity.⁸²

Our discussion on Vallejo’s books of thoughts has organically led us his notebooks, which contain entries from 1926 to 1938, with the author’s final dictation. According to Vallejo, many of the entries were supposed to be appended to Art and Revolution or Against Professional Secrets and, in some cases, to both. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics and rarely contain lyricism like that which we find in the poetry and sometimes the articles; instead, they are more of a meditative nature, more conceptual and fragmented, and many of these philosophical kernels emerge in subsequent magazine articles, reports, poems, and plays.

It’s fascinating to see how a simple concept from one entry—“The mercy and compassion of men for men. If at a man’s moment of death, all the mercy of all the men were mustered up to keep him from dying, that man wouldn’t die”—eventually grew into “Mass,” the crowning poem of Spain, Take This Cup from Me; or how notes on a film premiere in Moscow—“the foundation for a new aesthetic: the aesthetic of labor”—could give rise to such sizable endeavors as the plays Brothers Colacho and The Tired Stone; or how an ironic contradiction—“the revolutionary intellectual who, under a pseudonym, secretly contributes to reactionary magazines”—could transform into dialogue in the chapter “Workers Discuss Literature” from Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan.

This list could go on and on, but we’ll limit ourselves to these few examples, holding onto the belief that the pleasure of reading these fragments derives from discovering their permutations throughout the oeuvre. The intertextuality disclosed by the notebooks reveals a series of beginnings in Vallejo’s iterative writing process across the modalities of poetry, fiction, drama, reportage, and journalism. Although some entries are characterized by the cleverness of ludic puns and quips, which has led one translator to go so far as to publish them under the banner of “aphorisms,” the greater value seems to reside in their relation to the whole and in what can be learned about Vallejo’s writing process by patiently examining that relation.⁸³

Now, we switch gears to briefly discuss what is arguably Vallejo’s most polished performance piece, The Final Judgment, a short one-scene play that the author extracted from Moscow vs. Moscow, which itself was an early draft of The River Flows between Two Shores. It was probably written in or around 1930 but not published until 1979.⁸⁴ A review of the early drafts reveals that Vallejo first planned this scene as a prologue to the full-length play, but as he reworked the longer text (apparently to lock the characters into the conflict and give the tragedy a stronger foundation), the prologue seemed to hold up on its own. The scene acquires its dramatic strength through agony. Atovov lies on his deathbed and Father Rulak has come to hear his last confession: prior to the October Revolution, he killed Rada Pobadich, who was about to assassinate Lenin at a rally.

The priest is beside himself with rage. “So you saved the life of a man who brought misfortune to Russia and atheism to its souls? … You wretch! You heinous man! The true culprit of the Russian disaster!” Yet, Atovov, just before giving up the ghost, explains to his confessor that this same Pobadich had an affair with the priest’s concubine. Rulak is doubly destroyed and from this destruction his character transforms to offer the socialist message that Vallejo has planted from the beginning: “Lord God,” appeals the priest, “with the same mercy reap every soul, large or small, that has fallen into sin.” Thus, The Final Judgment is Vallejo’s most lucid stage script and demonstrates the form of self-implication he deemed necessary to engage the most complex socioeconomic problems of the era.

Much like in The Final Judgment, Vallejo drafted out his one-act tragedy Death in or around 1930 and extracted it from the full-length play called Moscow vs. Moscow, which, after rigorous rewrites, eventually became The River Flows between Two Shores. The script wasn’t published until 1979 in Teatro Completo, and the play was never staged in the author’s lifetime. Since Vallejo revised this text in Castilian and French, an update in one language doesn’t always appear in another. Such is the case with La Mort, originally written in French. Death is a well-crafted one-act tragedy set in the early days of Soviet Russia that examines the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in relation to the civil war and the ideological chasms it left between generations within a single family. In a sense, Death is the fall of the Polianovs, a once-wealthy royal family whose life has undergone a radical revision since the political tumult of the preceding years. Osip has abandoned the house and family, drowning his anguish in vodka and women, while Vara, his wife, suffers the loss of her husband and is destroyed by her children’s enthusiasm for the Bolsheviki and the ideals of the new society.

Against this backdrop of the Polianovs’s crisis, Vallejo stages a debate between Fathers Sakrov, Sovarch, and Rolanski, who agree that Osip’s soul is in peril but disagree on how it must be saved. Sakrov is convinced that his only hope for escape from moral and intellectual decadence is manual labor in the countryside with the workers. He thinks that Osip should once and for all leave his wife to go work on a kolkhoz outside Moscow. For a man of Osip’s stature, such a decision would be unprecedented, which is why Sakrov must insist, “history, my brothers, never repeats itself”—insistence that’s countered by Rolanski’s skeptical rebuttal: “But it spirals up, dear friend. Here’s the proof: we, here, in Soviet Russia, are already witnessing a similar revenge of human sentiment against Marxist rationalism.” Thus, Vallejo allows the dialectic to unfold, on the one side, with the forward-thinking Sakrov, who’s committed to collectively building the future in that land of hopes, and on the other side, with Rolinski, who’s wary of radical change and still clings on to a past he knows even if it no longer exists.

When the other priests go outside to beg, Sakrov stays behind, since begging isn’t in his nature (here again Vallejo accentuates his commitment to labor), thus allowing him to talk to Osip, who has entered the scene, on the verge of a breakdown, caused by the inner turmoil of his moral tailspin. “I have told you,” Sakrov says, that “it is given to man to rise up to God only if he leans on the shoulders of other men.” For Vallejo, an individual cannot achieve spiritual well-being without working to improve the well-being of society. The kolkhoz, the collective farm, perfectly embodies this image and is in keeping with his concentric relation of the individual and society—the self and the world. The isolation of medieval hermits no longer suits modern man, who knows that “God can be discovered only in the midst of the great human gatherings, amid the crowds. This is the religious statement of our times!” When the fate of Osip’s soul dangles on the question of whether or not to eschew individual love and embrace the collective, Vara suddenly enters the scene, and Osip’s dilemma acquires its full dramatic weight. The strength of his character is his moral weakness, and his tragedy stems from his inability to leave her, even though it’s evident to him, her, and everyone else that their relationship is doomed and that reuniting will end only in disgrace, misfortune, death.

With The Final Judgment and Death at arm’s reach, we turn our attention to The River Flows between Two Shores, first drafted in or around 1930 and edited as late as 1936. During the author’s lifetime, it was never staged, and the script never published.⁸⁵ This was Vallejo’s first full-length play, a tragedy with a prologue, three acts, and five scenes—and it was work that did not come easily. He struggled with the title of the play and, over the course of multiple drafts, changed it from Vera Polianova to The Game of Love and Hatred, then to The Game of Love, Hatred, and Death, and then to The Game of Life and Death, mimicking Romain Rolland’s The Game of Love and Death (1925). The play then went on to be called Moscow vs. Moscow, only to finally be given the title it bears today, The River Flows between Two Shores.

The title Vallejo finally chose perfectly captures the conflict: the generational antagonism established on the two shores (the parents and older children represent the old aristocracy; and the younger children, the new social order). Between these shores runs the unstoppable river, where water serves as the figure of historical transformation, tacitly evoking Heraclitus of Ephesus. The drama of the play surges out of the implacable flow of history, indifferent to whatever gets in its way. Although the tension arises from the conflict among Vera and her husband, Vallejo’s point of attack comes through Vera’s attempt to stop her younger children from embracing the new social order. Her downfall results not from the revolution, but from her inability to accept social reality in the wake of the revolution, and it’s precisely this state of denial that leads to her daughter’s tragedy, with unmistakable resonance of the early generational insight of Trilce LVI, which complains about the grown-ups who “understood themselves even as creators / and loved us even to doing us harm.”⁸⁶

The River Flows between Two Shores isn’t Vallejo’s best play, but it has redeeming qualities, and these he fought for tooth and nail. Such an ambitious endeavor for our Andean author—a full-length play set in Moscow about the generational conflict after the Russian civil war—bled into melodrama, and we get the sense that Vallejo recognized this, since he had the mind to salvage the successful shorts, The Final Judgment and Death. Additionally, we mustn’t forget that, contrary to his more mature stage writing (Brothers Colacho and The Tired Stone), The River Flows between Two Shores is the only full-length play that wasn’t adapted from a novel he’d previously written, thus revealing his absolute fearlessness as a writer willing to venture into unknown waters of genre and explore extremely complicated, controversial topics.

The case is different with Brothers Colacho. In 1932 Vallejo adapted his novel Tungsten into this full-length farce and edited it thoroughly thereafter, even imagining one of the revisions, Presidents of America, as a screenplay. None of the iterations was ever produced in the author’s lifetime, and the script, never published. Although Vallejo has the tendency of pouring salt on the wound of social conflict in all his plays, in Brothers Colacho it stings the most. The play is about two poor merchants, Acidal and Mordel Colacho, who rise from their humble beginnings into social and political positions of power and, through this transition, they’re quick to exploit members of the working class as they once were exploited. Here, exploitation occurs as a result of the lack of education, specifically the basic skills of mathematics and spelling. Acidal and Mordel are able to cheat the indigenous patrons of their store because these astute store owners know how to calculate and spell and their humble clients don’t. What makes their characters ruthless (and the play hysterical) is their sanctimony and ignorance. While gloating about their intelligence, they reveal their own stupidity.

Whereas Tungsten can be read as Vallejo’s nod at Gladkov’s Cement (1925), when we imagine what a production of Brothers Colacho would look like, The Gold Rush (1925) of Chaplin appears before our eyes. Like the novel that gave rise to it, Vallejo’s farce formulates a systemic critique of Peruvian government, which in 1930 was suffering grave problems brought on by the administration of Augusto B. Leguía and then several other fleeting administrations that ensued, a period when infamous deals were struck with the governments of imperialist countries. And Vallejo’s foresight must be recognized, since in Brothers Colacho he predicts that Peru would end with a dictatorship, which it did, led by Gen. Óscar R. Benevides.

At the heart of the play is a critique of collusion, since Vallejo isn’t against only U.S. imperialism but exploitation of all kinds, and he goes to great lengths to show that corruption, like that which occurred in the mining industry of the Peruvian Andes, was fostered by native power brokers. The self-inclusive feature of this argumentation is precisely what makes the Colacho brothers so despicable and the premise of the play so universal. Driven by personal greed, they sell out their own people behind a facade of sanctimony. Their malice—with its self-serving logic and part-time morality—makes their sociopolitical success detestable and drives the farce to hilarity.

Now, we turn our attention to what is considered one of Vallejo’s greatest literary accomplishments: Human Poems. The first edition was published in Paris in 1939, by Georgette de Vallejo and Raúl Porras Barrenchea (Les Editions des Presses Modernes), with an epilogue by Luis Alberto Sánchez and Jean Cassou. Composed in 1923–38 and comprising a cache of 108 texts, half of which were dated in the autumn of 1937 and half undated, the collection doesn’t appear to have a deliberate order, except for the final fifteen poems titled España, aparta de mí este cáliz. It’s safe to say that had Vallejo lived longer, these poems would’ve received further editing, and the collection a title, since critical consensus affirms that the phrase Poemas humanos was not Vallejo’s invention.

Human Poems counts as the first of two major works of a poet who has reached maturity. No longer obsessed with the convoluted syntax and idiosyncratic morphology which he had flaunted in Trilce with that artistic perversion and love for the cryptic, in this collection Vallejo has a much more universal and far-reaching agenda, transitioning from “multiplicity to integration.”⁸⁷ Through a complex system of historical references and toponyms in tune with the currents of high modernism, Vallejo’s poetry—interchangeably in verse and prose at this stage—refuses to forego its sentimentality and confessional mode that had defined him from the start. Now, saturated with pathos, not unlike the tragicomic aesthetic of Chaplin, the poetic voice begins its outward turn and starts to express a cosmic vision through the experienced lens of a man in his prime.

Whereas it was the nostos that drove the poetic of The Black Heralds and the kryptikos that created tension in Trilce, we perceive in Human Poems the poet yearning for the world to become a kosmos in which fields of maize transmute into human fields, and these into the “[s]olar and nutritious absence of the sea, / and oceanic feeling for everything!” as we read in the poem “Telluric and Magnetic.” In this quest for a complex orderly self-inclusive system, the manifestation of the poet’s desire for completion takes the form of complaints that he has only ever been given life and never once death; yet this feeling is frustrated by the very language that expresses it, as we see in the poem “Today I like life much less,” where he writes, “I almost touched the part of my whole and restrained myself / with a shot in the tongue behind my word.”

This notion of language as an obstruction from reaching cosmic totality was prefigured in the image of the Venus de Milo from poem XXXVI of Trilce, but in Human Poems the poet doesn’t appear to have only accepted his “orphanhood.” Instead, he starts acquiring a quasi-Whitmanian everythingist vision; although contrary to his democratic forebear, Vallejo’s gaze is set on the promise of socialism. Thus, in “The peace, the wausp, the shoe heel, the slopes,” he seeks to fraternize with “[t]he horrible, the sumptuous, the slowest, / the august, the fruitless, / the ominous, the convulsive, the wet, the fatal, / the whole, the purest, the lugubrious, / the bitter, the satanic, the tactile, the profound.”

From the experimental poetics of Trilce and Scales to the compositions we find in Human Poems, the direction of the poetic voice begins its outward turn, and the thematics shift from the existential concerns of the individual to the universal crises of the species. This can be explained by Vallejo’s adoption of a sort of Marxism that, as Ricardo González Vigil shows, “was ‘critical’ and ‘creative,’ loyal in this regard to Marx and not to the dogmas fabricated by his disciples.” In Human Poems Vallejo’s fundamental sensibility underlies his Marxism, formed during his childhood years with its Andean household background, his Christian and pantheistic upbringing, and his early awareness of injustice and sociocultural marginalization. These are poems seeking Peruvian roots and the origin of being, leading the poet “to accept the Revolution as the (dialectically superior) return trip to the paradise of the origin, the communal model of the Indian (cf. ‘Telluric and Magnetic’ and Tungsten) galvanized by the Bolsheviks (‘Angelic Salutation,’ Russia in 1931, and Reflections at the Foot of the Kremlin) and the militiamen of the Spanish Civil War (Spain, Take This Cup from Me).”⁸⁸

The time has come for us to linger on Vallejo’s last and most accomplished book of poems, Spain, Take This Cup from Me, composed and revised in 1937–38. Published in 1939 with a prologue by Juan Larrea, with the editorial support of Manuel Altolaguirre and a drawing by Pablo Picasso designed especially for the cover, it was printed at the Montserrat monastery near the end of the Spanish civil war. As we’ve recently learned from the first edition, discovered in the Montserrat library by Julio Vélez and Antonio Merino and subsequently published in facsimile at the hands of Alan Smith Soto, the government of the Generalitat had transformed the monastery into a hospital and printing center. Created in the fourteenth century by direct descendants of Guttenberg and then under the direction of Altolaguirre, the press was operated by soldiers of the Aragon front and published the imprint Ediciones Literarias del Comisariado, Ejército del Este, which, in addition to Vallejo’s book, produced editions of Pablo Neruda’s España en el corazón: Himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra and Emilio Prados’s Cancionero menor de los combatientes. In February 1939 Francoist forces destroyed virtually all Republican publications no sooner than it occupied the monastery.⁸⁹

In the heat of 1937 Vallejo was tormented more than ever by the tragedy taking shape in the Spanish landscape and by the hidden designs of evil incarnated by imperialist powers, which is why, when many people wavered, he marched down the socialist path and produced politically committed art in response to the threat of fascism.⁹⁰ The profound inspiration that he found in the selflessness of Spanish militiamen is recorded in “Popular Statements of the Spanish Civil War,” which might as well have been a preface to Spain, Take This Cup from Me, since there, writing as what in today’s lingo would be called an “embedded reporter,” Vallejo profiled the heroic feats of anonymous Republican soldiers who ended up resurfacing in the opening hymn of his last book of poems.

Comparative readings of Vallejo’s edited typescripts reveal a reordering of the poetic sequence, which resulted in a remarkable sense of continuity. The anguished editing of the texts from Spain, Take This Cup from Me and, in some cases, the existence of labyrinthine originals, attest to Vallejo’s rare ability to assimilate the experience of the war while it was happening with a seemingly supernatural drive toward completion. Reordered, the poem moves like a play, with an opening act that depicts the war as a panorama in which impassioned soldiers march off to battle (I); the succession of different battles (II); funeral songs for the anonymous heroes and the emblematic contemplation of death (III–VII); the poet’s meditations on death and destruction alongside corpses (IX–XI); resurrection triggered by universal solidarity and the transfiguration of the universe raised by the dust of the dead (XII–XIII); and the final warning to Mother Spain of her potential defeat and the prophesy of her fall (XIV–XV).⁹¹

If in his earlier poetry Vallejo’s voice aims inward and in Human Poems it begins its outward turn, in Spain, Take This Cup from Me, it’s directed completely outward to address the masses, crowds, and soldiers, against a backdrop of “the world of twentieth-century man, at the center of which Vallejo portrays himself as conceiving his own death. By the time the España manuscript was completed, the elitist tradition of many of the Modernist and Postmodernist poets had been turned inside out.”⁹² When these poems reach their emotive heights, the poetry “obtains the grandeur and potency of an epinikion,” as is the case with the opening “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic,” where the poet frames the entire poetic sequence in just a couple of lines: “Battles? No! Passions. And passions preceded / by aches with bars of hopes, / by aches of the people with hopes of men! / Death and passion for peace, of common people!”⁹³ With Marxian ideology and a sermonic drive reminiscent of Whitman, Vallejo’s “Hymn” can be read as “an overture of the entire collection of poems. It becomes a microcosm of almost all the themes and issues that we find in the compositions that follow it.”⁹⁴

Further on in that same “Hymn,” when Vallejo gives the order to “kill / death” and the reassuring exclamation that “[o]nly death will die!” he’s alluding to the prophecies of Isaiah (25:6–8, 26:19, and 28:15, 18, with clear echoes of Saint Paul: “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:25–26). But, Vallejo’s biblical allusions are more auditory than visual, and this line is also the revolutionary response to the infamous motto of Gen. Millán Astray: “¡Viva la muerte!” Nor can we forget that this was the motto of the Legión de los Tercios Españoles, who sinisterly called themselves the Volunteers of Death and used to sing the hymn “El novio de la muerte.”⁹⁵

The resurrection we see in poem III, dedicated to Pedro Rojas, who “after being dead, / got up, kissed his blood-smeared casket [and] / wept for Spain”—reveals his act of martyrdom as the saving grace of not only the side he’s fighting for but all of humanity, which is why “[h]is corpse was full of world.” He has accepted death voluntarily out of love for humanity to create a better world, and he is not dead as long as his ideals live on.⁹⁶ The invincibility of these ideals acquires more potent meanings toward the end of the collection, when the poet addresses the “[c]hildren of the world” and “sons of fighters,” warning them that if Mother Spain ends up falling, it will be their duty to “go look for her!”

In late 1937, around the time that he was writing Spain, Take This Cup from Me, Vallejo transformed his novella Toward the Reign of the Sciris into a three-act tragedy called The Tired Stone. He wrote this piece in an exalted poetic language saturated with a Quechua vocabulary, an element that returns this late composition to pre-Columbian Peru, where he depicts a hero hiding in a stonemason of the Inca Empire as the archetype of proletarian man. In January 1938 he submitted the play to radical revisions that yielded outstanding results. The first published edition, included in Teatro completo (1979), misconstrues the structure of the play as the author had envisioned it and renders that version unreadable. The most accurate version, Teatro completo III (1999), edited by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban and Cecilia Moreano, incorporates Vallejo’s handwritten changes and restores the integrity of the text.

In The Tired Stone, a stonemason named Tolpor falls in love with Kaura, a ñusta (princess), which is a sin, and this sets the tragedy in motion. When he realizes that he can neither have nor deny his love and that he has angered the gods, in response to which the Conquest is resumed in an attempt to pacify them, Tolpor selflessly heads off to war. But when he fights his enemies to save his people in search of Death instead of Glory, Fame ends up claiming him and, by popular demand, he ascends to the throne, without Kaura, who was displaced during the battles. No sooner does he receive the sacred tassel, than Tolpor renounces it, blinds himself, and goes to the countryside to live the life of a beggar, where years later he runs into Kaura. But, on account of his blindness, he can’t tell that it’s she, and because he’s transformed into a beggar, she doesn’t realize it’s he.

The confluence of the aesthetic and political visions—that the poor ensure the well-being of the people and that individual love is inferior to the love of a collective—epitomizes Vallejo’s late writings in which his ideals of indigenism fuse with those of socialism.⁹⁷ The central axis of The Tired Stone is the protagonist’s ethically negative concept of hubris, which arises from the dynamic of his destructive passions. The paradox that unites determinism and free will drives the tragic climax of his actions off a cliff and sends him falling into the traps of Fate and the world of Fault, where he demands his own punishment, giving way to the path of self-sacrifice and expiation.⁹⁸

Two years before he wrote the play, Vallejo was already wondering, “What laws and interests, what instincts or ideals, moved [the Incas]—in war and peace—to manifest a destiny whose historical essence and meaning seem to contain extraordinary kernels of wisdom and organization?”⁹⁹ Resources that the author appears to have used in response to those questions and in the creation of the play include the essay “Saycuscca-Rumi: Tradición cusqueña” by Eleazar Boloña (his thesis advisor at La Universidad de La Libertad) and the chapter “Tres torreones, los maestros mayores y las piedra cansada” from the Comentarios reales de los Incas by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as the anonymous classical Quechua play Ollantay. Moreover, Sacsayhuaman, one of the primary settings and symbols of Vallejo’s play—that architectonic structure under construction and being built by collective labor—can 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

3

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