Only foam comes out

Cé​sar Vallejo is Yeats’s poet with the sword upstairs. Everything about him seems to burn with intensity. He burned through zarzuela Spanish, making it into a language of monosyllables, blurts, inventions, contradictions, arcane legal and medical terms. (The Mexican scholar Ilan Stavans says he made it more American. Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love affairs, prison, exile, expatriation, hunger and poverty, hospital, topped off by a mysterious death. (Was his ‘intestinal infection’ a recurrence of Peruvian malaria or simple Parisian starvation?) Vallejo’s life has the brief, jagged outline of a broken mirror. He resembles a 19th-century poète maudit, a Beddoes, a Bécquer, a Baudelaire, a Rimbaud. He is a poetry touchstone, a poet-martyr, no less than his near exact contemporary Osip Mandelstam.

Vallejo was born in 1892, the youngest of eleven children, in an Andean town in the north of Peru. Using the word for a child of mixed heritage (his father was white, his mother was Indigenous), he referred to himself as ‘your unforgettable cholo’; ‘machetón’ (‘big machete’) is what his schoolmates called him, on account of his beaky nose. Later, he was just ‘un drôle d’étranger’. The few photographs of him I have seen are unforgettable: a face like a half-charred ember, dense black hair of the kind that reminds you hair continues to grow after death, lantern-jawed, bony, deeply furrowed features crumpled into uncomfortable or disagreeable expressions. There are elements of a dandyishness he had probably outgrown (or which were borrowed for or from the photographer): collar and tie, hat, showy ring with a fat stone, a silver-topped cane. He always seems to be at a rather dressy funeral.

Like almost everyone else in the 1920s and 1930s, Vallejo visited the Soviet Union two or three times and was engaged by, if not in, the Spanish Civil War. Hart’s few pages push him through a litany of deaths: a beloved older brother; an underage girlfriend; both his parents; a pupil, the daughter of an excellency, for whom he was asked to write an elegy and refused; a friend who was supposed to write the preface for his first book of poems, The Black Heralds (1919). When he was hounded out of Peru for good in 1923 by the resumption of a court case against him (he had been accused of arson), he tagged along with an acquaintance to Paris, the Mecca of Latin American exiles, where, presumably, his difficulties became both rarefied and more intense. He had exchanged a small Andean pond for the chilly grey ocean of Lutèce. His next book was knocked out on a borrowed typewriter in a friend’s flat, the one after in another friend’s flat. Neither was published in his lifetime. He was unlucky and impoverished, but not given to compromise. He died in 1938; in 1951, his French widow, Georgette, relocated to Lima, where she died in 1984, some sixty years after he had left.

Then there are the poems, and their particular swiftness, a don’t-carishness, an abruptness, a rebarbativeness. A stark howl of awfulness. ‘Expressionist’ really only applies to literature in German, but it gives a better notion of Vallejo than any other label, and certainly than those he sometimes attracts, such as Surrealist or modernist. As in Expressionism, the poems are blunt, crude, primitive, garish. They look jagged on the page, especially the 77 (Berryman again!) of the sometimes baffling and obscurely motivated Trilce (1922), where a word may be broken across a line-ending, or cascade down several lines. His earlier poetry has both family and God, at least in the form of blasphemy (his parents apparently hoped he might become a priest), but after about 1920 there is not much of either. The poems remain eschatological, to do with last things, but are also begrimed, wretched, small, full of rain, shoes, buttons, pain. The rather charming early uncertainty – the ‘tal vez’ and ‘duda’ and endless ‘yo no sé’s – has given way to defeat and defiance in the last poems, not published until a year after he died and possibly never finished (though lacking nothing). He has the elusiveness, the nightmarishness, the gnarliness of Berryman, a bit of shouting and a lot of pauperised swagger. The body makes a big showing in Vallejo, but it has no integrity and little defence; it is stuffed with bones (‘All my bones belong to others;/maybe I stole them’) and inner organs. The man’s stomach is empty, his bowels are empty, but his trousers are round his ankles (in the poem called ‘La rueda del hambriento’, or ‘The Hungry Man’s Rack’). ‘I want to write but only foam comes out.’

Each time I look, there seem to be more English Vallejos. I have six with me here (and I could have had more), from Eshleman, from H.R. Hays, from Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, from Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi, from Margaret Sayers Peden and now from Margaret Jull Costa. None is the English Vallejo. What frustrates their enterprise is an inability to decide what matters and what doesn’t. They end up not seeing the wood for the trees. ‘Espergesia’ in the original: is it ‘Espergesia’ in English, or ‘Exergasia’ or ‘Epexegesis’ or something else? They are so afraid of getting lost that, inevitably, they end up getting lost. They are literal, they are verbatim or near verbatim, they are anxious. You bebes your desayuno in Spanish, so you drink your breakfast in English, even though it doesn’t mean that, and it’s not important. (To her credit, Jull Costa – experienced prose translators are more sensible – has ‘I drink my morning coffee.’) Their careful reassembling of poems that Vallejo himself expelled seems to me quite wrong. Where he wrote away from words (using Dylan Thomas’s surprisingly valuable distinction), or perhaps tunnelled through them, the translators’ word-seeking logopetal approach is misguided. (After all, he wrote: ‘And if, after so many words,/the word doesn’t survive!/… To be honest, it would be better/if it was all swallowed up, and there’s an end to it!’) But these are translators: take away their originals and their dictionaries (and their lazy cognates) and they have nothing. Vallejo is a sound and a surge. He is itemisation and atomisation, powered by a mockery, a fury, a derision that I hardly ever hear in their English. Or does this kind of thing scare you?

Who doesn’t write a letter?
Who doesn’t speak of a very important matter,
dying out of sheer habit and weeping solely by ear?
Me, and I was simply born!
Me, and I was simply born!

Vallejo is a rhetorician, a ranter, harnessing impossibles, lashing truism and paradox together. It should come with a snarl, be less like writing and more like speech; if Tristan Corbière is out of range, at least make it sound as if he had read, so to speak, Tony Harrison. (Why do so many translations of poems sound as though their authors had read no poems, ever, in any language?) In English I see sculptures made from pipe-cleaners, bullied into unpredictability. The translations sound either continually surprised or professionally deadpan. They stumble from word to word and from line to line. As poems they are inert, they make no sense, they have no engine. For me, Vallejo is what gets lost between the verso and the recto, the Spanish and the English page. There’s an excellent German translation by the young Hans Magnus Enzensberger from 1963. It’s from his Gedichte that I take my sense of Vallejo as orator, provocateur and public nuisance. The selection is inspired, the tone forceful, believable and coherent. Enzensberger’s afterword suggests he even visited Vallejo’s birthplace, Santiago de Chuco, four or five days’ travel from Lima (‘only fourteen houses have electricity, most have no running water’).

It’s not that I think poets have to be translated by poets. Some of the very best English translations aren’t: the Cavafy of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, the Szymborska of Clare Cavanagh. But no single Vallejo poem in English approaches the standing of two free versions of his sonnet ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’ (a title no one understands and which, like so much in Vallejo, has been left irreducible and contested; Jull Costa has ‘Black Stone on a White Stone’). In it, the poet anticipates and greets his death: ‘Me moriré en París con aguacero.’ Both versions are by poets: one by Donald Justice called ‘Variations on a Text by Vallejo’ and one by Paul Muldoon called ‘Testimony’. It is worth quoting them in full. Here is Justice:

I will die in Miami in the sun,
On a day when the sun is very bright,
A day like the days I remember, a day like other days,
A day that nobody knows or remembers yet,
And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers
And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood
And of the surviving cousins by the graveside,
While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,
Rest on their shovels, and smoke,
Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.

I think it will be on a Sunday like today,
Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,
And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;
And I think it will be a Sunday because today,
When I took out this paper and began to write,
Never before had anything looked so blank,
My life, these words, the paper, the grey Sunday;
And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,
Looked up at me, not understanding,
And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept.

Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,
It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,
The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,
Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,
And after awhile the diggers with their shovels
Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.

It’s twice the length of Vallejo’s original sonnet, and has a mild, sleepy, melancholy mood. He substitutes Miami for Paris, sun for rain, Sunday for Thursday, himself for Vallejo. The Spanish is a nod to Vallejo, as is the closing word, ‘respect’. Miami inhabits, imbues, fills the entire poem: the sun, the bay, the storms, the palms, the eerie grey of Florida, the dark glasses, the white buildings, the driving with the headlights on, the Latino gravediggers.

Muldoon’s poem is a proper translation – into Muldoon. It’s still a sonnet, still Paris, still Thursday, still rainy, still Vallejo. And yet it sounds, starting with the ominous but knowingly dull title ‘Testimony’, like pure Muldoon. He’s in the rhymes, the in-and-out line lengths, the strangely wooden fluency in the easy phrase-making of ‘even now’, ‘make and remake’, ‘along the road’, ‘knock him about’, ‘also’, ‘borne out’ and ‘aforementioned’, which takes us straight back to ‘testimony’. As so often, Muldoon is drawn to blandness, to fatuous, expressionless, formulaic, pedantic language, from which he coaxes a surprising expressiveness.

I will die in Paris, on a day the rain’s been coming down hard,
a day I can even now recall.
I will die in Paris – I try not to take this too much to heart –
on a Thursday, probably, in the Fall.
It’ll be like today, a Thursday: a Thursday on which, as I make
and remake this poem, the very bones
in my forearms ache.
Never before, along the road, have I felt more alone.
César Vallejo is dead: everyone used to knock him about,
they’ll say, though he’d done no harm;
they hit him hard with a rod
and, also, a length of rope; this will be borne out
by Thursdays, by the bones in his forearms,
by loneliness, by heavy rain, by the aforementioned roads.

As Vallejo helped make Justice be Justice, and Enzensberger be Enzensberger, perhaps this is what he offers us: a glass in which we see not him, but ourselves.