Selected Writings of Cesar Vallejo

by Cesar Vallejo, Joseph Mulligan (Editor)

Overview

For the first time in English, readers can now evaluate the extraordinary breadth of César Vallejo’s diverse oeuvre that, in addition to poetry, includes magazine and newspaper articles, chronicles, political reports, fictions, plays, letters, and notebooks. Edited by the translator Joseph Mulligan, Selected Writings follows Vallejo down his many winding roads, from Santiago de Chuco in highland Peru, to the coastal cities of Trujillo and Lima, on to Paris, Madrid, Moscow, and Leningrad. This repeated border-crossing also plays out on the textual level, as Vallejo wrote prolifically across genres and, in many cases, created poetic space in extra-literary modes. Informed by a vast body of scholarly research, this compendium synthesizes a restored literary corpus and—in bold translations that embrace the idiosyncratic spirit of the author’s writing—puts forth a new representation of this essential figure of twentieth-century Latin American literature as an indispensable alternative to the European avant-garde. Compiling well known versions with over eighty percent of the text presented in English translation for the first time, Selected Writings is both a trove of and tribute to Vallejo’s multifaceted work. Includes translations by the editor and Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Suzanne Jill Levine, Nicole Peyrafitte, Michael Lee Rattigan, William Rowe, Eliot Weinberger, and Jason Weiss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819574848
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	05/28/2015
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Pages:	679
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

CÉSAR VALLEJO (1892–1938) was born in the Peruvian Andes and, after publishing some of the most radical Latin American poetry of the twentieth century, moved to Europe, where he diversified his writing practice to encompass theater, fiction, and reportage. As an outspoken alternative to the European avant-garde, Vallejo stands as one of the most authentic and multifaceted creators to write in the Castilian language. JOSEPH MULLIGAN is a professional translator and scholar. He has translated Against Professional Secrets by César Vallejo, The Antiquarian by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, and a selection of Sahrawi poetry included in Poems for the Millennium Volume IV: The University of California Book of North African Poetry. He lives in Rochester, New York.

Table of Contents

Thanks and Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on This Edition
BOOK ONE, 1915-1919
from Romanticism in Castilian Poetry
Introduction
Critique of Romanticism from The Black Heralds
The Black Heralds
The Spider
The Poet to his Lover
Dregs
The Black Cup
Imperial Nostalgias I–IV
Ebony Leaves
Autochthonous Tercet
Huaco
Dead Idyll
Agape
The Voice in the Mirror
Our Bread
The Miserable Supper
The Eternal Dice
Distant Footsteps
To My Brother Miguel
Januneid
Epexegesis
Articles and Chronicles
With Manuel González Prada
With José María Eguren
Abraham Valdelomar Has Died
Letters
To Óscar Imaña, January 29, 1918
To Óscar Imaña, August 2 1918
To Manuel Natividad Vallejo, December 2, 1918
Dedication in a copy of The Black Heralds to friends in Trujillo, July 1919
BOOK TWO, 1920–1923
from Trilce
I. Who’s making all that racket
II. Time time
IV. Two carts grind our eardrums down
VI. The suite that tomorrow I wore
IX. I sdrive to dddeflect at a blow the blow
X. Primary and final stone of groundless
XIII. I think about your sex
XVII. This 2 distills in a single batch
XVIII. Oh the four walls of the cell
XX. Flush with the beaten froth bulwarked
XXIII. Estuous oven of those my sweet rolls
XXV. Chess bishops upthrust to stick
XXVIII. I’ve had lunch alone now
XXX. Burn of the second
XXXI. Hope between cotton bawls
XXXVI. We struggle to thread ourselves through a needle’s eye
XXXVIII. This crystal waits to be sipped
XLII. Wait, all of you. Now I’m going to tell you
XLIV. This piano journeys within
XLV. I lose contact with the sea
XLIX. Murmured in restlessness, I cross
L. Cerberus four times
LII. And we’ll get up when we feel
LV. Samain would say
LVI. Everyday I wake blindly
LVII. The highest points craterized
LVIII. In the cell, in what’s solid
LXI. Tonight I get down from my horse
LXIII. Dawn cracks raining
LXV. Mother, tomorrow I am going to Santiago
LXVIII. We’re at the Fourteenth of July
LXX. Everyone smiles at the nonchalance
LXXI. Coils the sun does in your cool hand
LXXIII. Another ay has triumphed
LXXV. You’re all dead
LXXVII. It hails so hard, as if to remind me from Scales
Northwestern Wall
Antarctic Wall
East Wall
Doublewide Wall
Window Sill
Beyond Life and Death
Liberation
Wax from Savage Lore
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Letters
To La Reforma, August 12, 1920
To Óscar Imaña, October 26, 1920
To Gastón Roger, December 1920
To Óscar Imaña, February 12, 1921
To Antenor Orrego, 1922
To Óscar Imaña, July 1, 1922
To Manuel Natividad Vallejo, June 16, 1923
To Dr. Carlos C. Godoy, June 16, 1923
To Víctor Clemente Vallejo, July 14, 1923
To Carlos Raygada, September 15, 1923
Articles and Chronicles
The Blue Bird
La Rotonde
Cooperation
BOOK THREE, 1924–1928
Articles and Chronicles
Spain at the International Exhibit in Paris
Modern Man
Between France and Spain
The Need to Die
The History of America
The Assassin of Barrés
The Poet and the Politician
State of Spanish Literature
Da Vinci’s Baptist
In Defense of Life
A Great Scientific Discovery
Latest Scientific Discoveries
The Idols of Contemporary Life
Avant-garde Religions
Against Professional Secrets
The New Disciplines
Life as a Match
Artists Facing Politics
Contribution to Film Studies
Madness in Art
The Passion of Charles Chaplin
Invitation to Clarity
Proletarian Literature
Colonial Societies
Psychology of the Diamond Specialists
Literature Behind Closed Doors
Vanguard and Rearguard
Anniversary of Baudelaire
The Masters of Cubism
Tolstoy and the New Russia from Art and Revolution
Revolutionary Function of Thought
The Work of Art and the Social Sphere
Aesthetic and Machinism
Universality of Verse for the Unity of Languages
Poetry and Imposture
Grammatical Rule
My Self-Portrait in the Light of Historical Materialism
Tell me How you Write and I’ll tell you What you Write
Autopsy of Surrealism
New Poetry
The Image and its Syrtes
The Mayakovsky Case
Regarding Artistic Freedom from Against Professional Secrets
From Feuerbach to Marx
Explanation of History
The Death of Death
The Motion Inherent in Matter
Individual and Society
Negations of Negations
Reputation Theory
Noise of a Great Criminal’s Footsteps
Conflict between the Eyes and the Gaze
Languidly His Liqueur
Vocation of Death from Toward the Reign of the Sciris
1. The Other Imperialism
2. The Seer
3. The Peace of Túpac Yupanqui
4. An Accident on the Job
5. Byzantium, West Longitude from Moscow vs. Moscow
The Final Judgment
Death from The River Flows between Two Shores
Act I, Scene 1
Act I, Scene II
Act I, Scene III
Letters
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, May 14, 1924
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, May 26, 1924
To Alcides Spelucín, July 1924
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, October 19, 1924
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, November 5, 1924
To Juan Larrea, March 12, 1926
To Ricardo Vegas García, May 15, 1926
To Juan Larrea, July 26, 1926
To Alcides Spelucín, September 14, 1926
To José Carlos Mariátegui, December 10, 1926
To Emilio Armaza, December 10, 1926
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, July 24, 1927
To Luis Alberto Sánchez, August 18, 1927
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, September 12, 1927
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, October 19, 1927
To Rafael Méndez Dorich, February 17, 1928
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, March 17, 1928
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, April 26, 1928
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, October 19, 1928
To Pablo Abril de Vivero, December 27, 1928
Notebooks
Entries from 1926-1928
BOOK FOUR, 1929–1935
from Human Poems
Good Sense
I’m Going to Speak of Hope
“No one lives in the house”
Height & Hair
Hat, Overcoat, Gloves
Black Stone on a White Stone
“And don’t say another word to me”
“It was Sunday in the clear ears of my jackass”
“Today I like life much less”
Epistle to the Passersby
The Hungry Man’s Rack
“Considering coldly”
“Idle on a stone”
Paris, October, 1936
“And if after so many words”
Telluric and Magnetic
“The miners came out of the mine”
from Reflections at the Foot of the Kremlin
8. Literature. A Meeting of Bolshevik Writers
9. The Day of a Stonemason
14. Film: Russia Inaugurates a New Era on the Silver Screen from Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan
What is the Workers’ Club?
Workers Discuss Literature
Art and Revolution
The Mechanical Landscape
Dialectics and Manual Labor
Articles and Chronicles
The Lessons of Marxism
The Youth of America in Europe
Megalomania of a Continent
The Economic Meaning of Traffic
New Poetry from the United States
Buried Alive
From Warsaw to Moscow
Mundial in Russia
Mundial in Eastern Europe
Three Cities in One
Latest Theater News from Paris
An Incan Chronicle
The Incas, Revived from Tungsten
Chapter 1
Paco Yunque from Brothers Colacho
Act 1, Scene I
Act 1, Scene II
Letters
To Néstor P. Vallejo, October 27, 1929
To José Carlos Mariátegui, October 17, 1929
To Gerardo Diego, January 6, 1930
To Gerardo Diego, January 27, 1932
To Juan Larrea, January 29, 1932
Notebooks
Entries from 1929-1935
BOOK FIVE, 1936–1938
Articles and Chronicles
Recent Discoveries in the Land of the Incas
The Andes and Peru
Man and God in Incan Sculpture
The Great Cultural Lessons of the Spanish Civil War
Popular Statements of the Spanish Civil War
The Writer’s Responsibility from Human Poems
“Today I would like to be happy willingly”
Poem to be Read and Sung
“The tip of man”
“My chest wants and does not want its color”
“I stayed on to warm up the ink”
“The peace, the wausp, the shoe heel, the slopes”
“Confidence in glasses, not in the eye”
“Alfonso: you are looking at me”
“Chances are, I’m another”
The Book of Nature
“The anger that breaks the man into children”
Intensity and Height
Guitar
The Nine Monsters
“A man walks by with a baguette on his shoulder”
The Soul that Suffered from being its Body
“Let the millionaire walk naked, stark naked!”
“The fact is the place where I put on”
“In short, I have nothing with which”
The Wretched
Sermon on Death from Spain, Take this Cup from Me
I. Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic
III. “He used to write with his big finger in the air”
IV. “The beggars fight for Spain”
VIII. “Back here / Ramón Collar”
X. Winter During the Battle for Teruel
XII. Mass
XV. Spain, Take this Cup from Me from The Tired Stone
Act 1, Scenes I–VI
Act 1I, Scenes I–IV
Letters
To Juan Luis Velásquez, June 13, 1936
To Juan Larrea, October 28, 1936
To Juan Larrea, January 22, 1937
To Juan Larrea, June 11, 1937
To Luis José de Orbegoso, March 15, 1938
Notebooks
Final Dictation
Notes and Commentaries
Selected Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Ernesto Livon-Grosman

“Selected Writings is extraordinary in its choice of texts and the quality of translations. Mulligan brings scholarship on Vallejo to a new level of expertise while making that knowledge accessible to a wider audience.”

Efrain Kristal

“César Vallejo is rightly known as a major twentieth century poet. Thanks to Joseph Mulligan’s impressive edition, English readers will appreciate Vallejo's poetry in the context of his essays, journalism, letters, and explorations of other literary genres.”

Editorial Reviews

With his ferocious radicalism and bridge-burning experimentalism, Peruvian César Vallejo played avant-garde to the avant-garde. This wonderful selection of his poems, letters, essays, plats, and journalistic writings, with erudite and thoughtful commentary by Joseph Mulligan, gives us a brilliant and inviting open door to access the inner workings of the convulsive, dark, agonistic, and magically creative mind of one of the most radical innovators of twentieth-century literature. This book will change the rules of the Vallejo game forever.”—Gustavo Faverón Patriau

“This generous volume of Selected Writings a helps us to fill the gaps and get a fuller sense of Vallejo as an author and actor on the intellectual stage.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Vallejo’s writing, in the end, simply mesmerizes. He writes from a state of constant self-recognition and revelation … Again and again, Vallejo’s focus hovers over his awareness within the immediate activity of writing, drawing attention to the vital importance of the ongoing present.”—Patrick James Dunagan, Jacket 2

“Vallejo’s prose has so far gone largely untranslated into English. Joseph Mulligan’s excellent new Selected Writings of César Vallejo, just coming out from Wesleyan, should transform Vallejo’s reception, with its huge variety of poetry, drama, fiction, journalism, reviews, aesthetic theory, chronicles, and correspondence.”—David Lau, Lana Turner Journal

“Apart from his poetry, the great Peruvian writer wrote a thesis on Spanish Romantic poetry, a novel, short stories, children’s fiction, plays, two travelogues, journalism, political essays, philosophical notebooks, and a plethora of letters to family members, friends and literary colleagues which are eloquent, persuasive, sometimes heartbreaking. ... This edition is superb.”—Stephen M. Hart, UCL Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies

From the Publisher