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PROLOGUE
César Vallejo is a revolution in Spanish poetry, even more than Rubén Darío, whom he admired. Vallejo brings a new way of seeing and feeling, a life-giving breath of freedom to the rarefied atmosphere that was the latino-American poetry of his time, rickety and conventional, malnourished by the precepts and fashions of European literary schools. In the poetic work of Vallejo, everything will go against the current; the poet opens a path of personal discovery where everything is invented, reinvented for the first time: the worldview, the central motifs of inspiration, the poetic writing. And above all, no formal worry, no intention premeditated to write in an original way to distinguish oneself from others; From the beginning, Vallejo is looking between anxiety and hope, and the fruit of this research is a new language. Consecrated rules and accepted sentiments, conventional themes and traditions of good or bad taste, everything is left out; Vallejo, entirely free, only sets out in search of that heartbreaking human emotion that is ultimately ineffable, but that the poet has the mission to express.
When Vallejo began to write, what dominates in Peruvian poetry, it is the influence of modernism, whose official singer was in Peru the versifier Jose Santos Chocano. Los Heraldos Negros : adjectives full of colors, sumptuous images according to the taste of Darío and Herrera and Reissig, conventional themes, conventional writing. Poetry of imitation no doubt, but not more impersonal than that which at the same time write young people who boast of having broken with all the traditions: they do not imitate not Darius or do not sing lilies and branches under the moon, instead they call Marinetti and his futuristic school, they extol war, cannon, engines, machines, football in verse, free or not, where one discovers the desire to appear modern rather than the expression of an authentic poetic emotion. In Buenos Aires, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro sets, in a conference, the rules of a new aesthetic that puts the artist at the height of a god and claims the omnipotent force of the image ("Image makers, give the floor to men," exclaimed Vallejo years later.) Huidobro "founds" creationism Guillermo de Torre and Jorge Luis Borges ultraism [19459008OtherswillfollowDadaismandSurrealismasFuturismfirstfollowedit"AsforVallejohehasnoinclinationforschools:heisfreebuthehasgreatadmirationfortwopoetslordsandsecrets:JoséMaríaEgurenandManuelGonzálezPrada
In a word, Peruvian literature and, in general, Latin American literature, is at the beginning of the twentieth century, as it had been the eighteenth and the nineteenth, a colonial literature.The poet o strictly complies with the requirements of a literary school, follows the standards of good taste ; and in terms of good literary taste, as in fashion, it is always Europe that decides. Poets and novelists follow futurism or realism, because that is what was customary at the court of Madrid or Paris. Vallejo, who is not a court poet, will not follow the flock
The Black Heralds appear in 1919. In this book there are two books. Some poems are frankly modernist: there are rhythms, images, a whole vocabulary, in short, borrowed from Herrera and Darío, to whom Vallejo pays homage in the poem "Retablo". Sonnets of folk inspiration generally obey the same influences and concerns. The young Vallejo presents paintings in which the main objective of the "painter" is to bring out the local color . All that is descriptive poetry, like any poet who could be written at that moment. And yet, behind the disguise of the form, one sometimes discovers a deep human emotion: Vallejo feels attached to the Andean soil, to these "human fields", as he will say later, to the Indians on whom they weigh centuries and centuries. of exploitation, atrocities and misery. There is no doubt that the race, the motherland will be important in the work, and Vallejo will keep for many years the nostalgia of the Andean mountains and valleys that saw it born and grow; he will even represent the Indian as a kind of human prototype: " Indian after man and before him ." But it would be wrong to attribute to the said determining racial factor or essential character for the understanding of the work of the poet. This work has universal significance and if in the poetry of its maturity Vallejo exalts the Indians of Peru, the austere customs of the peasants of the Andes, is that these rough and simple beings, with their community mentality, with their patriarchal way of life, they embody for the poet the promise of the man of the future who nourishes his hope. The Indian becomes a symbol of man, and symbols play a leading role in Vallejo's poetry.
In the first book, this is not it yet, or at least not at all. The poet is always in search of his language, and we sometimes find literary "clichés", descriptions where the concern for "form" stifles poetic emotion. But parallel or sometimes even hidden in one of these conventional poems, another tone, dry and feverish, emerges, a true style not imitated and almost inimitable, which transmits directly to the reader an urgent message, a discharge of Anguish and sadness which mark us as a red iron applied directly to the skin. In this tone, the presage of Trilce and Human Poems we can see the essence of Vallejo's poetic message: his great metaphysical and human, social and human poetry.
The final poem of the book, which gives its title to the whole, are already present some fundamental reasons of this poetic universe which, later, deepened, developed, will become obsessive themes that will guide the world view of the poet: suffering, death, destiny, and also this gratuitous guilt inherent in the life of man. From the beginning, everything converges towards the man who appears as the central place of this inexplicable and unjustifiable suffering that enters the soul with every new blow that we receive without knowing why . " There are blows in life so strong, I do not know …" The poet asks about these blows, and does not know if he should badign them to the hatred of God or Death that sends them to man as black messengers. Here we find a capital intuition of Vallejo poetry: the sensible presence of death in life. But this presence even in a mystery. The poet sees suffering and evil but can not connect them safely to a specific cause. And so the tone, affirmative in trying to denounce the existence of evil on this earth ( "There are blows …" ) becomes doubtful when the poet asks about his origin () "I do not know … / will be maybe . … / the black heralds that Death sends us "). What torments Vallejo is surely more than to suffer in itself the impossibility of justifying or explaining it:
The evil develops for reasons we do not know
The poet will say years later of Human Poems . The anxiety of uncertainty, in The Black Heralds exploded in the cry repeated three times, "I do not know": feeling of anguish that founds from the first moment l & # 39; Poetic ontology of Vallejo by determining two divergent planes: the existence, given indeed, always imperfect because it is always limited, at the same time fragmentary, multiple and absurd; and to be, which is never given, but which always aims at an ideal horizon – cause and principle, unity and eternity of the real. At the intersection of these two shots, the perplexed poet discovers the man, orphaned and abandoned in the world, trapped in the limit and finite, wounded time and thirsty for eternity.
It is therefore a primarily metaphysical Inspiration poetry of what is advertised in these early poems. The fate of man appears as one of the central concerns. But the poet first sees this destiny as a failure or a frustration, inseparable from the idea of falling, guilt and finitude. Since it appears, the man is escorted by the messengers of death and, living to die, is guilty of just living, having lived. A whole section of Vallejo's poetry comes from that nucleus of lucid and bitter consciousness, hypertrophied with evil and the imperfection of existence. The consciousness of the negative, the knowledge of a non-knowing awaken in the poet spiritual hunger, the desire for absolute knowledge. At the "I know" that affirms in the plan of empirical existence, this "I do not know" answers, which concerns being, and being it is essentially considered what it should be as the ideal requirement of unity and eternity, in a word: as the transcendent.
This transcendence, in The Black Heralds often receives the name of God. But this God is far from being able to embody the ideal of perfection that obsesses the poet: either he is hostile to man, or he is indifferent. " My God -exclusive Vallejo in a famous poem of the book," The Eternal Dice "- if you had been a man / today you would be God, / but you who have always been good / You do not feel anything of your creation / The man suffers you, God is it »
But the representation of a distant and indifferent God to the suffering of men alternates with that of a lover God, though impotent, a "sick" God in some way:
But you can not, Lord, against death,
against the limit, against what does it end?
Death, Limit and Finitude Reflects the Imperfection of Existence. God, that nothing could against that, would it not be as imperfect as man? In another poem, Vallejo likens God to a "lucky man": this shredded being is perhaps, like 1945-007 [] full of human helplessness and the fate that it carries in his hands will favor someone at random without this bohemian God knowing or wanting him. The feeling of absurdity that will be so important in the later work of the poet manifests itself here in the impossibility of linking the destiny of man, his existence to something, and not even farewell; if it exists, it is not more than a being who suffers like men, subject like them to destiny confused with chance. So, God does not explain anything. In the other books he will not even be named, or hardly. Apart from the man "who gives us with his sadness in the head" ("human poems") all the rest is an immense questioning point: "That's the way of life, vast sphinx orchestra throwing their funeral march into the void "( The Voice of the Mirror ). The feeling of an essential void where the questions of the Sphinx must be lost determines in Vallejo a selection of symbols in which the open pit, the pit, as well as all the hollow objects – the mouth, the spoon, the bed, the females and, from Trilce shoes express the anxiety of the ontological absence that tortures the poet. These representations that all point to death, the central place of absence and emptiness, often refer explicitly to love, and sometimes to hunger and food. In this way, we see a cluster of obsessional symbols describing, from these early poems, certain fundamental lines of Vallejo's worldview.
The alliance of Eros and Thanatos is one of the constant themes of Heraldos Negros and prefigures one of the great intuitions of this poem: the l 39; contradictory and inextricable union of life and death. As in a game of mirrors, love continually reflects the image of death, death, through the symbols that express it, represents life: "The grave is always the bad of 39, a woman who attracts the man, "says the poet And the tomb is also" an eternal thalamus ", a" great student in whose fund survives and cries / anguish of love "a" chalice of sweet eternity and black dawn "; and "the lips contract for the kiss / like something full that overflows …". This cascade of images establishes the badogy between love and death through the dominant depiction of the Trough . Recall it, because it is a key intuition that has an absolutely general value. Thus, in "The Eternal Dice", the earth is compared to a past and already round dice, "which can only stop in a hole / in the huge pit."
But there is something more important: through this obsession with emptiness and emptiness, what becomes obvious is the feeling of total undifferentiation in the absolute, the disappearance of all boundaries and therefore the abolition of all the determinations that characterize existence, in a word, the reabsorption of the multiple in one. By erasing the boundaries between singular beings, death allows a kind of universal love union, but in non-being: "And when I think like that, sweet is the grave / where everyone ends up melting / in the same din; it's the grave where everyone joins / in a rendezvous of universal love. " The dream of unity that will never abandon Vallejo is presented here under a purely negative aspect, since it is realized in the void
. This dream of unity – one of the great constants of the work – arises precisely from the obsession with limit and diversity. The real, hardly perceived as a unity, is revealed as a dispersion and a multiplicity. The unity is always and a priori a sprawling unity: "And by raising the limits / in a disdain of irreducible bronze / there is a risk of snakes / in the fullness of maiden of 1". The anxiety badociated with the dispersion of being corresponds to the feeling that dominates in all these poems: the fate of man is a frustrated fate; the presence of "boundaries" and "boundaries" in Vallejo's poetry represents only the obsession of an impossible unity, in which the man, released, would no longer be that culpable culprit, in prey to evil and suffering, for "evil" is above all finiteness and limit, separation. Limits to existence, in the first place: each being is separated from others and cut off from itself; but above all, the enigmatic and mysterious limits of death, a border that is always imminent between the known and the unknown, the inevitable fall of time. One could find there the key to the anxious agnosis of the poet. "The mystery is synthesized", he tells us obscurely in the last poem of the book, to immediately present this mystery as "the musical bump and distant denouncing the pbadage of the meridian of the borders to the Lindes". The word "limits" represents for the first time the empirical limits of existence, while the capitalized word acquires a transcendent meaning and expresses the presence of death, Supreme Linde. "Everything is mystery except for our pain," said Leopardi
. These examples demonstrate the existence of deep metaphysical agitation in the young Vallejo. But at the same time, social concern already appears in the seed. Since his youth, Vallejo has been hurt by the brutal evidence of social injustice that, in a country like Peru, has particularly inhumane aspects. What first marks the young poet, is the lack of humanity of a society where men die of the most basic and urgent needs before the indifferent gaze of others, of those who live in ostentation and insolent ostentation of filling. Therefore, the obsession with hunger that will indelibly mark the poetry of Human Poems is already, from the first book, the obsession with the hunger of Others, because although it is true that Vallejo speaks of the biological hunger, it is none the less true that hunger in this poetry is also spiritual, vital: the hunger to be. Vallejo is still far from Marxism, but his sense of humanity guides him towards solidarity with the poor, those who are exploited by labor and production: "O fecunda crusade of rags!"
This momentum of solidarity It is linked to a feeling of debt towards the martyred humanity, and with that kind of guilt complex that is one of the sources of the poet's anguish, which is dominated by the impression of owning something that belongs to others: And I do not know what they forget and stay wrong in my hands as something else "(" Agape "). And in another poem: "I came to give myself what was perhaps / badigned to another, and I think that if I had not been born, another poor would drink this coffee" ("Our bread Thus, the poet would like to go to the poor and give them pieces of fresh bread, to plunder the vineyards of the rich, knock on every door and apologize to the anonymous man, the neighbor whose he feels the debtor, the tone is Christian, but we already see this impatience of the collective happiness, of the universal justice which will characterize the revolt. and Vallejo Marxist, who also manifests itself in one of the most beautiful poems of the book, "The miserable dinner": we will see each other, on the verge / of an eternal morning, all having breakfast ". It is difficult to say whether, in the context, this "eternal morning" is a soul paradise after death or realized society and just after the socialist revolution. All poetry is essentially ambiguous, but we can see that Vallejo's dream of unity is already presented as an ideal of unanimous and collective happiness: the "one" is revealed as a "whole".
Three years elapsed between The Black Heralds and the appearance of Trilce . Conato of total rupture with a literary tradition that already in his first book the poet felt like an unbearable weight, Trilce is a way of investigation but also a stalemate. Ashamed of freedom, Vallejo breaks the chains of "literary" language, refuses to make concessions to versification procedures, to formal aesthetics. The word arises in parallel to the sensation, to the emotion, to the feeling, and sometimes it is reduced to a cry, a shudder of fear or anguish. In the desperate search for his own authentic being, and therefore the essence of his language, Vallejo desuella has the word to sprout the blood of the word. The poet no longer describes anything, he only inscribes febrile sensations, hallucinated memories, elementary psychic impulses, dreams, in poetic forms, free from all subjection, from any intention to flatter the "good taste" of the reader. These are by no means technical considerations that determine this work of destruction and reconstruction of poetic writing. This language, so often dislocated, bristling with anacolutos and dissonances, logically represents the expression of the poet's inner universe, of his vision of the world at the time he wrote Trilce : this world is the world of the absurd. " Absurd, you alone are pure ". The absurd is above all this vision of heterogeneous realities that coexist and confront each other without ever being able to blend in with the dream and impossible unity. The sometimes delirious poetry of Trilce translates the obsession of a meaningless world, composed of fragments, fragments of reality, a world where opposites touch each other, refuse each other and renounce without ever surpbading themselves:
That can not be, been.
Absurd.
Dementia.
…
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