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.
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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