An Alphabet of Poets – V is for Vallejo

AND WHAT IF AFTER

And what if after so many words
the word itself doesn’t survive!
And what if  after so many wings of birds
the stopped bird doesn’t survive!
It would be better then, really,
if it were all swallowed up, and let’s end it!

    To have been born only to live off our own death!
To raise ourselves from the heavens toward the earth
carried up by our own bad luck
always watching for the moment to put out our darkness with our
    shadow!
It would be better, frankly,
if it were all swallowed up, and the hell with it!

And what if, after so much history, we succumb,
not to eternity,
but to these simple things, like being
at home, or starting to brood!
What if we discover later
all of a sudden, that we are living
to judge by the height of the stars,
off a comb and off stains in the handkerchief!
It would be better, really,
if it were all swallowed up, right now!

They’ll say we have a lot
of grief in one eye, and a lot of grief
in the other also, and when they look
a lot of grief in both….
So then!…..Naturally….So!….Don’t say a word!

Cesar Vallejo (1892 – 1938), translated by Robert Bly and Douglas Lawder from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade, Harper Collins Publishers, 1992

Welcome to Houdini poetry. Poetry that should shriek danger, danger! Poetry that busts out from linear, rational thinking, takes two plus two and makes it a bird. Welcome to the poetry of Cesar Vallejo, born in a small Peruvian village but who spent many years in exile in Europe, mainly Paris where he died in difficult circumstances. But how his words cry out, as fresh, in his unexpected voice, today as it did years ago. The fearless poet who famously wrote On the day I was born, God was sick.

Welcome to what Robert Bly has coined “leaping poetry.”  Poetry that leaps from the known to the unknown. Poems with images, metaphors, that come out of the “deep” imagination, challenge easy understanding, especially the understanding of the Western mind. Some call Vallejo and his poetry part of the Surrealism tradition but I like the wildness inferred by “leaping”. It is vigorous dynamic poetry. It can scratch, bite, claw out your normal eyes, grief struck eyes, even, so you can see further deeper, closer with our other eyes – ones we can forget we have. So then!….Naturally….So!….Don’t say a word! Don’t say a worn word. An expected word. A stopped word!

These poems require an act of faith, ask that we read them with another part of our brain, trust the imagination of the poet, their associations and leaps between images and let our own imaginations leap into where the images take us even though they may seem disconnected, random. For a deeper understanding of this poetry check out LEAPING POETRY by Bly published in 1975 by Beacon Press or more recently The Winged Energy of Delight by Bly published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2004.

I picked the poem above not just because of its leaps but because of its intensity; its  plea against sameness, sleep walking, the numbness of mere repetition of the day to day.

And what if after so many words
the word itself doesn’t survive!
And what if  after so many wings of birds
the stopped bird doesn’t survive!
It would be better then, really,
if it were all swallowed up, and let’s end it!

Did you leaps with the leaps? Or do they throw you off? How can we live off our own death? How can we raise ourselves from the heavens toward the earth? How can we put out our darkness with our shadow? I don’t know right away But Vallejo encourages me to try! Some danger, some darkness, clings to these words. It reminds me of the poem by the American poet Charles Olson (1910 – 1970) that reminds us to write poems with roots that dangle, that still  have the dirt on, so we remember where they come from. Lots of good  composted dark where Vallejo works!

And imagine this:

What if we discover later
all of a sudden, that we are living
to judge by the height of the stars,
off a comb and off stains in the handkerchief!

What unexpected, accurate metaphors for an unlived life. Ouch! Am I caught in appearances ( what my comb does) or am I living even smaller – off stains on a hankie? The stopped bird. Stopped wings! Have I forgotten my own? Do you remember yours?

A man walks by with a baguette on his shoulder

A man walks by with a baguette on his shoulder
Am I going to write, after that, about my double?

Another sits, scratches, extracts a louse from his armpit, kills it
How dare one speak about psychoanalysis?

Another has entered my chest with a stick in hand
To talk then about Socrates with the doctor?

A cripple passes by holding a child’s hand
After that I’m going to read André Breton?

Another trembles from cold, coughs, spits blood
Will it ever be possible to allude to the deep Self?

Another searches in the muck for bones, rinds
How to write, after that, about the infinite?

A bricklayer falls from a roof, dies and no longer eats lunch
To innovate, then, the trope, the metaphor?

A merchant cheats a customer out of a gram
To speak, after that, about the fourth dimension?

A banker falsifies his balance sheet
With what face to cry in the theater?

An outcast sleeps with his foot behind his back
To speak, after that, to anyone about Picasso?

Someone goes to a burial sobbing
How then become a member of the Academy?

Someone cleans a rifle in his kitchen
How dare one speak about the beyond?

Someone passes by counting with his fingers
How speak of the non-self without screaming?

Cesar Vallejo, translated by Clayton Eshleman from The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, HarperCollins Publishers 2010

Bly is not sure Eshleman’s translations captures the quickness of Vallejo’s leaps and associations but they seem eye-blink fast to me. Such unexpected opposites, paradoxes, contradictions. A banker falsifies his balance sheet/ With what face to cry in the theatre?

Oh, how Vallejo captures our confusions – some hateful. It makes me think of the contradiction of a Nazi officer who comes home for lunch dry-eyed from the death camp only to cry at the death of his  daughter’s sparrow. The public face of embezzler, Bernie Madoff.

And these Black Riders in the poem below – they leap, they rear up. I recognize them. It is all I can do to keep my seat! There are blows in life so violent…I can’t answer. How this a poet captures the deep angst I feel at moments, angst I do not admit so readily, so publically. If I don’t feel this do my words die, do my wings stop?

The Black Riders

There are blows in life so violent—I can’t answer!
Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them,
the deep waters of everything lived through
were backed up in the soul . . . I can’t answer!

Not many; but they exist . . . They open dark ravines
in the most ferocious face and in the most bull-like back.
Perhaps they are the horses of that heathen Atilla,
or the black riders sent to us by Death.

They are the slips backward made by the Christs of the soul,
away from some holy faith that is sneered at by Events.
These blows that are bloody are the crackling sounds
from some bread that burns at the oven door.

And man . . . poor man! . . . poor man! He swings his eyes, as
when a man behind us calls us by clapping his hands;
Swings his crazy eyes, and everything alive
is backed up, like a pool of guilt, in that glance.

There are blows in life so violent . . . I can’t answer

Cesar Vallejo translated by Robert Bly from The Winged Energy of Delight

Am I feeling a strange melancholy today? Is this why I have chosen the poem above, the one below? I don’t know. But………

Black Stone upon a White Stone

I will die in Paris with the heavy rains
on a day already I recall.
I will die in Paris-and I don’t turn away-
perhaps a Thursday, like today, in fall.

Thursday then, since today, Thursday, as I prose
these lines, my forearms have begun to ache
and, never like today, as I take
to my old road, have I felt so alone.

César Vallejo is dead, they all kept hitting
him though he doesn’t do a thing
to them; they beat him hard with sticks and hard

as well with rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays and the bones of his arms,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads …

Cesar Vallejo, translated by Kelly Brown, from portals 2006, San Francisco State University

 

According to Brown this poem was strangely prescient. Written several years before his death, this sonnet just about got it right. Vallejo did die in Paris in a heavy rain, but not quite Thursday. Friday it was, Good Friday; spring, not fall. Who among us readers has not felt the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

Post a Comment

Your email is never shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*