All in a Lifes Work: Translating the Poetry of Cesar Vallejo The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 16, 2007 Listen All in a Lifes Work: Translating the Poetry of Cesar Vallejo Byline: RICHARD BYRNE WIDOWS AND WORD HUNTS: In his foreword to The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press), the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa places his countryman in the category of inexplicable poets. Mr. Vargas Llosa unpacks that label in this way: It means that ... even after we have studied everything about his poems that rational knowledge has to offer -- his sources, his techniques, his unique vocabulary, his influences, the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of his poems -- we remain in the dark, unable to penetrate that mysterious aureole that we feel to be the secret of this poetrys originality and power. Clayton Eshleman, a noted poet and an emeritus professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, has spent 50 years groping through that darkness to translate the entire poetic oeuvre of one of Latin Americas greatest writers into English. He agrees with Mr. Vargas Llosa that some poems and words in Vallejo -- particularly in his elusive modernist masterpiece Trilce (1922) -- stubbornly resist easy exegesis. There are poems in Trilce, Mr. Eshleman says in an interview, there must be half a dozen, that, frankly, I dont understand the poem. I think Ive translated it accurately, but if I was to sit down with a group of students and they asked, What does this mean? I dont think I could gloss it. Vallejo, who was born in 1892 and died in 1938, also wrote plays and articles. (A film scenario with the intriguing title Charlie Against Chaplin is now missing, according to Mr. Eshleman.) But he is best known for his four books of poetry, which comprise Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Heralds, 1918), Trilce, and two posthumous books, Poemas Humanos and Espana, Aparta de Mi Este Caliz (Human Poems and Spain, Take This Cup From Me), both of which were published in 1939. Mr. Eshleman first translated Human Poems for Grove Press in 1968. His translation of the last two books with Jose Rubia Barcia (who died in 1997) were published as Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry by the University of California Press and won the 1979 National Book Award for Translation. His version of Trilce was published by Marsilio Publishers in 1992, with a revised edition published by Wesleyan University Press in 2000. While he felt that a Complete Poetry was doable, Mr. Eshleman says, I was willing to consider using somebody elses Black Heralds. But then I went out and read carefully all of the Black Heralds translations. And I realized that I was not happy at all with any of the other translations. So I decided I would do it. *** In addition to the foreword by Mr. Vargas Llosa, the new collection boasts an introduction by Efrain Kristal, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Los Angeles; an extensive chronology of Vallejos life and publication history by Stephen M. Hart, a professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at University College London; and notes on the poems by Mr. Eshleman. It is a comprehensive introduction to a poet who ranks with Pablo Neruda and Ruben Dario in importance in Latin American letters, and whose work encompasses the verbal revolutions of modernism and the political upheavals of the 1930s. The new collection also includes a highly personal essay by Mr. Eshleman, which describes the tumult (lost notebooks, near-death experiences of family members, accusations of being a spy) in his five decades of translating Vallejo. Mr. Eshlemans travels with the poet chart a truly global itinerary, from Mexico City to Kyoto, Japan, to Paris (where Vallejo is buried, in Montparnasse Cemetery) to Lima, Peru, where the translator had a rocky relationship with Vallejos widow, Georgette. In the memoir, Mr. Eshleman says he moved to Lima to curry favor with Vallejos widow and to see the poets work sheets. In their first meeting, he recalls in the essay, I had not been in her apartment for 15 minutes when she told me that my translations were full of howlers, that Vallejo was untranslatable, ... and that neither the first edition nor the work sheets were available to be studied. His second, and last, encounter with Ms. Vallejo was even more catastrophic, ending with a drinking session in which Mr. Eshleman expressed his doubts about whether she and Vallejo had been formally wed. She used what she considered to be her great affection and esteem for the work in effect to block it, says Mr. Eshleman in the interview. For so long it was difficult to get things published. It was only in the past decade that the prose, which is mainly journalism, ... and the plays have been published in Spanish. And also she destroyed a lot of stuff. In his essay, Mr. Eshleman playfully recalls that he ended his 1968 translation of Human Poems with the words My work is done. So is his journey with Vallejo finished now? It has to be, he says. Im 71, and since Im primarily a poet, I want to spend the rest of my time to continue my research and work on some projects that have been in abeyance. Theres not much for me to do as a translator after the complete poetry of Vallejo. By RICHARD BYRNE Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. chronicle Source Citation Byrne, Richard. All in a Lifes Work: Translating the Poetry of Cesar Vallejo. The Chronicle of Higher Education 53.24 (2007). Biography in Context. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. 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Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:43:22 +0000
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