Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938)
- Born in a small village in the northern Andes of Peru
- Both grandfathers were Spanish Jesuit priest and both grandmothers were Chimu Indians
- The youngest of seven boys and four girls, he was raised Catholic and encouraged to become a priest. This didn’t work out for him as he, ironically, found he could not follow celibacy.
- Became disenchanted immediately upon arrival in the cities of Trujillo and Lima. When he returned to his village in 1920, he was accused of involvement in a riot in the village that resulted in a three-month prison stay.
- He left Peru at the age of 31 and never returned.
- He wrote essays, novels, short stories, plays and a screenplay but best known for his poetry which was published posthumously.
Style:
- Franco comments that for Vallejo, using that language was a vital exercise of freedom: "Vallejo knew that with every automatic word and gesture man contributes to his own damnation and imprisonment. His great achievement as a poet is to have interrupted that easy-flowing current of words which is both a solace and the mark of our despair, to have made each poem an act of consciousness which involves the recognition of difficulty and pain." Vallejo is seen as the progenitor of many innovations in poetic technique. New York Times Book Review contributor Alexander Coleman observes that Vallejo, "the standard for authenticity and intensity" in Hispanic literature, opened the way for future poets by leaving to them "a language swept clean, now bright and angular, ready for the man in the street."
- Vallejo often cloaks social and existential themes in religious imagery
- In 1928 he traveled to Russia because he believed that Communism could save the world.
- Clayton Eshleman and JoséRubia Barcia translated the Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo, which won the 1979 National Book Award.
- Wrote “Spain, take this cup from me” in fall and winter of 1937 in Spain when he was deported from France to Spain. “During the Fall and Winter of 1937, Vallejo wrote 25 of the poems represented in Poemas Humanos and the entire text of España, aparta de mí esta cáliz (Spain, take this cup from me), which can probably best be described as a kind of verbal Guernica. The best of these last poems exhibit a blend of participation and reflection where time, space, and motion seem to come together in a new dimension of reality. The play of variations on themes and word groups serves to weave each poem together in a mounting crescendo of emotional impact, manipulated so powerfully that the lack of resolution of the chords of sound and imagery leaves behind an impression of the poem as a great suspended sigh. This has the effect of forcing the reader to provide his own resolution and allows the poet to refuse the limitations imposed by taking a moral position.” Cesar Vallejo's Search for Transcendence by Sandy McKinney
Sources:
- Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 290: Modern Spanish American Poets, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by María A. Salgado, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gale, 2004. pp. 331-345.