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For nearly forty-five years, I have been translating, off and on, the poetry of César Vallejo. His writing has become the kelson in the ship of poetry I have attempted to construct. Here I would like to offer an overview of this translational companionship and to evoke some of the experiences that occurred because of it. Finally, I would like to say what this companionship has meant to me, as a poet and as a human being.

* While I was a student at Indiana University in 1957, a painter friend, Bill Paden, gave me a copy of the New Directions 1944 Latin American Poetry anthology. I was particularly impressed with the poetry of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. At the same time, I read Angel Flores' translation of Neruda's Residencia en la tierra, and upon comparing his version with those of H.R. Hays and Dudley Fitts in the anthology, I was intrigued with the differences. Without knowing any Spanish, I began to tinker with the versions. During the summer of 1959, with a pocket Spanish-English dictionary and two hundred dollars, I hitchhiked to Mexico. The following summer I again returned to Mexico, rented a room in the back of a butcher's home in Chapala, and spent the summer with Neruda's poetry, as well as writing most of the poems that were to appear in my first book, Mexico & North in 1962.

In 1960, I edited the English Department sponsored literary tri-quarterly, Folio, where I printed some Neruda versions I had done with friends in Mexico City, and four Vallejo versions, cotranslated with another graduate student, Maureen Lahey. I had become aware of poetry in translation almost as soon as I became aware, in 1956, that poetry existed at all.

I finished a Master's Degree in 1961, and took a job with the University of Maryland's Far Eastern Division, teaching literature to military personnel stationed in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Before leaving, almost as an afterthought, I packed the copy of Poesía de America #5, Homenaje a César Vallejo, that I had found in a Mexico City bookstore.

César Vallejo

Oh bottle without wine! oh wine the widower of this bottle!
Afternoon when the dawn of the afternoon
flamed fatally in five spirits.
Widowhood without bread or grime, finishing in hideous metalloids
and in oral cells ending.

Oh always, never to find the never of so much always!
oh my good friends, a cruel deceit,
partial, piercing our truncated
volatile, frolicful grief!

The sublime, low perfection of the pig,
gropes my customary melancholy!
Adz sounding in dreams,
adz
asinine, inferior, betrayed, lawful, thief,
lowering and groping what used to be my ideas!

You and he and they and everyone,
nevertheless,
inserted at the same time into my shirt,
into my shoulders wood, between my femurs, little sticks;
you particularly,
having influenced me;
he, futile, reddened, with money,
and they, winged drones of another weight.

Oh bottle without wine! oh wine the widower of this bottle!

16 September 1937

Clayton Eshleman's translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, with a Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, an Introduction by Efrain Kristal, and a Chronology by Stephen Hart, will be published December 2006 by University of California Press.

Copies can be ordered online at
http://www.ucpress.edu. Toll-free phone is 800 777 4726. When ordering enter the following code in the special instructions box: 06D3136. The cloth edition is 704 pages, bilingual, and costs $49.95 plus $4.00 shipping charge.

POETRY Mexico & North (1962)
Indiana (1969)
Altars (1971)
Coils (1973)
The Great Wall (1975)
What She Means (1978)
Hades In Manganese (1981)
Fructure (1983)
The Name Encanyoned River (1986)
Hotel Cro-Magnon (1989)
Under World Arrest (1994)
From Scratch (1998)
Everwhat (2003)
My Devotion (2004)

PROSE
Antiphonal Swing (1989)
Companion Spider (2002)
Juniper Fuse, Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (2003)

TRANSLATIONS
Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth (1962)
César Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry (with José Rubia Barcia, 1978)
Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry (with Annette Smith, 1990)
Michel Deguy, Given Giving (1984)
Bernard Bador, Sea Urchin Harakiri (1986)
Aimé Césaire, Lyric & Narrative Poetry 1946-1982 (with Annette Smith, 1990)
Antonin Artaud, Watchfriends & Rack Screams (with Bernard Bador, 1995)
César Vallejo, Trilce (1992, 2000)
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (with Annette Smith, 2001)

EDITOR
Folio (Bloomington, Indiana, 3 issues, 1959-1960)
Quena (Lima, Peru, 1 issue edited, suppressed by the North American Peruvian Institute, 1966)
Caterpillar (NYC-Los Angeles, 20 issues, 1967-1973)
A Caterpillar Anthology (Issues #1-12, 1971)
Sulfur (Pasadina-Los Angeles-Ypsilanti, 46 issues, 1981-2000)

Clayton Eshleman's Official Website may be found at:
http://www.claytoneshleman.com/

All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is prohibited.

The official version of this magazine is available on Ygdrasil's World-Wide Web site http://www.synapse.net/~kgerken. No other version shall be deemed "authorized" unless downloaded from there. Distribution is allowed and encouraged as long as the issue is unchanged.

* Klaus Gerken, Chief Editor - for general messages and ASCII text submissions: kgerken@synapse.net