Clayton ESHLEMAN
Vallejo's Charge
Francois Vitrani has asked me to address my relationship to the poetry of Cesar Vallejo. I apprenticed myself to poetry in Kyoto, Japan, in 1962, by committing to a publishable translation of Vallejo’s European poetry, then called Poemas humanos (1938). As I stepped into the quicksand of this poetry, as a novice without a path I was also driven to confront my own background as well as what seemed to be my destiny in language.
On a translational level, this commitment has resulted in the publication of Human poems (1968), Spain, Take This Cup From Me (1974), a retranslation of both these books, with Jose Rubia Barcia, in 1978 as The Complete Posthumous Poetry, and finally, in 1992, of Trilce. In 1965/66 I spent a harrowing 9 months in Lima, Peru, trying unsuccessfully to gain access via the poet’s poisonous widow, to the worksheets for the never completed European poetry.
On a psychic level, my difficulties in Kyoto in writing poems which seemed to be my own, and my difficulties in transforming Vallejo’s Spanish into accurate American poems, became entangled in a drama where Vallejo in the guise of a medieval Japanese overlord commanded me, as a dishonored samurai, to commit seppuku. I did, discovering in the place of self-destruction “a dark red flower moving / with heaven’s untiring power.” In a way that today strikes me as evocative of shamanic initiation, I had engaged my master in a Jacob/angel struggle and jettisoned my given life for a creative one.
This successful double apprenticeship is at the core of my unfolding as a poet, translator, editor, essayist, and investigator of the origins of image-making via the Ice Age painted caves. What this tortured and truthful Peruvian essentially offered me was the possibility of a confrontation in which, in exchange for translating him, I learned to imprison myself in global life, to stew in what was happening to me, and to make some uncommon sense out of it. More than any other artist, Cesar Vallejo has granted me permission to say anything that would spur on my quest for authenticity and for constructing an alternate world in language.
13 April 2004