A
special session at the 2016 MLA
Convention, offering new
readings of César Vallejo by
Pedro Granados (Vallejo Sin
Fronteras Instituto, Lima, Peru), Alan E. Smith (Boston University),
Jonathan Mayhew (University of
Kansas-Lawrence), and Stephen Hart
(University College London). Respondent Michelle Clayton (Brown
University).
Presiding Leslie Bary
(University of Louisiana, Lafayette).
We are Panel 690, convening Saturday, January 9, 2016 from 5:15-6:30 PM
in 203 JW Mariott. Bary and Smith will also participate in Panel
396, "César Vallejo: New Contexts," Friday, January 8, 3:30-4:45 PM,
205 JW Mariott, with Rosario Bartolini
(Vallejo Sin Fronteras Instituto, Lima, Peru) and Julio C. Ortega (Brown University).
Introduction
Leslie Bary
Borges
said Quevedo was a poet of language: “La grandeza de Quevedo es
verbal.” His
contemporary César Vallejo was a Quevedo disciple in his youth, and
some of his
later language experiments
are more Quevedian than avant-garde. This panel considers Vallejo as a
poet of language itself,
rather than as an “expressive,” or ethical or political poet as has
been most traditionally done. Such
thematic readings are essential for a politically committed writer
whose work uses
a great deal of
autobiographical material and also closely engages the intellectual
life of his time. But the strong
emphasis in Vallejo’s critical tradition on his difficult personal
circumstances, his
vocabulary of pain,
and his leftist politics
also works reductively, as does the focus on image at the expense of
intertext
and sound. Vallejo’s language consciousness is well recognized, but is
part of his difficulty still an
effect of evading questions of textuality and grammar? Our papers
present close readings not
motivated by the most commonly invoked thematic clusters in Vallejo
criticism (orphanhood,
poverty, suffering, displacement, mestizaje), and reconsider the
artistic response to his work. We
contend that a focus on language also reveals Vallejo as a more
affirmative poet than he is
often
considered to be.
César Vallejo died in 1938 with
much of his
major work still unpublished. He has
since emerged as
one of the most important writers
in the Spanish language and as
a major figure in world literature and international modernism, which his Andean voice helped to form. See
complete panel description and
information on speakers.
Trilce/Teatro:
guión, personajes
y público
Pedro Granados
Full
text in .doc
Looking
for "Hallazgo de la Vida"
Alan E. Smith
Full text
in .doc
Pedro Granados
and Alan E. Smith offer new readings of well known texts, engaging
questions of voice, embodiment, movement, and verbal play. Granadós’ “Trilce/Teatro: guión, personajes y
público” focuses on Trilce
(1922), Vallejo’s most linguistically daring collection. Granados first
shows how Trilce works as a
theatrical or performance text, and then considers one of the specific
audiences with which this collection enters into dialogue: the journal Colónida (1916) and the Colónida
movement that grew up around it. Smith’s “Looking for ‘Hallazgo de la
vida’” examines the prose poetry of Vallejo’s early Paris years, some
of the poet’s darkest, arguing that the poems are in fact affirmative
texts and
showing how their uses of plural personae and highly textured voices
work to recover both the human figure and pathos, discovering a “door
to life.”
Vallejo and the Trials of
Translation: The Erasure of Logopoeia
Jonathan Mayhew
Full text
in .docx
César Vallejo's Publics
Stephen Hart
Full text in
.pdf
Jonathan Mayhew and Stephen Hart consider translations, adaptations,
and Vallejo’s influence on contemporary literature and art. Mayhew’s
analysis of translations ranges from the early collection Los heraldos
negros (1919) to España,
aparta de mí este cáliz (1938), drawing
contrasts with translation projects on Neruda and Lorca. Vallejo's
modernism, he argues, is not characterized by visual imagery but by
what Ezra Pound called "logopoeia," or the "dance of the intellect
among words." Hart examines the poets who commemorated their ‘audience’
of and with Vallejo in a number of poems, focusing mainly on the poems
Pablo Neruda dedicated to him. He discusses as well the five novels
which have resurrected different aspects of Vallejo’s biography (Saer
1994, Bolaño 1999, Freire Sarria 2007, González Viaña 2007, Nájar
2010), Roy Andersson’s film Songs
from the Second Floor (Special Jury
Prize, Cannes 2000), and Fernando de Szyszlo’s artwork. Questions
implicit in Mayhew’s paper and explicit in Hart’s are what we mean by
“public,” and what forces are at play when we talk about the influence
a writer wields over other artists.
Response
Michelle
Clayton
Michelle Clayton is the author of Poetry in Pieces:
César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (U of California P, 2011) and
other work on Vallejo.
Page
created and maintained by Leslie
Bary
Last revised 17 December 2015