| | | VALLEJO, CÉSAR - SELECTED POEMS | | |
| | Edited and translated by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith. Shearsman Books, 2006
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| | Smith and Gianuzzi have given us here an excellent selection of Vallejo's poetry in this small volume, together with a fine introduction and notes to the poems. The translators tell us in their introduction that "there are many Vallejos", that "[h]e is many poets at different periods of his life". This extraordinary variety is both the strength of Vallejo and the problem with Vallejo. Smith and Gianuzzi's selection does give a sense of his variety while also reflecting Vallejo's constant obsessions with large themes such as suffering, injustice, hunger, death, and the pity of war. One 'constant' is Vallejo's intensity, which always comes across, even in other languages. We begin with poems from The Black Heralds with their tight construction, move on to Trilce, in which Vallejo experiments with language that breaks formal rules in a kind of anguished but incredibly articulate howl, and then move on to the great later prose-poetry and poems in Poemas Humanos about he human condition, which include some of the extraordinary poems written during the Spanish Civil War. We are lucky that these late poems, never published during Vallejo's short life (he was only 46 when died in 1938), were not destroyed. Many of them are among the great poems of the twentieth century. The choice of poems and the introduction are so good that it seems wrong to criticise the translations at all. The truth is that Vallejo is almost impossible to translate. One feels that it is perhaps necessary sometimes to sacrifice specific meaning for sound and sonority. But Smith and Gianuzzi have made a valiant try, and perhaps these translations will serve as springboards for a poet writing in English to attempt something freer, crazier — more Vallejan.
Text provided by Alan Biggins, Librarian at Canning House | | |
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