refusing translation in exile

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Midwest Modern Language Association

Refusing Translation in Exile: The Language Barrier in Csar Vallejo's "Poemas humanos"Author(s): Dianna NiebylskiSource: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 35, No. 2, Translatingin and across Cultures (Autumn, 2002), pp. 88-99Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315169Accessed: 03/09/2010 07:25

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Refusing Translationin Exile: TheLanguageBarrierin Cesar Vallejo's

PoemashumanosDianna Niebylski

More than half a century after his death and well into the postmodernera, C6sar Vallejo remains the most intractable poet ever to have writtenin Spanish. It is well known that in Vallejo's case the syntactical experi-ments of his poetry obeyed an ethics of solidarity-he might simply havecalled it a "human" ethic-more than a (merely) vanguard aesthetic.Behind the nearly untranslatable syntax lurked the poet's desire to makehis native language utter new sounds of metaphysical despair, or at thevery least new groans for hunger pains. In graduate school I was sodrawn to the difficulty of Vallejo's syntax and so intrigued by his per-versely broken metonyms that I devoted a chapter of my dissertation touses of silence in Poemas humanos. Seeking to build a framework forunderstanding Vallejo's ruptured language at the time, I invoked WalterBenjamin's notions of apocalyptic alienation, Ludwig Wittgenstein'sthoughts on the resistance of private language(s) to the Other's efforts attranslation, and George Steiner's meditations on literatures of disaster.Moored to these speculations, I approached Vallejo's poems as a particu-larly anguished manifestation (a manifesto, even) of the global socio-his-torical alienation that defined much of the mid-twentieth century.Rereading my own chapter over a decade later,' I am struck by my eager-ness to prove Vallejo as the Ur-poet of catastrophe and despair by inter-preting his highly personal lyrics as expressions of a transnational andtranscultural existential malaise. Although I alluded to the poet's moreintimate woes (his economic troubles, his chronic health problems, hisinvolvement in Spain's Civil War), my doctoral reading reflects clearlymy own resistance to engaging too closely the poet's personal circum-stances.While relieved to see that much of my thesis chapter on Poemashumanos still rings true, a recent rereading has led me to revisit some ofthe questions that lie at the heart of these poems--specifically, thenotions of exploded subject/body and the violent assaults on languageand syntax-but from a perspective that considers the rupture of the sub-ject and the estrangement of language against the reality of Vallejo's writ-ing in exile. Aided by Julia Kristeva's theoretical meditations on exile andthe foreigner's estrangement, particularly as articulated in Strangers to

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Ourselves,2 I propose to examine the way in which Vallejo's ontologicaland existential despair, as expressed in the broken language of Poemashumanos, gains new resonances when linked to the sense of abandon-ment, displacement, and betrayal that Vallejo experiences in exile. Whilethere is no denying the existential and metaphysical dimensions of Valle-jo's orphanhood as dis-articulated in his poetry, I am now convinced thatwhat mediates the shocking impenetrability of so many of Vallejo's laterpoems is the dark specter of the exile's sense of loss: the loss of familiarrituals, the loss of meaningful sounds, the perennial threat of the loss oflanguage. It is the intimate, visceral nature of these impending losses thatgives full credence-and for me a new sense of urgency-to the poet'sstruggling attempts to remain on the other side of silence while hangingon to a progressively foreign-sounding language.

Readers familiar with Vallejo's poetic trajectory might object that hisexperiments with pushing language to the edge of communicable mean-ing first find expression in Trilce,a work written, in large part, while thepoet was in prison in Peru. As critics have noted, with Trilce Vallejoattempts dramatic plunges into the abysses of meaning in novel and utter-ly original ways, extracting from an overburdened, over-anguished lan-guage many of the pulverized phrases and cataleptic images that willbecome the trademark of his mature poetry.3 For purposes of consistency,it would be possible to argue that the prison term that spawned many ofthe poems in Trilceis already a form of exile-an internal exile of a veryreal kind. But this argument is unnecessary. The experimental ruptures ofTrilcediffer significantly and substantially from the less controlled, morevisceral, yet more alienated (and alienating) semantic chaos of Poemashumanos.

Contrary to some critics' comparative assessment of the convulsive,metallic hermeticism of Trilceas opposed to the solidarity-tempered criesof Poemas humanos,4 I am persuaded that, for all their difficulty, thepoems of Trilceare less susceptible to the overwhelming sense of inartic-ulateness that threatens to mute so many of the Poemas humanos. Therecurrent presence of the feminine, and the repeated allusions to the erot-ic (as lost presences and failed couplings, to be sure, but ones that con-nect the poet physically and psychically to nurturing bodies), keep thepoetic persona of Trilcefrom ever reaching the impotent devastation thatdefines the "I"of Poemas humanos. Irony, parody, and self-parody arerhetorical traits in both texts, but the dark playfulness of some of T7ilce'spoems finds no counterpart in Poemas humanos. Furthermore, the sullenparadoxes of a poem like "Earthquake"("Terremoto")in Poemas humanos,a poem which bombards the reader with a series of metonymicallydyslexic questions ("Intalking of the firewood, do I silence the fire?/ Insweeping the floor, do I forget the fossil?" ["gHablandode la lefia, callo el

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fuego?/ Barriendo el suelo, olvido el fosil?"]; 130)5have the grimness butnot the ludic flavor of Trilce'soften anthologized poem XXXII "999 calo-ries" ("999 calorias..."). Thus, although Trilce's alienated language maybe no less impenetrable than the language-in-exile of Poemas humanos,theearlier work never quite matches the sense of inevitable aphasia thatemerges from the later poems.6I. Displacement, Disposession, "Dyslexia"

Even the most miserable and obscure of Peruvianexiles finds himselfwith a ticket and somemoney ... Onlythis poorindianis left to pick upthe crumbsat the banquet.El mis desgraciado y obscuro de los vagabundos peruanos consiguepasajey pasajeen dinero ... S61oeste pobreindigenase quedaal mar-gen del festin Vallejo,Epistolario

In the letter quoted above, Vallejo refers to himself as a pariah, oneforgotten by his country and his countrymen. The letter is dated 1928,five years after Vallejo's arrival in Paris, but the sense of abandonmentand betrayal expressed here will only intensify throughout Vallejo's exileof nearly two decades. Vallejo readers are likely to remember that thepoet was incarcerated in 1920, unjustly blamed for being an accomplicein a politically-motivated fire (in fact, the owner of the store that wasdestroyed by the fire was a friend of Vallejo's family). Charged with beingan intellectual instigator, he was condemned to six months in jail. Thereis some disagreement among Vallejo historians as to whether the poetwas vulnerable to further persecution following his release, but it is clearthat Vallejo continued to feel he was in some danger of being returned tojail by political and local enemies. Added to his anxieties about the possi-bility of being jailed once again were the poet's bitter disappointment atthe general indifference with which Trilcewas received in 1922 and hisinability to hold on to his teaching jobs (for various reasons, some ofthem political and some personal). His mother had died in 1920, andVallejo appears to have felt an ongoing sense of guilt at having perhapscontributed to the heartache and worry that may have precipitated herdeath or at least darkened the last months of her life. All of these factorsplayed a part in convincing the penniless poet to accept his friend JulioGalvez's invitation to try his luck in Paris. It is clear that he never intend-ed for the journey to result in permanent exile, but Vallejo-perenniallyimpoverished and ill in Paris-never returned to his native Santiago deChuco.Above all else, exile meant the intensification of that sense of "orphan-hood" ("orfandad")already present in Vallejo's earliest poems. In Poemas



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humanos this sense of cultural, social, and familial displacement conveysan uneasy and slippery, but deeply alienating, transcultural flavor. It is ahybrid mix of twentieth-century continental malaise and indoamericanfatalism, and the reader senses the bitterness of the poem's aftertaste vis-cerally before she can begin to decipher it intellectually as theme orrhetorical refrain. The theme of orphanhood is present in Vallejo's poetryfrom the start, and the poetic persona of Black Heralds (Los Heraldosnegros) is already a walking specter barely held together by needs andlacks. Yet, while in Heraldos negros orphanhood is conveyed as the cata-lyst to the poems' bittersweet melancholy, melancholy is no longer a con-vincing vehicle for the sense of displacement felt by the mature poet, andin Poemas humanos the sense of dispossession and dislocation finds other,more disturbing and less modernista, registers: befuddlement, rage, andthe always uneasy compromise betweeen scream and silence.Both the sense of dislocation and the confused rage resulting from itare first evinced at a syntactical level, as if grammar and syntax crumbledfirst and the images quickly followed. In "Height and Hair" ("Alturaypelos") the poet's reaction to feeling dispossessed of the familiar-familiarroutines, familiar gestures, familiar words-is one of resentful befuddle-ment. Made up entirely of interrogatives and exclamations, the poemlaments the poet's loss of access to daily rituals. As he is excluded fromordinary acts everyone else takes for granted, he becomes progressivelyless able to express a sense of disorientation. The poem's plaintive coda,repeated twice at the end of every stanza, is an example of paradoxicalreasoning: the poet claims to have been excluded from the normal orderof things (or the normal comfort of things) because he has "only beenborn." The apparently simple structure of the poem's initial questionstricks readers with the promise of ordinary syntax: "who doesn't own ablue suit?" ("%quienno tiene su vestido azul?"),only to stump them at theend of each stanza with baffling exclamations: "I who have only beenborn!" ("iYoque tan s6lo he nacido!"; 127). Had Vallejo used the adjective"alone"("solo")instead of the adverb "only"("s61o")the logic of the expla-nation given for the poet's plight would be merely a concession to exis-tentialist angst. But the use of the adverb turns the verse into a perplex-ing example of dyslexic reasoning at the same time that it deals adestabilizing blow to the poem's syntax.As in many of the Poemas humanos, in "Height and Hair" the sense ofdispossession evoked by the poet's situation pushes language into a stateof rhetorical tension compounded by the accumulation of questionmarks and exclamation points. It is evident that the poet's spatial andphysical disorientation results in his inability to reflect logically on hisalienation. For Kristeva, the loss of common sense is one of the foreign-er's (or the exile's) first losses. The semi-comprehensible, autistic

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musings ("cavilaciones") of "Alturay pelos," repeated in more extremeform in many other poems, can be read as a consequence of the logicaland linguistic dyslexia that affects and afflicts all linguistic exiles.In Strangersto Ourselves,Kristeva notes that, in its most acute manifes-tations, the loss of identity to which every exile is prone threatens todestroy the exiled subject's ability to differentiate between himself, hisbody, and the outside world. In the more intractable of the Poemashumanos, the subject's fragmentation is both visually and viscerally con-veyed through images of the exploded, pulverized, or dismembered body:internal glands, tears, hands, dislocated limbs, fleeing feet, and an occa-sional eye float loosely and ominously throughout the poems. In "TheMiserable Ones" ("Los desgraciados"), the poet orders himself to "windup" his arm, then commands his hand to hold his large intestine in place:"The day is coming, wind your arm/. ..The day is coming; hold yourlarge intestine firmly in your hand" ("Yava a venir el dia; da cuerda a tubrazo/. . . Ya va a venir el dia; ten fuerte en la mano a tu intestinogrande"; 170). In "Apillar bearing consolations" ("Un pilar soportandoconsuelos") the poet is bound to his skeleton only by a heartbeat ("hearti-ly bound to my skeleton" ["coraz6nmente unido a mi esqueleto"]; 158).And in "Poemto be read and sung" ("Poemapara ser leido y cantado") heknows that someone with "his [bodily] parts"is looking for him, althoughit is unclear if that someone is himself or someone else ("Iknow there issomeone made up of my parts" ["[s]6que hay una persona compuesta demis partes"]; 155). Reflecting on this aspect of Poemas humanos, AmericoFerrari has noted that Vallejo's "is the poem of the body, but of a bodywithout unity, one where the different parts would seem to be independ-ent of each other and independent of the subject" ("esel poema del cuer-po, pero de un cuerpo sin unidad, en el que parece como si las diferentespartes fuesen independientes entre si e independientes del sujeto"; Fer-rari 140). Against the visceral wreckage provoked by the experience ofexile, Vallejo's broken subjects cease to be mere philosophical or psycho-logical emblems of the modern or even postmodern condition, andbecome metonymic but graphic depictions of real "foreign"bodies, bodiesconstantly exposed to the unfamiliar, subject to distortion, disorientation,and displacement.Made visibly real by images of the exploded body, the poet's shatteredsense of self borders on schizophrenia or psychosis. "Maybe I'm another"("Alo mejor, soy otro") begins one of the untitled poems, as the poet'sincreasing self-alienation succeeds in leading him, through an increasing-ly tortuous syntax, to deny both a personal past and a possible future:"No, Not ever. Never yesterday. Never tomorrow." ("No, Nunca. Nuncaayer. Nunca despues"; 180). In "Paris, October 1936" ("Paris, octubre1936") the poet announces his departure from himself as an inevitable



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but irrefutable biographical fact: "Ofall this I take my leave alone/ of thisbench, of my underwear,/ of my overall situation, of my actions,/ of myown number broken in two parts,/ Of all this I take my leave alone" ("Detodo esto yo soy el inico que parte/ De este banco me voy, de mis cal-zones, de mi gran situaci6n, de mis acciones, de mi nfimero hendidoparte a parte, de todo esto yo soy el finico que parte"; 166). Only fragiletokens (a shoe, a buttonhole, and the bend of his elbow) remain to provethat he was once precariously there. As one living in the city thatinspired Descartes to proclaim the demonstrable self-certainty of the cogi-to, Vallejo must surely feel the bitter irony of having to rely on somethingas insubstantial as a buttonhole to certify his own existence. The patheticimage of self-alienation conveys the extent to which the exiled Peruvianpoet-more so even than other mid-century (Continental) estrangedsouls-is barred from stepping into the sturdy shoes of the Cartesianheritage.II. From Word-Piles to Exiled Language

The exile is capableof ... "multiplesublationsof the unnameable,theunrepresentable,the void."Kristeva,"ANew Typeof Intellectual:The Dissident"The Peace,'the wasp, the heel, the slopes,the deadman, the deciliters,the owl,the places,the ringworm,the sarcophagi,the glass,the brunettesLaPAZ,la abispa,8el taco, las vertientes,el muerto,los decilitros,el bfiho,los lugares,la tifia,los sarc6fagos,el vaso, las morenas...LaPAZ,la abispa,el taco, las vertientes

Unable to return to Peru, out of indigence and also for fear that hewould be imprisoned once again upon arrival (in 1926 a Trujillo courtdeclared him guilty of his earlier charge and re-issued an order to incar-cerate him), Vallejo remained a perennial outsider in Paris. Always pover-ty-stricken, he and the silent Georgette Vallejo (a difficult woman, if laterVallejo translators and editors are to be believed) moved from one cheaphotel to another in search of more affordable, if increasingly darker andless hospitable, surroundings. His trips to the Soviet Union provedincreasingly disillusioning; his deeply committed involvement in theSpanish Civil War ended in heartbreak as it did for so many poets. Hisacute disillusionment over the turn of events that would lead to a Francovictory months later may well have contributed to Vallejo's prematureand miserable death. He died in great pain, having just heard in a state ofsemi-consciousness that the Fascist forces had succeeded in occupyingthe Ebro, thus cutting the Republican armies in two. His exile had

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extended for sixteen years. There is no indication at all, either in his poet-ry or in his letters, that he ever made peace with exile, or with his condi-tion as an exile. It is hard to find, in the annals of literary or artisticexiles, a more recalcitrant case of non-adaptation, or a more sustainedrefusal to let go of the exile's sense of radical dislocation.In "The Silence of Polyglots," Kristeva comments that the foreigner's"polymorphic mutism" is the inevitable legacy of exile (Strangersto Our-selves 16). As distinguished from the silences of a Mallarme or a Celan,Vallejo's recalcitrant muteness is not that of the white page, nor even thatof the graphic and audible silences of the disappearing or self-cancellingpoem. In Poemas humanos, silence is what results from the gaps of mean-ing created by the poet's assault on syntax, the accumulation of words-among them, misspelled words and strange neologisms-that resist inter-pretation, and the utterly paradoxical nature of the poems' images ("Well,does the pale metalloid heal you?" ("ZYbien? gTe sana el metaloide pali-do?"; 176).9 One could even argue that, far from being the result of anabsence of words, the silences of Poemas humanos are the consequence ofa desperate piling-up of language: the poet's barricades of disconnectedand mutilated words conveying better than any blank space the utterimpossibility of affirming meaning in the face of historical chaos. Hence,the most hermetic poems in Poemas humanosare simply lists. "ThePeace,the wasp, the heel, the slopes. . ." (178), quoted at the beginning of thissection, is an example of a poem whose only thematic unity stems fromthe fact that all verses revolve around different parts of speech. The firststanza contains a list of nouns (see above); the second one is nothingmore than a chain of adjectives ("Fluid,saffroned, external, clear" ["Duic-til, azafranado, externo, nitido ..."]); the third revolves around gerunds(burning, comparing, living.. ." ["ardiendo,comparandol viviendo. .."]);and finally a hybrid combination of adjectives and adverbs related totime or space. The poem's last stanza reads like a condemnation of cer-tain states of being ("Thehorrible, the sumptuous, the slowest . . ." ["Lohorrible, lo suntuario, lo lentisimo . .").One can play games of interpre-tation with these lists for a long time, but all readings of the poem lead tothe same conclusion: the word-lists evoke vague feelings of despair butoffer no keys for understanding the poem's meaning. Another poem,"Overcome, Solomon-like, decent," ("Transido,salom6nico, decente,") fol-lows a nearly identical pattern, piling up sounds against an apocalypticword-heap. Devoid of context and causality, the lists are ultimately unde-cipherable. Reading both poems, one senses that the poet has barricadedhimself in a literal prison-house of language, one from which there is noexit for him, no entrance for the rest of us.Devoid of the false assurances provided by conjunctions and preposi-tions but saturated with word-lists, these two poems may ironically be



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the most "silent" of the Poemas humanos, but many others that appear toadopt a normal syntax prove to be almost as intractable. The poem, "Lis-ten to your mass, your comet, listen to them; don't cry" ("Oyea tu masa,a tu cometa, escuichalos; no gimas") could be a warning to heed thebody's cry when confronted by the threat of death, but the poem's mean-ing is muted by an accumulation of metonyms that struggle against eachother for shock effect rather than meaningful communication. Like manyof the poems, the one that begins with the words "Well, does the palemetalloid heal you" ("ZYbien? iTe sana el metaloide pailido?";176) soundslike a conversational poem, but its hallucinated images resist any and all"authoritative" readings. Quoting Phillippe Sollers, Kristeva speaks of a"disenunciation"that "continually demonstrat[es] the absence of any sub-ject whatsoever" (Revolutionin Poetic Language 221). Part of what is revo-lutionary about Vallejo's most impassable poems is the way in which theygraphically depict this absence of a speaking subject in a language thatun-says ("dis-enunciates") itself even as it grows like a cancerous organ-ism around this absence.

If some of these poems articulate the exile's anguish mostly throughthe mute strangeness of his syntax and the recalcitrant hostility of hisimages, in other poems Vallejo approaches his fear of losing languageopenly, bluntly, and stubbornly. "I want to write, but out comes foam,/Iwant to say so much but I choke" ("Quiero escribir, pero me saleespuma,/ quiero decir muchisimo y me atollo"; 156), he confesses in"Intensity and Height" ("Intensidad y altura"), conveying at once theimage of the poet as a rabid dog, a babbling infant, and a senile adult. In"I remain to warm the ink in which I drown" ("Qued6me a calentar latinta en que me ahogo"), the poet admits he is only (still) here to keep theink warm, but the ink chokes him before he can write. In "Epistle of thePassers-by" ("Epistola a los transetintes"), he no longer speaks a humanlanguage: "I suffer from the lion's direct speech" ("yo sufro del lenguajedirecto del le6n"; 132). In "The Unfortunate Ones" ("Losdesgraciados"),addressing himself as well as the reader in the second person, he tells usthat he can only speak through the "oralorgan of your silence" ( "6rganooral de tu silencio"; 170). In "It is there that I place myself" ( "Ello es ellugar donde me pongo"), he notes that his skeleton has been skinned ofwords: "my dear skeleton now letterless" ("mi querido esqueleto ya sinletras"; 191). In "Andif after so many words" ("Ysi despues de tantas pal-abras"), he considers the frightening possibility that there might be nologos left to make sense of "allthe words" that make up so many proposi-tions (166). In the ominously titled "Pantheon" ("Pante6n"), the poetwatches as his "general sounds" ("sonidos generales"), mortally woundedby life as well as death, take leave of him and of his voice.Faced with such a wasteland, the poet reflects aloud on his insistent

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masochism, or perhaps his masochistic paranoia. In "What comes overme, that I whip myself with the line/ and I think the period is after me, ata gallop?"("Qudme da, que me azoto con la linea/ly creo que me sigue, altrote, el punto?"; 164), the verse becomes a whip, and grammar a gallop-ing executioner. Although the whip, or the act of whipping, conveys theimage of a medieval Christian penitent, the poem's sense of abjectionsuggests another figure: a twentieth-century Kafkaesque victim-hero,clueless before the forces that threaten to silence him without grantinghim the benefit of an explanation. In all of these confessions of impend-ing silence, these poems articulate, now directly, the effects of the exile'sestrangement on this poet who refused to became either an expatriate oran immigrant.10Estranged, dispossessed, and aphasic, Vallejo's persona in Poemashumanos is indeed a dismembered Orpheus (to borrow Ihab Hassan'simage), one whose voice is in imminent danger of being swallowed up byits own cacophonous echoes, broken beyond recovery. The poet's cata-strophic semantic and syntactical tactics lay painfully bare the imminentvulnerability to a disintegrating language spoken from a psychic no-place.There is no denying the sense of existential anguish permeating theseverses, but viewed against Vallejo's progressive distance from everythingthat had made his language familiar, even some of the most impenetrableverses in Poemas humanos lose their surreal edge and become, instead,believable signs of the foreigner's real sense of displacement.

Throughout his nearly two decades as an exile in Paris, Vallejo contin-ued to write in his native tongue. Yet in its most obtuse moments, theSpanish of Poemas humanos sounds very much like a foreign language, ora tortured transliteration of a language that the translator has failed toproperly decode. It would be difficult to imagine, in fact, a more trouble-some articulation of linguistic alienation than that present in thesepoems. Against the disappearance of a mother tongue that progressivelybaffles and eludes the increasingly mute poet, one wonders if the piling-up of words is not a way of resisting the onslaught of silence, the oblivionof a language whose native sounds are less and less audible to the poet.From this perspective, those impossible word-list poems may be read asthe exiled poet's desperate attempt to retain his mother tongue, even ifonly in ruins. In his famous "Ninth Elegy," Rilke's "poet/traveller/visitor"brings "a handful of words" to show not only where he has been, but alsothat he has been. In many of the Poemas humanos, Vallejo piles up hisnative but increasingly foreign-sounding words against a world thatspeaks to him in other tongues and threatens to rob him of his sense bothof self and of the real.



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Julia Kristeva notes that despite the losses it entails, only "exile" (asreal or metaphorical estrangement) can produce the disorientation neces-sary for the artist or the poet to create a truly revolutionary work of artor literature."1In Vallejo's case, and in his Poemas humanos in particular,the estrangement of exile led the poet to some of the most uncompromis-ingly original verses ever written in the Spanish language. Such a pro-found estrangement pushed him, and his poetry, to the very brink ofsilence.University of Kentucky

Notes1. "Vallejo'sPoemashumanos:Languageand Silence as Expressionsof Despair."Dianna Niebylski, The Poem on the Edge of the Word: The Limits of Language andthe Uses of Silence in the Poetry of Mallarme, Rilke, and Vallejo (New York: PeterLang, 1993) 129-163.2. I am aware, of course, that Kristeva uses "exile" metaphorically in this andother meditations on exile. Sometimes a metaphor for the human condition, thecondition of exile is also, for Kristeva,the necessary condition for any kind oftransgressiveor originalwriting.Yetthere is no doubtthat, in discussingherownrealityas a "foreigner,"andalludingto otherforeigners'andexiles' concreteexpe-rience, she also addressesthe condition of physicaland linguisticexile in illumi-natingdetail.3. Mostrecently,GustavoGeirolahas written that Trilcemarks"theentrance,bymeans of the poet's labor,to "another"poetic zone, one not outside of languagebut outside of language'sbourgeoismoralsand epistemology"["eladvenimiento,por medio del trabajoportico, de una 'otra'zona no exterioral lenguaje,pero siexteriora lamoraly a laepistemologiaburguesasdel lenguaje"](38).4. HumbertoDiaz-Casanuevamaintainsthat the stridentanguishof Trilceis tem-pered ("sesosiega")in Poemashumanos.Noel Salomonexpressesa similaropinionin "Algunosaspectos de lo 'humano' en Poemashumanos."My position on thecomparative"anguish"of both texts is much closer to that expressedby GonzaloSobejanoin "Poesiadel cuerpoen Poemashumanos."5. All citations from Poemas humanos refer to Vallejo's Obrapodtica completa. Thetranlationsof Vallejo'sletters andpoems aremy own.6. Otherreadersfamiliarwith Vallejo'swork might objectto my emphasison theestrangingeffects of exile in Vallejo'spoetry by pointingout thatthe poet address-es the subjectof exile circumspectlyand seldom.As one engagedin the "univer-sal" cause of lessening the sufferingand the hungerof his "hombreshumanos,"Vallejothe Marxistactivist must have questioned,and questionedfrequently,thepotential "inauthenticity,"or bad faith, of his feelings of national and linguisticuprootedness.In this way, his (relative)silence on the subjectcould be read as asign of a guilty consciousness(not the universal,"human"guilt the poet feels inPH but a morepersonaland concrete sense of guilt).In this connection,it mightbe pertinent to recall-as Julia Kristevaremindsus in her post-Marxistmedita-tions on estrangement-that silence is also a tactic for expressingconflicts forwhich the exile has no language.

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7. The non-Spanish-speaking reader should note that, because of Vallejo's capital-ization, "La Paz"could just as well refer to the city of La Paz. Since the poem iscomposed of things rather than place names, one assumes he intended the mean-ing of the capitalized word as "peace"and not La Paz.8. The spelling error, obviously intentional, is part of the poem's difficulties.9. This is an obvious allusion to gold ("the pale metal"), but my translationremains faithful to the obtuseness of the original.10. Thomas Pavel argues that the distinction is crucial: "[i]mmigrantsbegin a newlife and find a new home; exiles never break the psychological link with theirpoint of origin" (26).11. In "ANew Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," Kristeva bluntly affirms that"[w]ritingis impossible without some kind of exile" (298).

Works CitedBenjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt. Trans. HarryZohn. New York:Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

. Reflections.Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York:Harcourt,Brace, Jovanovich, 1978.Diaz-Casanueva, Humberto. "Resefiaa Poesias completas (1949)."C6sarVallejo.Ed.Julio Ortega. Madrid: Taurus, 1974. 225-232.Ferrari, Americo. El universo poetico de C6sar Vallejo. Caracas: Monte Avila Edi-tores, 1974.Franco, Jean. C&sarVallejo. The Dialectics of Poetryand Silence. Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 1976.Geirola, Gustavo. "Cesar Vallejo: Enunciaci6n y teatralidad." Revista Chilena deLiteratura55 (Nov 1999): 31-65.Kristeva, Julia. "ANew Type of Intellectual: The Dissident." The Kristeva Reader.Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: ColumbiaUP, 1984.

. Strangersto Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York:Columbia UP, 1991.Niebylski, Dianna. The Poem on the Edge of the Word: The Limits of Languageand

the Uses of Silence in Mallarme, Rilke, and Vallejo.New York: Peter Lang, 1993.Pavel, Thomas. "Exileas Romance and as Tragedy."Exile and Creativity:Signposts,Travelers,Outsiders, Backward Glances. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Durham:Duke UP, 1998. 25-36.Salomon, Noel. "Algunos aspectos de lo 'humano' en "Poemas humanos." C6sarVallejo.Ed. Julio Ortega. Madrid: Taurus, 1974. 289-334.Smith, Anna. "The Space of Travel: Reading and the Female Voyager."ReadingsofExile and Estrangement.Ed. Julia Kristeva. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.51-82.Sobejano, Gonzalo. "Poesia del cuerpo en Poemas humanos." C&sarVallejo. Ed.Julio Ortega. Madrid: Taurus, 1974. 335-346.Steiner, George. Languageand Silence. Essays on Language,Literatureand the Inhu-man. New York:Atheneum, 1982.

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Vallejo, Cesar. Epistolariogeneral. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1982.. Poemas humanos (1923-38). Paris: Les Editions des Presses Modernes, 1939.. Obrapoetica completa. Ed. Enrique Ball6n Aguirre. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacu-cho, 1979.. Trilce.3era ed. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1961.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks, 1914-1916. New York: Harper Torchbooks,1969.. TractatusLogico-Philosophicus.London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

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