Section V: The Erotic
Toward the Center: From the Imitative to the Representational
he following poem, one of the early sonnets from Los Heraldos Negros, is a direct inheritance from Darío and the Modernists. The translation takes only those liberties necessary to preserve some of the formal devices which distinguish this segment of Vallejo's early work: the rhyme, including the persistent repetition of words (kiss, night, beloved), the graphic imagery, and the overall tone of sympathy mixed with irony. A distinguishing feature of Latin American poets of this period is the extent to which they revel in dwelling on the details of corruption and in forging a delicate metaphorical filigree composed of such details. This kind of 'realism' has proved, in the work of Latin Americans who refused to abandon their preciousness, to be only another level of romanticism.
EL POETA A SU AMADA Amada, en esta noche tú te has crucificado sobre los dos maderos curvados de mi beso; y tu pena me ha dicho que Jesús ha llorado y que hay un viernesanto más dulce que ese beso. En esta noche rara que tanto me has mirado, la Muerte ha estado alegre y ha cantado en su hueso. En esta noche de septiembre se ha oficiado mi segunda caída y el más humano beso. Amada, moriremos los dos juntos, muy juntos; se irá secando a pausas nuestra excelsa amargura; y habrán tocado a sombra nuestros labios difuntos, Y ya no habrán reproches en tus ojos benditos; ni volveré a ofenderte. Y en una sepultura los dos nos dormiremos, como dos hermanitos. THE POET TO HIS BELOVED Beloved, this night you have been crucified on the two curving timbers of my kiss, and your distress repeats how Jesus cried and recalls a holy Friday sweeter than that kiss. On this rare night your steady gaze has spied Death singing in her bones from happiness for this September night that's ratified my second fall and all too human kiss. Beloved, we will die together, close together; this exalted bitterness will mellow as it dries and Darkness turns our dead lips from one another. Reproaches will no longer cloud your blessed eyes, nor I again offend; instead we'll sleep together in one single grave, like a little sister and brother.
This poem substantiates Ferrari's comment about those early poems where a 'preoccupation with form stifles the poetic emotion'. But Vallejo was to leave behind such imagistic manipulativeness in short order. When this poem was published, he was already deeply involved with his first sweetheart, Otilia, in the flamboyant affair which he was to celebrate in the vigorous, bawdy, unabashed eroticism of the love poems that emerged in Trilce only three years later. This suggests that certain of Vallejo's commentators, for example Fernando Alegria, in his introduction to the Smith translation of Trilce, are mistaken in claiming that Vallejo was torn by conflict between his erotic inclinations and his basic Christian sense of guilt. The Trilce poems should prove that the traditional lament voiced in this sonnet is a poetic convention and in no sense the true emotional or sexual stance of Vallejo as a man.
Whether Vallejo found his emotional needs fulfilled by sexual love is another question. We are never again to witness in his work the degree of sexual and emotional abandon which characterizes the erotic poems in Trilce. Although one might speculate on the nature and duration of his relationship with the woman celebrated in this series, of more interest here is an analysis of the extent to which he was able to employ the vigor of his sexual energy to push his work beyond the romantic conventions and stereotypes seen in even the best of the love poems in Los Heraldos Negros.
A comparison of two poems on the same subject -- one from Los Heraldos Negros and one from Trilce -- will show the distance that Vallejo had covered in three years in the control of language and metaphor and the manipulation of imagery.
HECES (from Los Heraldos Negros) Esta tarde llueve, como nunca; y no tengo ganas de vivir, corazón. Esta tarde es dulce. Por qué no ha de ser? Viste gracia y pena; viste de mujer. Esta tarde en Lima llueve. Y yo recuerdo las cavernas crueles de mi ingratitud; mi bloque de hielo sobre su amapola, más fuerte que su "No seas así!" Mis violentas flores negras; y la bárbara y enorme pedrada; y el trecho glacial. Y pondrá el silencio de su dignidad con óleos quemantes el punto final. Por eso esta tarde, como nunca, voy con este búho, con este corazón! Y otras pasan; y viéndome tan triste, toman un poquito de tí en la abrupta arruga de mi hondo dolor. Esta tarde llueve, llueve mucho. ¡Y no tengo ganas de vivir, corazón. DREGS This afternoon it rains as never before; and I don't feel like staying alive, heart. This afternoon is sweet. Why shouldn't it be? It's dressed in grace and sorrow, dressed like a woman. This afternoon it's raining in Lima. And I remember the cruel caverns of my ingratitude; my chunk of ice on her poppy, harsher than her 'Don't be like that.' My violent black flowers; the savage outrageous lashing out; and the glacial distance. And the silence of her dignity will brand the final period with blazing oil. That's why this afternoon, as never before, I walk owl-like, with such a heart. And others go by, and seeing me so sad, they sense a little of you in the craggy furrows of my deep misery. This afternoon it rains and rains. And I don't feel like staying alive, heart. (Trilce) XV En el rincón aquel, donde dormimos juntos tantas noches, ahora me he sentado a caminar. La cuja de los novios difuntos fue sacada, o talvez qué habrá pasado. Has venido temprano a otros asuntos y ya no estás. Es el rincón donde a tu lado, leí una noche, entre tus tiernos puntos un cuento de Daudet. Es el rincón amado. No lo equivoques. Me he puesto a recordar los días de verano idos, tu entrar y salir, poca y harta y pálida por los cuartos. En esa noche pluviosa ya lejos de ambos dos, salto de pronto . . . Son dos puertas abriéndose cerrándose, dos puertas que al viento van y vienen sombra a sombra. (Trilce) XV In that corner where we slept together so many nights, I've sat down now to wander. The bedstead of the defunct lovers was taken out, or -- who knows what happened? You've come early on other business and now you're no longer here. It's the corner where, by your side, I read one night between your tender breasts a story by Daudet. It's the corner we loved. Don't mistake it. I've begun to remember those lost days of summer, your comings and goings, little and fed up and pale through the rooms. On this drenching night, already far from us both, I jump up suddenly . . . It's two doors opening, closing, two doors that come and go in the wind shadow to shadow.
In a comparison of two Vallejo poems of different periods the danger arises that the earlier poem will be interpreted as 'lesser'. This is always a problem in any investigation which traces the development of a deceased poet's style; but such esthetic judgements are not the intention of this study. The first poem cited, from Los Heraldos Negros, already demonstrates the sensibility and many of the technical details which will persist throughout Vallejo's work: the repetition of words and phrases, the intensely sensory imagery, and the deep sense of personal responsibility for actions past and present.
However, in both imagery and voice, the poet is maintaining a certain distance from his subject matter by employing the kind of exaggerated private metaphor that gives the reader insufficient information for complete access to the poem. The romantic hyperbole of 'violent black flowers' and 'blazing oil' testifies to the intensity of the speaker's emotion, but leaves the reader floundering in search of a clear picture of exactly what real events provoked such explosive imagery.
The first thing noticeable about the Trilce poem, on the other hand, is the flatness of its language. The contradictions inherent in 'I've sat down to wander' and the question that intrudes at the end of the first stanza combine with the ghostly presence of the absent woman to create an ambience of loneliness and desolation which is dependent not on visual imagery but on a realistic catalogue of the speaker's shifting emotional states, where memory brings him to a sense of recall so overwhelming in its specificity that the reader expects, as does the speaker, that the beloved person will reappear. The stark reality of the ending, with the symbolic overload contained in the image of the two doors, is notably different from the kinds of resolutions employed in the poems from Los Heraldos Negros.
It seems useful at this point to introduce the Trilce love poems themselves, and to reserve comment until the entire series is seen, as their impact is more obvious if they are read as a unit than if any one is examined in isolation. These erotic poems deserve special attention as a thematic unity, especially since they can be regarded as a major technical achievement in the overall development of Vallejo's poetic voice. The energy, the concentration, the thrust of immediacy and aliveness and participation will be recaptured in the vigorous 'persona' poems in Poemas Humanos, but never will the poet come so close again to the intoxicated contemplation of his own emotional experience.
The poems which follow have been chosen because of their explicitness of erotic and emotional details. The reader who understands Spanish will be able to perceive them in greater depth by studying the originals, because it is in these poems that Vallejo goes farthest in employing the explosions of sound and syntax which attempt to recreate the heightened emotional state that is their subject. There are several poems in this series which use even more contorted language and more extreme metaphorical leaps, but since the energy of sexual excitement is expressed in them through the innuendo of combined and coined words and the play of multi-level puns, it is virtually impossible to translate them effectively.
The love poems in Trilce are neither modest nor confessional, but attempt to reveal the truth of the erotic experience. The degree to which they succeed is still unusual in the 1990s; in the 1920s it must have been unique.
IX Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe. Sus dos hojas anchas, su válvula que se abre en suculenta recepción de multiplicando a multiplicador, su condición excelente para el placer, todo avía verdad. Busco vol ver de golpe el golpe. A su halago, enveto bolivarianas fragosidades a treintidós cables y sus múltiples, se arrequintan pelo por pelo soberanos belfos, los dos tomos de la Obra, y no vivo entonces ausencia, ni al tacto. Fallo bolver de golpe el golpe. No ensillaremos jamás el toroso. Vaveo de egoísmo y de aquel ludir mortal de sábana, desque la mujer esta ¡cuánto pesa de general! Y hembra es el alma de la asusente. Y hemra es el alma mía. IX Wanna giback stroke for stroke Her two broad leaves, her valve opening in succulent reception of muliplicand to multiplier, her condition excellent for pleasure, the whole been truth Want to giback stroke for stroke. She murmurs and I lay on bolivarian peaks for thirty-two furlongs and their multiples hair by hair she tightens Lady Blubberlips, an Ouevre in two parts till I can't live without or with that touching. Can't giback stroke for stroke. We'll never saddle that bull-y. I dribble from egoism and that mortal friction of sheets since the woman is -- how heavy she's become! And female is the soul of the absent one. And female is my soul. XIII Pienso en tu sexo. Simplificado el corazón, pienso en tu sexo, ante el hijar maduro del día. Palpo el botón de dicha, está en sazón. Y muere un sentimiento antiguo degenerado en seso. Pienso en tu sexo, surco más prolífico y armonioso que el vientre de la Sombra, anque la Muerte concibe y pare de Dios mismo. Oh, Conciencia, pienso, si, en el bruto libre que goza donde quiere, donde puede. Oh, escándalo de miel de los crepúsculos. Oh entruendo mudo. ¡Odumodneurtse! XIII I'm thinking of your sex. My heart simplified, I'm thinking of your sex, faced with the ripe flank of the day. I stroke your bud of pleasure, it's in season. And an old feeling dies, degenerated in brains. I'm thinking of your sex, furrow more prolific and harmonious than the womb of Darkness, though Death conceives and brings forth from God himself . . . Oh, Conscience! I'm thinking, yes, of the free beast rutting where he pleases, wherever he can. Oh, honeyed scandal of twilights, Oh, mute outcry. Odumodneurtse! XXX Quemadura del segundo en toda la tierna carnecilla del deseo, picadura de ají vagoroso, a las dos de la tade inmoral. Guante de los bordes borde a borde. Olorosa verdad tocada en vivo, al conectar la antena del sexo con lo que estamos siendo sin saberlo. Lavaza de máxima ablución. Calderas viajeras que se chocan y salpican de fresca sombra unánime, el color, la fracción, la dura vida, la dura vida eterna. No temamos. La muerte es así. El sexo sangre de la amada que se queja dulzorada, de portar tánto por tan punto ridículo. Y el circuito entre nuestro pobre día y la noche grande, a los dos de la tarde inmoral. XXX Second degree burn in all the tender swelling of desire, prickling of that vagrant chile pepper at two in the immoral afternoon. Gauntlet of the borders verge to verge. Fragrant truth captured alive, connecting up the antenna of sex with what we are being without knowing it. Overflow of the ultimate ablution. Traveling cauldrons that collide and spatter with fresh shade unanimous, the color, the fraction, the hard life, the hard eternal life. Let's not be afraid. Death is like this. The sex blood of the beloved who moans sugarsweet, from bearing so much on such a ridiculous point. And the circuit linking our poor day and the grand night, at two in the immoral afternoon. XLIII Quién sabe se va a tí. No te ocultes. Quién sabe madrugada. Acaríciale. No le digas nada. Está duro de lo que se ahuyenta. Acaríciale. Anda! Cómo le tendrías pena. Narra que no es posíble todos digan que bueno, cuando ves que se vuelve y revuelve animal que ha aprendido a irse . . . No? Sí. Acaríciale. No le arguyas. Quién sabe se va a tí madrugada. ¿Has contado qué poros dan salida solamente, y cuales dan entrada? Acaríciale. Anda! Pero no vaya a saber que lo haces porque te lo ruego. Anda! XLIII It seems to be going toward you. Don't hide from it. Seems to be dawn. Pet it. don't say a thing to it. It's hard from what it's running from. Pet it. Come on! You should feel sorry for it. It's telling you there's no possibility that everyone will say that's great when you see how it moves and sways, animal that's learned to get around -- no? Yes! Come on! Don't argue with it. Seems to be going toward you, dawn. Have you counted which pores open out only and which open in? Pet it. Come on! But don't let it know you're doing it because I beg you. Come on!
In spite of Vallejo's intellectual gifts and his evident acquaintance with both dogma and Scripture it is clear from his earliest poems that he looked more to Eros than to Logos for his spiritual values. Born into a devout Catholic family in which the tenets of the church were tempered by the clannishness and family feeling typical of the indigenous populations of the Americas, he always had more fealty to family ties, especially those exemplified by the mother, than he did to the colder and more intellectual dogma of the church.
When he speaks of his father, he speaks of him not as stern, or even wise, but as a loving figure, whose
' . . . noble countenance shows a gentle heart . . . '
The young Vallejo is first angry with God, whom he accuses with:
'My God, if you had been man,
today you would know how to be God;
but you, who have always lived well,
you feel nothing for your creation.
And the man who suffers you: he is God!'
The next moment he is torn with compassion for the same God:
' . . . because you love so much; because you never smile; because always your heart must give you such great pain . . . '
This, then, is a man whose theology is primarily instructed by the heart rather than the head. The Trilce poems suggest that his sexuality followed the same path. The singularly yielding quality of his erotic testimony, the tenderness, the delicate whimsey with which he regards and describes the anatomical details of the sexual organs, indicate that he had integrated the feminine component of his own psyche and had, as Jungian psychology would put it, a healthy relationship with his anima. In fact, the closing lines of Poem IX provide some evidence that this was the case and that Vallejo was conscious of it.
Two of these poems are of particular interest in an analysis of just how Vallejo manipulates language in order to create a climate of virtual participation in the experience he is presenting. In XIII, the chain of meaningless but evocative syllables which constitute the last line is carefully prepared for by the repetition of the syllable 'Oh' three times before the final utterance is spoken. There is no 'real' word which could possibly have reproduced so convincingly the inner tension which rises from the impossiblity of giving voice to that 'mute outcry'. To give us the unpronounceable is a valid means of attempting to evoke in us a memory of the ineffable, especially after the richly sensuous and poignant imagery that introduces it. It is by using this combination of the serious, the whimsical, the thoughtful, and the apparently random that Vallejo succeeds in graphing verbally a diagram of the interior of the brain in the moment of a heightened emotional state.
Poem XXX is another example, with its puns, its mock-serious repetition of the immorality of making love in the afternoon and the clear trajectory whereby its bent, abstract imagery extends past rational meaning by the persistent jagged friction of one unexpected juxtaposition after another. The tension is maintained partly by repetition and partly by timing the violent cascade of images. At the peak of that crescendo of flitting shadows, the flat, almost didactic statement at the end of stanza three has the effect of containing the entire electrical charge which preceded it. And yet the energy generated by those jostling cauldrons and the grand melange of thought, feeling, sensation, intuition, and motion seems to have taken place within the confines of a held breath.
In an age when sex has lost most of its mystery, along with much of its romantic emotional content, the tenderness and honesty of these love poems makes them a lasting esthetic document. Vallejo has forced language to report the heart of an intimate experience in the multi-dimensional continuum of time, space, and motion in which it is actually perceived in life. More significantly, he has been able to use the erotic emotion as an occasion for condensing human perception into the microcosm of a physically and emotionally supercharged event and has left us feeling that he is speaking from the center of our experience as well as his own.
The next example, from Poemas Humanos, loses no trace of whimsey or sexual ardor for what it gains in the inclusiveness of a mature conjugal love. The difference here in tone is that which distinguishes all the significant poems from Poemas Humanos from Vallejo's earlier work: an inclusiveness that gathers together bits and snatches of memory, thought, wish, and imagination. In spite of the persistent arrival into the poem of images from the edges of Vallejo's associative consciousness, the whole is solidly grounded by language, by allusion, and by visual imagery, in a palpable reality which is both physically and psychologically convincing. Where Los Heraldos Negros holds up for us a poster view of man's dilemma, and Trilce reproduces the fluid life of a cell seen under the microscope, Poemas Humanos is Vallejo's map of the universe, where the simplest event takes on a glow of simultaneous strangeness and familiarity. Vallejo is able to make his perceptions and syntheses appear to be the common experience of all men, everywhere, any time. In every poem, there is always some thought or image that everyone can identify with. On the other hand, there intrude associative images so strange, so compelling, that one is set to pondering, so powerfully do his apparent non-sequiturs prompt the imagination to trace them to their sources. But traceable or not, the quality of genuine reverie is so present that the reader is inclined to go away unsure if he is remembering what Vallejo wrote in a poem, or if it is perhaps a long-forgotten memory of his own that the poem has reminded him of.
Nowhere in Vallejo's work is this more true than in the love poems which were written to real women, such as the following, to his wife, Georgette:
DULZURA POR DULZURA CORAZONA ¡Dulzura por dulzura corazona! ¡Dulzura a gajos, eras de vista, esos abiertos días, cuando monté por árboles caídos! Así por tu paloma palomita por tu oración pasiva andando entre tu sombra y el gran tesón corpóreo de tu sombra. Debajo de ti y yo, tú y yo, sinceramente, tu candado ahogándose de llaves, yo ascendiendo y sudando y haciendo lo infinito entre tus muslos. (El hotelero es una bestia, sus dientes, admirables; yo controlo el orden pálido de mi alma señor, allá distante . . . paso paso . . . adiós señor...) Mucho pienso en todo esto conmovido, perdurosa y pongo tu paloma a la altura de tu vuelo y, cojeando de dicha, a veces, repósome a la sombra de ese árbol arrastrado. Costilla de mi cosa, dulzura que tu tapas sonriendo con tu mano; tu traje negro que se habrá acabado, amada, amada en masa, ¡qué unido a tu rodilla enferma! Simple ahora te veo, te comprendo avergonzado en Letonia, Alemania, Rusia, Bélgica, tu ausente, tu portátil ausente, hombre convulso de la mujer temblando entre sus vínculas. ¡Amada en la figura de tu cola irreparable, amada que yo amara con fósforos floridos, quand on a la vie et la jeunesse, c'est deja tellement! Cuando ya no haya espacio entre tu grandeza y mi postrer proyecto, amada volveré a tu media, has be besarme, bajando por tu media repetida, tu portátil ausente, dile así . . . Sweetness for heart's sweetness! Sweetness in clusters, you were for the viewing, those open days when I mounted among the fallen trees! And so for your little pigeon's pigeon for the quiet prayer moving between your shade and the great corporeal firmness of your shadow. Underneath you and me, you and I, sincerely, your padlock choked with keys, myself mounting and sweating and making what is iinfinite between your thighs. (The desk clerk is a bumpkin, admirable teeth; I maintain the ghastly workings of my soul. Sir, you over there . . . go on, go on . . . goodbye, Sir . . .) I think a lot about all this, touched, endlessly and send your pigeon to the top of your flight and, staggering with happiness, sometimes I rest myself in the shade of that dragged-down tree. Rib of my being, sweetness you cover, smiling, with your hand; your black dress which must be worn out by now beloved, beloved in the flesh, how bound to your hurt knee! Only now can I see you, understand you -- ashamed in Lithuania, Germany, Russia, Belgium, your absent one, your portable absent one, man convulsed by the woman trembling within his grasp. Beloved for the shape of your irreparable tail, beloved I should have loved with flowering matches. quand on a la vie et la jeunesse c'est dejá tellement! When there's no longer space between your greatness and my latest project, beloved, I will come back to your stocking, you must kiss me, as I bend down to your stocking, over and over, your portable absent one, tell him like this . . .One of Vallejo's most interesting syntactical devices is the juxtaposition of two nouns, either of which can be used as a modifier for the other. In some cases, he will change the ending of the second noun, in order to make it conform in gender and/or number with the first. In other cases the two nouns are identical, although it is clear that one serves as a modifier. This doubling of substantives, especially when it amounts to a doubling of the same word, has the effect of investing his work with a quality of urgent intensity, as though he wanted to be sure that the reader knows he is talking about the really real. This technique is used typically in the poem just quoted, where the word 'heart' is modified to function as an adjective to intensify the emotional quality of the word 'sweetness' (dulzura por dulzura corazona) and the pigeon is used as a symbol for both the female sexual organ and the emotions connected with sexual feeling (paloma palomita). It is important not to miss such grammatical and syntactical devices, because it is largely by this manipulation of language that Vallejo invests his work with those subtleties which give his emotional outbursts the mixture of irony and passion which keeps them from degenerating into sentimentality. It seems clear from this accelerating inclusiveness in Vallejo's work that the resolution and control of the energies available from sexual and emotional intensity were increasingly invested in a growing link with the more profound layers of his own awareness. It is reasonable to conclude that his essential question was not, 'How can you be a Christian and a sexual being?' but rather, 'How can you be a Christian and be conscious?' Up until that final breakthrough which was apparently occasioned by what he experienced in Spain near the end of his life, what all the poems have in common is a kind of groping for the light. In these poems of love and sexual passion, the uniting impulse is that same determined search for the living truth at the creative center of the universe that characterizes his constant exploration into other aspects of himself and of the world around him. Like so many other pilgrims, Vallejo was to discover that the transcendental is only available to those who are willing to endure and celebrate the outer limits of what the body has to teach. Unlike most of those pilgrims, he has left us a detailed and credible record of his experience. © Sandy McKinney