Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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linger on Vallejo’s last and most accomplished book of poems, Spain, Take This Cup from Me, composed and revised in 1937–38. Published in 1939 with a prologue by Juan Larrea, with the editorial support of Manuel Altolaguirre and a drawing by Pablo Picasso designed especially for the cover, it was printed at the Montserrat monastery near the end of the Spanish civil war. As we’ve recently learned from the first edition, discovered in the Montserrat library by Julio Vélez and Antonio Merino and subsequently published in facsimile at the hands of Alan Smith Soto, the government of the Generalitat had transformed the monastery into a hospital and printing center. Created in the fourteenth century by direct descendants of Guttenberg and then under the direction of Altolaguirre, the press was operated by soldiers of the Aragon front and published the imprint Ediciones Literarias del Comisariado, Ejército del Este, which, in addition to Vallejo’s book, produced editions of Pablo Neruda’s España en el corazón: Himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra and Emilio Prados’s Cancionero menor de los combatientes. In February 1939 Francoist forces destroyed virtually all Republican publications no sooner than it occupied the monastery.89
In the heat of 1937 Vallejo was tormented more than ever by the tragedy taking shape in the Spanish landscape and by the hidden designs of evil incarnated by imperialist powers, which is why, when many people wavered, he marched down the socialist path and produced politically committed art in response to the threat of fascism.90 The profound inspiration that he found in the selflessness of Spanish militiamen is recorded in “Popular Statements of the Spanish Civil War,” which might as well have been a preface to Spain, Take This Cup from Me, since there, writing as what in today’s lingo would be called an “embedded reporter,” Vallejo profiled the heroic feats of anonymous Republican soldiers who ended up resurfacing in the opening hymn of his last book of poems.
Comparative readings of Vallejo’s edited typescripts reveal a reordering of the poetic sequence, which resulted in a remarkable sense of continuity. The anguished editing of the texts from Spain, Take This Cup from Me and, in some cases, the existence of labyrinthine originals, attest to Vallejo’s rare ability to assimilate the experience of the war while it was happening with a seemingly supernatural drive toward completion. Reordered, the poem moves like a play, with an opening act that depicts the war as a panorama in which impassioned soldiers march off to battle (I); the succession of different battles (II); funeral songs for the anonymous heroes and the emblematic contemplation of death (III–VII); the poet’s meditations on death and destruction alongside corpses (IX–XI); resurrection triggered by universal solidarity and the transfiguration of the universe raised by the dust of the dead (XII–XIII); and the final warning to Mother Spain of her potential defeat and the prophesy of her fall (XIV–XV).91
If in his earlier poetry Vallejo’s voice aims inward and in Human Poems it begins its outward turn, in Spain, Take This Cup from Me, it’s directed completely outward to address the masses, crowds, and soldiers, against a backdrop of “the world of twentieth-century man, at the center of which Vallejo portrays himself as conceiving his own death. By the time the España manuscript was completed, the elitist tradition of many of the Modernist and Postmodernist poets had been turned inside out.”92 When these poems reach their emotive heights, the poetry “obtains the grandeur and potency of an epinikion,” as is the case with the opening “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic,” where the poet frames the entire poetic sequence in just a couple of lines: “Battles? No! Passions. And passions preceded / by aches with bars of hopes, / by aches of the people with hopes of men! / Death and passion for peace, of common people!”93 With Marxian ideology and a sermonic drive reminiscent of Whitman, Vallejo’s “Hymn” can be read as “an overture of the entire collection of poems. It becomes a microcosm of almost all the themes and issues that we find in the compositions that follow it.”94
Further on in that same “Hymn,” when Vallejo gives the order to “kill / death” and the reassuring exclamation that “[o]nly death will die!” he’s alluding to the prophecies of Isaiah (25:6–8, 26:19, and 28:15, 18, with clear echoes of Saint Paul: “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:25–26). But, Vallejo’s biblical allusions are more auditory than visual, and this line is also the revolutionary response to the infamous motto of Gen. Millán Astray: “¡Viva la muerte!” Nor can we forget that this was the motto of the Legión de los Tercios Españoles, who sinisterly called themselves the Volunteers of Death and used to sing the hymn “El novio de la muerte.”95
The resurrection we see in poem III, dedicated to Pedro Rojas, who “after being dead, / got up, kissed his blood-smeared casket [and] / wept for Spain”—reveals his act of martyrdom as the saving grace of not only the side he’s fighting for but all of humanity, which is why “[h]is corpse was full of world.” He has accepted death voluntarily out of love for humanity to create a better world, and he is not dead as long as his ideals live on.96 The invincibility of these ideals acquires more potent meanings toward the end of the collection, when the poet addresses the “[c]hildren of the world” and “sons of fighters,” warning them that if Mother Spain ends up falling, it will be their duty to “go look for her!”
In late 1937, around the time that he was writing Spain, Take This Cup from Me, Vallejo transformed his novella Toward the Reign of the Sciris into a three-act tragedy called The Tired Stone. He wrote this piece in an exalted poetic language saturated with a Quechua vocabulary, an element that returns this late composition to pre-Columbian Peru, where he depicts a hero hiding in a stonemason of the Inca Empire as the archetype of proletarian man. In January 1938 he submitted the play to radical revisions that yielded outstanding results. The first published edition, included in Teatro completo (1979), misconstrues the structure of the play as the author had envisioned it and renders that version unreadable. The most accurate version, Teatro completo III (1999), edited by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban and Cecilia Moreano, incorporates Vallejo’s handwritten changes and restores the integrity of the text.
In The Tired Stone, a stonemason named Tolpor falls in love with Kaura, a ñusta (princess), which is a sin, and this sets the tragedy in motion. When he realizes that he can neither have nor deny his love and that he has angered the gods, in response to which the Conquest is resumed in an attempt to pacify them, Tolpor selflessly heads off to war. But when he fights his enemies to save his people in search of Death instead of Glory, Fame ends up claiming him and, by popular demand, he ascends to the throne, without Kaura, who was displaced during the battles. No sooner does he receive the sacred tassel, than Tolpor renounces it, blinds himself, and goes to the countryside to live the life of a beggar, where years later he runs into Kaura. But, on account of his blindness, he can’t tell that it’s she, and because he’s transformed into a beggar, she doesn’t realize it’s he.
The confluence of the aesthetic and political visions—that the poor ensure the well-being of the people and that individual love is inferior to the love of a collective—epitomizes Vallejo’s late writings in which his ideals of indigenism fuse with those of socialism.97 The central axis of The Tired Stone is the protagonist’s ethically negative concept of hubris, which arises from the dynamic of his destructive passions. The paradox that unites determinism and free will drives the tragic climax of his actions off a cliff and sends him falling into the traps of Fate and the world of Fault, where he demands his own punishment, giving way to the path of self-sacrifice and expiation.98
Two years before he wrote the play, Vallejo was already wondering, “What laws and interests, what instincts or ideals, moved [the Incas]—in war and peace—to manifest a destiny whose historical essence and meaning seem to contain extraordinary kernels of wisdom and organization?”99 Resources that the author appears to have used in response to those questions and in the creation of the play include the essay “Saycuscca-Rumi: Tradición cusqueña” by Eleazar Boloña (his thesis advisor at La Universidad de La Libertad) and the chapter “Tres torreones, los maestros mayores y las piedra cansada” from the Comentarios reales de los Incas by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as the anonymous classical Quechua play Ollantay. Moreover, Sacsayhuaman, one of the primary settings and symbols of Vallejo’s