Midwest Modern Language Association

Refusing Translation in Exile: The Language Barrier in César Vallejo's "Poemas humanos"
Author(s): Dianna Niebylski
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 35, No. 2, Translating
in and across Cultures (Autumn, 2002), pp. 88-99
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315169
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 Refusing Translationin Exile: The
Language Barrier in Cesar Vallejo's
Poemas humanos
Dianna Niebylski

More than half a century after his death and well into the postmodern
era, C6sar Vallejo remains the most intractable poet ever to have written
in 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 have
called it a "human" ethic-more than a (merely) vanguard aesthetic.
Behind the nearly untranslatable syntax lurked the poet's desire to make
his native language utter new sounds of metaphysical despair, or at the
very least new groans for hunger pains. In graduate school I was so
drawn to the difficulty of Vallejo's syntax and so intrigued by his per-
versely broken metonyms that I devoted a chapter of my dissertation to
uses of silence in Poemas humanos. Seeking to build a framework for
understanding Vallejo's ruptured language at the time, I invoked Walter
Benjamin's notions of apocalyptic alienation, Ludwig Wittgenstein's
thoughts on the resistance of private language(s) to the Other's efforts at
translation, 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 and
transcultural existential malaise. Although I alluded to the poet's more
intimate woes (his economic troubles, his chronic health problems, his
involvement in Spain's Civil War), my doctoral reading reflects clearly
my own resistance to engaging too closely the poet's personal circum-
stances.
While relieved to see that much of my thesis chapter on Poemas
humanos still rings true, a recent rereading has led me to revisit some of
the questions that lie at the heart of these poems--specifically, the
notions of exploded subject/body and the violent assaults on language
and 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 and
the foreigner's estrangement, particularly as articulated in Strangers to

88 RefusingTranslationin Exile
Ourselves,2 I propose to examine the way in which Vallejo's ontological
and existential despair, as expressed in the broken language of Poemas
humanos, gains new resonances when linked to the sense of abandon-
ment, displacement, and betrayal that Vallejo experiences in exile. While
there is no denying the existential and metaphysical dimensions of Valle-
jo's orphanhood as dis-articulated in his poetry, I am now convinced that
what mediates the shocking impenetrability of so many of Vallejo's later
poems is the dark specter of the exile's sense of loss: the loss of familiar
rituals, the loss of meaningful sounds, the perennial threat of the loss of
language. It is the intimate, visceral nature of these impending losses that
gives full credence-and for me a new sense of urgency-to the poet's
struggling attempts to remain on the other side of silence while hanging
on to a progressively foreign-sounding language.
Readers familiar with Vallejo's poetic trajectory might object that his
experiments with pushing language to the edge of communicable mean-
ing first find expression in Trilce, a work written, in large part, while the
poet was in prison in Peru. As critics have noted, with Trilce Vallejo
attempts 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 will
become the trademark of his mature poetry.3 For purposes of consistency,
it would be possible to argue that the prison term that spawned many of
the poems in Trilce is already a form of exile-an internal exile of a very
real kind. But this argument is unnecessary. The experimental ruptures of
Trilce differ significantly and substantially from the less controlled, more
visceral, yet more alienated (and alienating) semantic chaos of Poemas
humanos.
Contrary to some critics' comparative assessment of the convulsive,
metallic hermeticism of Trilce as opposed to the solidarity-tempered cries
of Poemas humanos,4 I am persuaded that, for all their difficulty, the
poems of Trilce are less susceptible to the overwhelming sense of inartic-
ulateness that threatens to mute so many of the Poemas humanos. The
recurrent 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 the
poetic persona of Trilce from ever reaching the impotent devastation that
defines the "I" of Poemas humanos. Irony, parody, and self-parody are
rhetorical traits in both texts, but the dark playfulness of some of T7ilce's
poems finds no counterpart in Poemas humanos. Furthermore, the sullen
paradoxes of a poem like "Earthquake"("Terremoto")in Poemas humanos,
a poem which bombards the reader with a series of metonymically
dyslexic questions ("In talking of the firewood, do I silence the fire?/ In
sweeping the floor, do I forget the fossil?" ["gHablandode la lefia, callo el

Dianna Niebylski 89
fuego?/ Barriendo el suelo, olvido el fosil?"]; 130)5 have the grimness but
not the ludic flavor of Trilce's often anthologized poem XXXII "999 calo-
ries" ("999 calorias..."). Thus, although Trilce's alienated language may
be no less impenetrable than the language-in-exile of Poemas humanos, the
earlier work never quite matches the sense of inevitable aphasia that
emerges from the later poems.6
I. Displacement, Disposession, "Dyslexia"
Even the most miserable and obscure of Peruvianexiles finds himself
with a ticketand some money ... Only this poor indianis left to pick up
the crumbsat the banquet.
El mis desgraciado y obscuro de los vagabundos peruanos consigue
pasajey pasaje en dinero ... S61oeste pobre indigenase queda al mar-
gen del festin
Vallejo,Epistolario
In the letter quoted above, Vallejo refers to himself as a pariah, one
forgotten by his country and his countrymen. The letter is dated 1928,
five years after Vallejo's arrival in Paris, but the sense of abandonment
and betrayal expressed here will only intensify throughout Vallejo's exile
of nearly two decades. Vallejo readers are likely to remember that the
poet was incarcerated in 1920, unjustly blamed for being an accomplice
in a politically-motivated fire (in fact, the owner of the store that was
destroyed by the fire was a friend of Vallejo's family). Charged with being
an intellectual instigator, he was condemned to six months in jail. There
is some disagreement among Vallejo historians as to whether the poet
was vulnerable to further persecution following his release, but it is clear
that Vallejo continued to feel he was in some danger of being returned to
jail by political and local enemies. Added to his anxieties about the possi-
bility of being jailed once again were the poet's bitter disappointment at
the general indifference with which Trilce was received in 1922 and his
inability to hold on to his teaching jobs (for various reasons, some of
them political and some personal). His mother had died in 1920, and
Vallejo appears to have felt an ongoing sense of guilt at having perhaps
contributed to the heartache and worry that may have precipitated her
death or at least darkened the last months of her life. All of these factors
played a part in convincing the penniless poet to accept his friend Julio
Galvez'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-perennially
impoverished and ill in Paris-never returned to his native Santiago de
Chuco.
Above all else, exile meant the intensification of that sense of "orphan-
hood" ("orfandad")already present in Vallejo's earliest poems. In Poemas

90 RefusingTranslationin Exile
humanos this sense of cultural, social, and familial displacement conveys
an uneasy and slippery, but deeply alienating, transcultural flavor. It is a
hybrid mix of twentieth-century continental malaise and indoamerican
fatalism, and the reader senses the bitterness of the poem's aftertaste vis-
cerally before she can begin to decipher it intellectually as theme or
rhetorical refrain. The theme of orphanhood is present in Vallejo's poetry
from the start, and the poetic persona of Black Heralds (Los Heraldos
negros) is already a walking specter barely held together by needs and
lacks. 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, and
in Poemas humanos the sense of dispossession and dislocation finds other,
more disturbing and less modernista, registers: befuddlement, rage, and
the always uneasy compromise betweeen scream and silence.
Both the sense of dislocation and the confused rage resulting from it
are first evinced at a syntactical level, as if grammar and syntax crumbled
first and the images quickly followed. In "Height and Hair" ("Altura y
pelos") the poet's reaction to feeling dispossessed of the familiar-familiar
routines, familiar gestures, familiar words-is one of resentful befuddle-
ment. Made up entirely of interrogatives and exclamations, the poem
laments the poet's loss of access to daily rituals. As he is excluded from
ordinary acts everyone else takes for granted, he becomes progressively
less able to express a sense of disorientation. The poem's plaintive coda,
repeated twice at the end of every stanza, is an example of paradoxical
reasoning: the poet claims to have been excluded from the normal order
of things (or the normal comfort of things) because he has "only been
born." The apparently simple structure of the poem's initial questions
tricks readers with the promise of ordinary syntax: "who doesn't own a
blue suit?" ("%quienno tiene su vestido azul?"), only to stump them at the
end of each stanza with baffling exclamations: "I who have only been
born!" ("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 a
destabilizing blow to the poem's syntax.
As in many of the Poemas humanos, in "Height and Hair" the sense of
dispossession evoked by the poet's situation pushes language into a state
of rhetorical tension compounded by the accumulation of question
marks and exclamation points. It is evident that the poet's spatial and
physical disorientation results in his inability to reflect logically on his
alienation. For Kristeva, the loss of common sense is one of the foreign-
er's (or the exile's) first losses. The semi-comprehensible, autistic

Dianna Niebylski 91
musings ("cavilaciones") of "Altura y pelos," repeated in more extreme
form in many other poems, can be read as a consequence of the logical
and 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 to
destroy the exiled subject's ability to differentiate between himself, his
body, and the outside world. In the more intractable of the Poemas
humanos, 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 "The
Miserable Ones" ("Los desgraciados"), the poet orders himself to "wind
up" 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 your
large intestine firmly in your hand" ("Yava a venir el dia; da cuerda a tu
brazo/. . . Ya va a venir el dia; ten fuerte en la mano a tu intestino
grande"; 170). In "Apillar bearing consolations" ("Un pilar soportando
consuelos") 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 "Poem to be read and sung" ("Poemapara ser leido y cantado") he
knows that someone with "his [bodily] parts" is looking for him, although
it is unclear if that someone is himself or someone else ("I know there is
someone made up of my parts" ["[s]6que hay una persona compuesta de
mis partes"]; 155). Reflecting on this aspect of Poemas humanos, Americo
Ferrari has noted that Vallejo's "is the poem of the body, but of a body
without unity, one where the different parts would seem to be independ-
ent of each other and independent of the subject" ("es el poema del cuer-
po, pero de un cuerpo sin unidad, en el que parece como si las diferentes
partes fuesen independientes entre si e independientes del sujeto"; Fer-
rari 140). Against the visceral wreckage provoked by the experience of
exile, Vallejo's broken subjects cease to be mere philosophical or psycho-
logical emblems of the modern or even postmodern condition, and
become metonymic but graphic depictions of real "foreign"bodies, bodies
constantly exposed to the unfamiliar, subject to distortion, disorientation,
and displacement.
Made visibly real by images of the exploded body, the poet's shattered
sense of self borders on schizophrenia or psychosis. "Maybe I'm another"
("Alo mejor, soy otro") begins one of the untitled poems, as the poet's
increasing 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. Nunca
ayer. Nunca despues"; 180). In "Paris, October 1936" ("Paris, octubre
1936") the poet announces his departure from himself as an inevitable

92 RefusingTranslationin Exile
but irrefutable biographical fact: "Of all this I take my leave alone/ of this
bench, of my underwear,/ of my overall situation, of my actions,/ of my
own number broken in two parts,/ Of all this I take my leave alone" ("De
todo 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 hendido
parte a parte, de todo esto yo soy el finico que parte"; 166). Only fragile
tokens (a shoe, a buttonhole, and the bend of his elbow) remain to prove
that he was once precariously there. As one living in the city that
inspired Descartes to proclaim the demonstrable self-certainty of the cogi-
to, Vallejo must surely feel the bitter irony of having to rely on something
as insubstantial as a buttonhole to certify his own existence. The pathetic
image of self-alienation conveys the extent to which the exiled Peruvian
poet-more so even than other mid-century (Continental) estranged
souls-is barred from stepping into the sturdy shoes of the Cartesian
heritage.

II. From Word-Piles to Exiled Language

The exile is capable of ... "multiplesublationsof the unnameable,the
unrepresentable,the void."
Kristeva,"ANew Typeof Intellectual:The Dissident"
The Peace,'the wasp, the heel, the slopes,
the dead man, the deciliters,the owl,
the places, the ringworm,the sarcophagi,the glass, the brunettes
La PAZ,la abispa,8el taco, las vertientes,
el muerto,los decilitros,el bfiho,
los lugares,la tifia, los sarc6fagos,el vaso, las morenas...
La PAZ,la abispa,el taco, las vertientes
Unable to return to Peru, out of indigence and also for fear that he
would be imprisoned once again upon arrival (in 1926 a Trujillo court
declared 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 later
Vallejo translators and editors are to be believed) moved from one cheap
hotel to another in search of more affordable, if increasingly darker and
less hospitable, surroundings. His trips to the Soviet Union proved
increasingly disillusioning; his deeply committed involvement in the
Spanish Civil War ended in heartbreak as it did for so many poets. His
acute disillusionment over the turn of events that would lead to a Franco
victory months later may well have contributed to Vallejo's premature
and miserable death. He died in great pain, having just heard in a state of
semi-consciousness that the Fascist forces had succeeded in occupying
the Ebro, thus cutting the Republican armies in two. His exile had

Dianna Niebylski 93
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 artistic
exiles, a more recalcitrant case of non-adaptation, or a more sustained
refusal 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 that
of the graphic and audible silences of the disappearing or self-cancelling
poem. 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 an
absence of words, the silences of Poemas humanos are the consequence of
a desperate piling-up of language: the poet's barricades of disconnected
and mutilated words conveying better than any blank space the utter
impossibility of affirming meaning in the face of historical chaos. Hence,
the most hermetic poems in Poemas humanos are simply lists. "The Peace,
the wasp, the heel, the slopes. . ." (178), quoted at the beginning of this
section, is an example of a poem whose only thematic unity stems from
the fact that all verses revolve around different parts of speech. The first
stanza contains a list of nouns (see above); the second one is nothing
more 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 to
time or space. The poem's last stanza reads like a condemnation of cer-
tain states of being ("The horrible, the sumptuous, the slowest . . ." ["Lo
horrible, 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 to
the same conclusion: the word-lists evoke vague feelings of despair but
offer 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 apocalyptic
word-heap. Devoid of context and causality, the lists are ultimately unde-
cipherable. Reading both poems, one senses that the poet has barricaded
himself in a literal prison-house of language, one from which there is no
exit 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

94 RefusingTranslationin Exile
the most "silent" of the Poemas humanos, but many others that appear to
adopt a normal syntax prove to be almost as intractable. The poem, "Lis-
ten to your mass, your comet, listen to them; don't cry" ("Oye a tu masa,
a tu cometa, escuichalos; no gimas") could be a warning to heed the
body'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 each
other for shock effect rather than meaningful communication. Like many
of the poems, the one that begins with the words "Well, does the pale
metalloid heal you" ("ZYbien? iTe sana el metaloide pailido?";176) sounds
like 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 they
graphically depict this absence of a speaking subject in a language that
un-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 through
the mute strangeness of his syntax and the recalcitrant hostility of his
images, in other poems Vallejo approaches his fear of losing language
openly, bluntly, and stubbornly. "I want to write, but out comes foam,/I
want to say so much but I choke" ("Quiero escribir, pero me sale
espuma,/ quiero decir muchisimo y me atollo"; 156), he confesses in
"Intensity and Height" ("Intensidad y altura"), conveying at once the
image 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 la
tinta en que me ahogo"), the poet admits he is only (still) here to keep the
ink warm, but the ink chokes him before he can write. In "Epistle of the
Passers-by" ("Epistola a los he no longer speaks a human
transetintes"),
language: "I suffer from the lion's direct speech" ("yo sufro del lenguaje
directo del le6n"; 132). In "The Unfortunate Ones" ("Los desgraciados"),
addressing himself as well as the reader in the second person, he tells us
that he can only speak through the "oral organ of your silence" ( "6rgano
oral de tu silencio"; 170). In "It is there that I place myself" ( "Ello es el
lugar donde me pongo"), he notes that his skeleton has been skinned of
words: "my dear skeleton now letterless" ("mi querido esqueleto ya sin
letras"; 191). In "Andif after so many words" ("Y si despues de tantas pal-
abras"), he considers the frightening possibility that there might be no
logos left to make sense of "allthe words" that make up so many proposi-
tions (166). In the ominously titled "Pantheon" ("Pante6n"), the poet
watches as his "general sounds" ("sonidos generales"), mortally wounded
by 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

Dianna Niebylski 95
masochism, or perhaps his masochistic paranoia. In "What comes over
me, that I whip myself with the line/ and I think the period is after me, at
a gallop?" ("Qudme da, que me azoto con la linea/l y creo que me sigue, al
trote, el punto?"; 164), the verse becomes a whip, and grammar a gallop-
ing executioner. Although the whip, or the act of whipping, conveys the
image of a medieval Christian penitent, the poem's sense of abjection
suggests another figure: a twentieth-century Kafkaesque victim-hero,
clueless before the forces that threaten to silence him without granting
him the benefit of an explanation. In all of these confessions of impend-
ing silence, these poems articulate, now directly, the effects of the exile's
estrangement on this poet who refused to became either an expatriate or
an immigrant.10
Estranged, dispossessed, and aphasic, Vallejo's persona in Poemas
humanos is indeed a dismembered Orpheus (to borrow Ihab Hassan's
image), one whose voice is in imminent danger of being swallowed up by
its own cacophonous echoes, broken beyond recovery. The poet's cata-
strophic semantic and syntactical tactics lay painfully bare the imminent
vulnerability to a disintegrating language spoken from a psychic no-place.
There is no denying the sense of existential anguish permeating these
verses, but viewed against Vallejo's progressive distance from everything
that had made his language familiar, even some of the most impenetrable
verses 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, the
Spanish of Poemas humanos sounds very much like a foreign language, or
a tortured transliteration of a language that the translator has failed to
properly decode. It would be difficult to imagine, in fact, a more trouble-
some articulation of linguistic alienation than that present in these
poems. Against the disappearance of a mother tongue that progressively
baffles 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 oblivion
of a language whose native sounds are less and less audible to the poet.
From this perspective, those impossible word-list poems may be read as
the exiled poet's desperate attempt to retain his mother tongue, even if
only 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 also
that he has been. In many of the Poemas humanos, Vallejo piles up his
native but increasingly foreign-sounding words against a world that
speaks to him in other tongues and threatens to rob him of his sense both
of self and of the real.

96 RefusingTranslationin Exile
 Julia Kristeva notes that despite the losses it entails, only "exile" (as
real or metaphorical estrangement) can produce the disorientation neces-
sary for the artist or the poet to create a truly revolutionary work of art
or literature."1 In 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 of
silence.

University of Kentucky

Notes
1. "Vallejo'sPoemashumanos:Languageand Silence as Expressionsof Despair."
Dianna Niebylski, The Poem on the Edge of the Word: The Limits of Language and
the Uses of Silence in the Poetry of Mallarme, Rilke, and Vallejo (New York: Peter
Lang, 1993) 129-163.
2. I am aware, of course, that Kristeva uses "exile" metaphorically in this and
other meditations on exile. Sometimes a metaphor for the human condition, the
condition of exile is also, for Kristeva,the necessary condition for any kind of
transgressiveor originalwriting. Yetthere is no doubt that, in discussingher own
realityas a "foreigner,"and alludingto other foreigners'and exiles' concreteexpe-
rience, she also addressesthe condition of physical and linguisticexile in illumi-
natingdetail.
3. Most recently,GustavoGeirolahas written that Trilcemarks "theentrance,by
means of the poet's labor,to "another"poetic zone, one not outside of language
but outside of language'sbourgeoismorals and epistemology"["eladvenimiento,
por medio del trabajoportico, de una 'otra'zona no exterioral lenguaje,pero si
exteriora la moraly a la epistemologiaburguesasdel lenguaje"](38).
4. HumbertoDiaz-Casanuevamaintainsthat the stridentanguishof Trilceis tem-
pered ("sesosiega")in Poemashumanos.Noel Salomonexpressesa similaropinion
in "Algunosaspectos de lo 'humano' en Poemashumanos."My position on the
comparative"anguish"of both texts is much closer to that expressedby Gonzalo
Sobejanoin "Poesiadel cuerpoen Poemashumanos."
5. All citations from Poemas humanos refer to Vallejo's Obra podtica completa. The
tranlationsof Vallejo'slettersand poems are my own.
6. Other readersfamiliarwith Vallejo'swork might objectto my emphasison the
estrangingeffects of exile in Vallejo'spoetry by pointingout that the poet address-
es the subject of exile circumspectlyand seldom. As one engagedin the "univer-
sal" cause of lessening the suffering and the hunger of his "hombreshumanos,"
Vallejothe Marxistactivist must have questioned,and questionedfrequently,the
potential "inauthenticity,"or bad faith, of his feelings of national and linguistic
uprootedness.In this way, his (relative)silence on the subject could be read as a
sign of a guilty consciousness (not the universal, "human"guilt the poet feels in
PH but a more personaland concrete sense of guilt). In this connection,it might
be pertinent to recall-as Julia Kristevareminds us in her post-Marxistmedita-
tions on estrangement-that silence is also a tactic for expressing conflicts for
which the exile has no language.

Dianna Niebylski 97
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 is
composed 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 translation
remains faithful to the obtuseness of the original.
10. Thomas Pavel argues that the distinction is crucial: "[i]mmigrantsbegin a new
life and find a new home; exiles never break the psychological link with their
point of origin" (26).
11. In "ANew Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," Kristeva bluntly affirms that
"[w]ritingis impossible without some kind of exile" (298).

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Diaz-Casanueva, Humberto. "Resefia a Poesias completas (1949)." C6sar Vallejo.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 Poetry and Silence. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 1976.
Geirola, Gustavo. "Cesar Vallejo: Enunciaci6n y teatralidad." Revista Chilena de
Literatura55 (Nov 1999): 31-65.
Kristeva, Julia. "ANew Type of Intellectual: The Dissident." The Kristeva Reader.
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the Uses of Silence in Mallarme, Rilke, and Vallejo.New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
Pavel, Thomas. "Exile as Romance and as Tragedy."Exile and Creativity:Signposts,
Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Durham:
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Salomon, Noel. "Algunos aspectos de lo 'humano' en "Poemas humanos." C6sar
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