BOOKS - Correspondence
César Vallejo in his letters
By José Manuel Caballero Bonald
poet's correspondence completes the picture of who suffered all kinds of hardship and left us a splendid poetry
I'm very addicted to writing letters, that fickle lot of literature that has stopped practicing years ago. I think his past farmers were already installed go, like me, in the suburb of senescence. Now nobody or almost nobody writes letters, unless to do so through the electronic devices, which by definition neutralizing what these writings were of slow deployment of ideas and confidential. Some of the collected letters lately published, with Juan Ramon Jimenez to head far belie such hasty judgments that labeled them as ephemeral literature. This edition of the correspondence of a César Vallejo further evidence of remarkable repertoire of data that provide the cards to complete the picture of a writer.
This entire pick, whose title is rather bold, brings to a total of 242 letters, besides other smaller papers, the largest being those to the family, Paul April Vivero, Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego. True that the compiler itself acknowledges in his 'Introduction' that some cards have not been close to them, so it is even more unfounded title qualifier. One wonders also whether there is any correspondence that can be considered complete. Impossible to know the exact count of letters that someone has written throughout his life and the number of impossible to find for some reason.
This edition, prepared with fervent solvency Jesus Cabel, met in any case very helpful in providing us made quite a few keys of the human journey and literary César Vallejo. Are written to communicate well about their difficult life, barely located between Lima, Paris and Madrid. There walks the poet tweaking his own portrait: the heroic figure who dislocated the aesthetics of the past in the interest of ethics of the future, the image combative, needy, caring, loving, erratic, that emissary of his own life also wanted to change the life, exemplary who suffered all kinds of hardship and left us a splendid poetry.
It is instructive to refer poetic Vallejo experiences to personal experiences expressed in these letters. From modernism, symbolism, the author comes to the isms Trilce wars without any desire to comply. The frequent and beyond in a shift that affects every other turn of the poetry written in English for those years. A harsh verbal flow, as jagged edge, woven of new words, phrases, lexical and syntactic mismatches, paradoxically allow the balance of a rare and wondrous poetic lineage. The domestic scene, the sad landscape of memory are subjected to all kinds of stresses grammar until rhetorical tangles disappear to make way for a poetry quite clear. That may be another of his secrets: the harmony arising from the disorder. What also is clear from the own account of misfortunes, human inclinations, political anxieties attested in these letters.
Correspondence complete. César Vallejo. Jesus Cabel (editor). Pre-Textos. Valencia, 2011. 380 pages. 22 euros.
Article: http://www.elpais.com 26/03/2011
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