César Vallejo

César Vallejo , of its complete name César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza , is a Peruvian Poète born with (Santiago de Chuco, the March 16th 1892 - and died with Paris, the April 15th 1938).

He is regarded as one of the largest poets of language Spanish E and one of most innovative, in spite of the brevity of his life like his work. Vallejo is the Peruvian poet most famous, an important figure of poetry Spanish-American of with Pablo Neruda.

César Vallejo was born in Santiago de Chuco, a small village in the Peruvian Andes. He was the eleventh child of a family of indigenous and Spanish origin. Since its childhood, he knew misery, but also the heat of the hearth, far which he felt orphan.

Very young person, it was interested in poetry and attended initially the romantic and traditional writers, then the modernistic ones. He studied the literature at the university of Libertad with Trujillo, in Peru. The poet left the university several times. Working in sugar plantations, it was pilot exploitation of workers. This experiment influenced its thought. It received its control in Spanish Literature in 1915.

In Trujillo, it published its first poems before settling with Lima with the end of the year 1917. In Lima, it was stimulated by the Bohemian local one formed by rebellious journalists, writers and politicians. He suffered in the previous years the publication much from its first book “Los Heraldos Negros” in 1919.

After having published Trilce in 1923 and having lost another post of teacher, the poet emigrated in Europe. Vallejo settles with Paris and contacts the European Avant-gardes, becoming a large friend of Juan Larrea. In 1928, it enters to the Communist party. In prey with serious economic problems, he survives ollaborations in newspapers. In Spain Vallejo collaborates with the Republic. He writes fifteen texts on the war of Spain, which were published in 1939 pennies the title “Spain draws aside from me this chalice”.

César Vallejo dies in Paris on April 15th, 1938. It rests with the Cimetière of Montparnasse.

Its first poetic book the Black Heralds was published in 1919. The modernistic influence appears there through the language and the use of images with an intention Symbolist. Nevertheless, one perceives already that the poet moves away from the Modernism, by his attempt to reflect the daily newspaper and by the use of a conversational language. The Black Heralds let show through a sad vision of the world. The human being is a guilty being which undergoes the whims of the destiny. There does not exist any balsam with the human suffering. It would be said that Vallejo - poet deeply believing complains about the abandonment of the human beings on behalf of God.

In its following book, Trilce (1922), the rupture with former poetry is total. The poems highlight even more pessimism already present in preceding work; but the anguish and desolation appear with a new poetic language, from now on deprived of any modernistic trace. The anecdote is completely absent there. The language désarticule. Syntax disappears sometimes. The whole gives the impression of a world chaotic and distressing. This book is converted into one of most important of the poetry of avant-garde.

In, Spain draws aside from me this chalice (1939) it exceeds its tragic and pessimistic design world to feel interdependent of all those which suffer. The action of the people will make it possible according to Vallejo- to finish some with the injustices and with the human beings to face the cosmic forces which spread the suffering throughout the world.

; Principal publications

Los Heraldos negros (1918). One of the examples most representative of the Post-modernism. There the poet confronts his existential anguish, his culpability and his pain in his famous sentences: “There are fists in the life, also forts. I do not know” and “I was born one day when God was sick”

Trilce (1922). Who is regarded as one fundamental moment in the renewal of the poetic language Spanish-American. The book took a radical and extreme style, by using a technique now known like surrealist.

Poemas Humanos (1939). Published by its wife after her death. It incorporates in it historical elements and realities concrete (Peruvian, European and universal with which it expresses a faith impassioned for the fight of the man for justice and solidarity social.

; French translations

César Vallejo, human Poems , transl. of Claude Esteban, in Claude Esteban, parallel Poems , Galileo, 1980.
César Vallejo, Poésie supplements , transl. of Gerard de Cortanze, Flammarion, coll " Barroco" , 1983.

España aparta semi este cáliz (Spain draws aside from me this chalice, 1939):

" Never, human men,/ there was not in the chest, with the reverse of the jacket, in the wallet,/ such an amount of pain,/ in glass, butchery, the arithmetic one! / never so much of painful tendreress/ never so near to the so remote attack,/ never fire never/ its role of dead cold did not hold better! // ..... misfortune increases, brothers hommes"

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