We explain who César Vallejo was, what his main literary works were and what his life was like in Europe.
César Vallejo is the greatest poet of Peru and one of the most outstanding poets of the Spanish language.
Who was Cesar Vallejo?
César Vallejo was a Peruvian poet and writerconsidered the greatest poet of the Peruvian tradition and one of the most important authors of Hispanic literature of the 20th century. His collection of poems Trilce (1922) is a central reference in the passage from modernism to literary avant-garde in the West and an outstanding work in the universal poetic tradition.
Vallejo He lived a brief and enigmatic life, much of it in exile, where he was part of the circuit of Latin American authors settled in France between the wars, many of them linked to left-wing thought. In fact, the last stage of Vallejo’s work clearly shows his ideological positioning and his position close to Marxism.
Known as “the saddest of poets” or “the saddest man”Vallejo is one of the most important literary voices of the Hispanic world and also of the universal tradition. He was also a close and admired figure by other important poets such as the Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) or the Spaniard Juan Larrea (1895-1980).
Birth and youth of César Vallejo
César Vallejo was born on March 16, 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, a town in the eastern region of Peru. He was the youngest of the eleven children of Francisco de Paula Vallejo Benites and María de los Santos Mendoza Gurrionero, a humble and peasant couple, of mixed origins: indigenous Quechua and descendants of Spanish.
Vallejo began his schooling at the Municipal School of Santiago de Chuco, where he was recognized as a brilliant student.. Starting in 1905 he attended high school at the Colegio Nacional de San Blas, in the town of Huamachuco, and there he discovered literature and composed his first rhymes.
In 1910, he decided to undertake higher studies at the Faculty of Letters of the National University of Trujillo, but he had to withdraw due to financial problems. Back in his town, assisted his father in his newly acquired duties as district governor and discovered the cruel working conditions of the region’s miners.
The following year, he had enough money to study again, and decided to enroll at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima, to study medicine. But he again failed in the attempt and had to return, several months later, and began working as a tutor for the children of a landowner in Acobamba, in the department of Junín.
In 1912 he returned to Trujillo, ready to resume his studies, for which he got a job as an assistant cashier at the “Roma” sugar plantation in the Chicama valley. He stayed there for several months, before enrolling again in the Faculty of Letters. Between 1913 and 1915 he worked as a teacher at the Colegio Nacional de Varones No. 41 and then at the Colegio Nacional San Juan, while he studied. At that time he began to write his first poems.
The literary beginnings of César Vallejo
Vallejo (seated, center) frequented the El Norte group of young Trujillo intellectuals.
In 1915 Vallejo successfully completed his studies and had his first public poetry readings. In addition, he began to frequent the intellectual group “El Norte”, composed of Antenor Orrego (1892-1960), Alcides Spelucín Vega (1895-1976), José Eulogio Garrido Espinoza (1888-1967), Juan Espejo Asturrizaga (1895-1965) , Macedonio de la Torre Collard (1893-1981) and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895-1979).
The intellectual exchange with this group was decisive for the formation of Vallejo.. Thanks to them he became acquainted with the poetry of the modernists Rubén Darío (1867-1916) and Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875-1910), as well as the work of the American Walt Whitman (1819-1892). These readings strongly influenced his poetic production and, at that time, his first texts appeared in several local newspapers, such as Reform.
Due to his love of poetry and his sad personality, the members of the group gave Vallejo the nickname “Korriscosso”, taken from a story by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900).
During those days, Vallejo fell in love with María Rosa Sandoval. The young woman, however, disappeared shortly after the poet’s life, embarking on a trip to the Otuzco mountain range, where she died in 1918 of tuberculosis. This fruitless love inspired Vallejo many of the poems that made up his first publication: The Black Heraldsin 1919.
In 1917, however, and after a second spite with the young Zoila Rosa Cuadra, Vallejo decided to move to Lima, where he undertook doctoral studies in Law at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
The black heralds
The black heralds It was Vallejo’s first collection of poems. It is one of his most famous works.
In Lima, Vallejo frequented the capital’s intellectual community and was generally received with enthusiasm.. He became friends with Abraham Valdelomar (1888-1919) and frequented his group Colónida, as well as with José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930). He also published some poems in the magazine South America.
In 1918 Vallejo entered the Colegio Barrós in Lima and soon found himself in the position of director. That year his mother died and Vallejo began a stormy romance with the young Otilia Villanueva, a relative of one of his colleagues. This torrid affair cost him his position at the school, so the following year he became a teacher of Spanish grammar at the Colegio Nacional Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.
In 1919 his first collection of poems appeared, The black heralds, that It was received with positive reviews and praise from the Lima literary community.who saw in him an important renewal of modernist poetry.
The black heralds It is one of Vallejo’s most famous works. The collection of poems consists of six sections, preceded by a poem with the same title as the book, which is his most famous composition. His first stanzas are:
“There are blows in life, so strong… I don’t know!
Blows like the hatred of God; as if before them,
the hangover of all the suffering
It will sink into the soul. I don’t know!
They are few; But they are. They open dark ditches
in the fiercest face and the strongest back.
They may be the foals of the barbarian Attilas;
or the black heralds that Death sends us.
They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adorable faith that Fate blasphemes.
These bloody blows are the crackles
of some bread that burns on the oven door.”
Taken from Complete poetic work (1968).
In November 1919, his friend Abraham Valdelomar died, and Vallejo, overcome with nostalgia, He returned briefly to Santiago de Chuco, and in 1920 became involved in a local political plot concerning the poor working conditions of indigenous workers.. Local judges accused him of inciting the masses to loot and burn the property of a landowner family and he was pursued and detained for three months.
Although the legal proceedings against him were never concluded, Vallejo was released on bail. Back in Lima, he carried with him the first verses of his next great work, Trilce (1922).
Trilce and the departure for Europe
With his second collection of poems, TrilceVallejo was ahead of the European avant-garde movements.
After winning a couple of literary contests, Vallejo was able to face the publication of Trilcehis most important and revolutionary work. Printed in the Lima Penitentiary Workshops, it had a circulation of 200 copies, which were received with indifference by readers.The work, with a prologue by his friend Antenor Orrego, also had a portrait of the author on the cover, the work of the painter Víctor Morey Peña (1900-1965).
The literary importance of Trilce was not perceived at the time of its appearance. This is a poetic proposal of radical experimentalism, which anticipated the innovations of the European avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s.In his verses, old words are rescued, new ones are invented, and language is freed from the rules of syntax and apparent logic.
The title of the collection of poems already constitutes a provocation: it was invented by Vallejo as a replacement for the original title, “bronze skulls”, and it came from the fact that there were already three pages printed. The poet played with the word “three” until he deformed it and turned it into an original word, ideal to baptize his poetic innovations, comparable only to those who later proposed Altazor (1931) by Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) and Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce (1882-1941).
On the other hand, the 77 untitled poems that make up the work, numbered with Roman numerals, form a continuous series that does not allow for a thematic or structural differentiation at first glance. Each poem, thus, must be appreciated as a unit in itself and often requires an interpretive and linguistic effort to be understood..
The importance of Trilce In Latin American literature, it was such that it influenced numerous literary, musical, and even pictorial works by later artists, such as the literary group and magazine of the same name that the Chilean poet Omar Lara (1941-2021) founded in 1964.
The publication of Trilce was followed by other works by Vallejo, such as melographed scales (1922), a collection of short stories, and Wild fable (1923), a short psychological novel set in the northern mountains of Peru.
The poor reception of Trilce and the feeling of not completely belonging to the Lima culture led Vallejo towards new horizons. Thus, in mid-1923 he left on a steamship for Europe, a continent from which he never returned..
The life of César Vallejo in Paris
César Vallejo left for Paris in 1923 and never returned to his homeland.
On July 13, 1923, César Vallejo arrived in Paris. His capital was summed up in a coin of five hundred soles and the possibility of offering articles and translations to different journalistic media: the newspaper The North and the magazine Amauta in Peru, the French magazine L’Amérique Latin and the Spanish magazines Spain and Alfar.
His first years in France were difficult. His life went from hotel to hotel and his economy was always precarious, so he sometimes had to sleep on the street.. At the same time he established relationships with important writers, such as Juan Larrea (1895-1980) and Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), and through them with other important intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Tristán Tzara (1896-1963). ).
The year 1924 was particularly hard for Vallejo: he learned of his father’s death and he himself suffered health problems that forced him to enter a charity sanatorium, where he later underwent surgery and managed to recover. The following year he found work in an advertising company, The Great Ibero-American Journalswhere he remained until 1926.
That year he founded the magazine with his friend Larrea Favorable Paris Poem and together with the Peruvian Pablo Abril de Vivero…