‘Snapping César Vallejo’s Soul’: review of Malanga Chasing Vallejo: Selected Poems by César Vallejo, New Translations and Notes by Gerard Malanga (Three Rooms Press, New York, 2014), 257 pp.
César Vallejo – as is well known – has influenced a bevy of Latin American poets (such as Nicanor Parra, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Gonzalo Rojas, Ernesto Cardenal, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Juan Gelman), mystics (such as Thomas Merton), dramatists (such as Samuel Beckett, especially a crucial scene in En attendant Godot; see Efraín Kristal, ‘Introduction’, in César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Clayton Eshleman [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007], pp. 1-20 [pp. 9-11]), musicians (such as Cesar Bolaños, especially his avant-garde piece, ‘Intensidad y altura’, of 1964), novelists such as the Chilean Roberto Bolaño (in his novel Monsieur Pain published in 1999, Eng. trans. 2010) and the Peruvian Eduardo González Viaña (in Vallejo en los infiernos, published in 2007, Eng. trans. 2015), and film directors such as the Swede Roy Andersson (in his film Songs from the Second Floor released in 2000), but to this list we must now add the photographer-poet Gerard Malanga (b. 1943), best known for his work as Andy Warhol’s right-hand man at The Factory in New York during the heyday years from 1963 to 1970. Malanga has published an intriguing book about his enduring interest in Vallejo’s work, Malanga Chasing Vallejo (2014), which includes 88 new translations of Vallejo’s poems. Malanga thereby becomes the latest in a long line of translators – including John Knoepfle, James Wright, Robert Bly, Clayton Eshleman, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, Jose Rubia Barcia, Ed Dorn, Gordon Brotherson, James Higgins, William Rowe, Richard Schaaf, Kathleen Ross, Rebecca Seiferle, Barry Fogden, Valentino Gianuzzi, Michael Smith, and Joseph Mulligan – who have grappled over the years with the Peruvian’s often impenetrable verbal artillery.
