Cesar Vallejo’s book Espana aparta de mi este caliz isn’t considered one of his most acclaimed works of poetry. Written in a final burst of poetic fever at the end of his life at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Espana was published posthumously with another work entitled Poemas humanos. Translator Clayton Eshman considers Espana as an extension of this earlier work in which the Peruvian poet examines through the poetic lens the nature of humanity’s destiny in the third decade of the twentieth century. In truth, if I had wanted to read Vallejo as a merely lyrical figure in and of himself, it would have probably been better to choose an earlier work such as Trilce or Los heraldos negros. Espana comes a lot closer to what might be called “prose poetry”. The text is more a reportage of real events than an aesthetic experiment.
My area of interest, however, lies particularly in the intersection between poetry and real events, both how poetry approaches the changes of history and also how history is influenced by poetry. It is my belief that the Spanish Civil War was a real turning point in hispanic letters, both in the Iberian Peninsula and on the American Continent. Given that the Spanish Republic was a venture strongly supported by leftist intellectuals, the ensuing war against Franco was fought with arts and letters as much as with guns. One of the first victims of the Franco regime was the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Poets, either observing the war or involved in it, became entrenched figures commenting on the brutality and violence. This is particularly evident when one considers the fate of both this text and another text written at the same time, Neruda’s Espana en el corazon. Both books were written, published and diseminated during the war, printed and collated by the Republican soldiers themselves. (Neruda’s book was printed on paper made out of scraps of everything, including old bandages).
In Czeslaw Milosz’ book The Witness of Poetry, the polish poet describes the difficulty which poets after the Holocaust faced in finding an adequate language to articulate what they had seen and experienced. Milosz describes much of the poetry written during the occupation of Poland as using pre-war lyrical language, clinging to the style of romanticism. Both Vallejo and Neruda struggle with a similar difficulty, how to articulate what they were witnessing. Of what use was poetry in the battlefield? It’s interesting that Vallejo’s opening poem “Himno a los voluntarios de la republica” articulates this difficulty:
“Cuando marcha a matar con su agonia
mundial, no se verdaderamente
que hacer, donde ponerme; corro, escribo, aplaudo,
lloro, atisbo, destrozo, apagan, digo
a mi pecho que acabe, al bien, que venga
y quiero desgraciarme.” (2)
Vallejo expresses the complete futility of the poet in these circumstances. The barrage of actions he attempts are useless. The “apagan” trips the line of first person verbs, reminding him that regardless of what he does, they die, they become extinguished. This feeling of helplessness persists. Vallejo soon discovers that his only recourse is to praise the republican fighters and let them speak through his poems:
desde mi piedra en blanco, dejame
solo
cuadrumano, mas aca, mucho mas lejos
al no caber entre mis manos tu largo rato extatico
quiebro contra tu rapidez de doble filo
mi pequenez en traje de grandeza.
It is in Espana where we also see the intersection between the realms of religion and politics as Vallejo tries to negotiate the questions of human goodness and the role of God in the light of the immanent violence and destruction he witnesses. Phrases from the Gospel of Matthew are interspersed in the poems as a way of reconfiguring the concept of salvation as emerging from the active engagement of the working class. Here we see the beginnings of the cross polination between revolution and revelation through the medium of poetry. Christianity, Catholicism in particular, during the Spanish Civil War was associated with the reactionary Church which supported the Falange. Thus in order for it to be rescued from meaninglessness, from being swallowed up in the problematic of a Church and thus a God who supports the power of the rich and the oppression of the working class, it must be distilled through the lens of socialism to its pure form. Vallejo’s work might be seen as the initiator of two cross-currents in hispanic letters: the creation of a politically engaged poetry working to witness and at the same time influence the process of history, and also the translation of socialist discourse into the language of revelation.
