| Friday, April 27, 2007 8:56PM | | | | CÉSAR VALLEJO, cont. | Posted By: Claudio Iván Remeseira
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I am among those who believe that César Vallejo is the most important Hispanic-American poet of the last century. "He stands above and beyond the rest", agrees Peruvian poet Mariela Dreyfus. "The deep yet controlled emotion that permeates his poetry is unparalleled in Spanish".
The disruption and recreation that the Spanish language undergo in Vallejo's poetry, adds Dreyfus, is probably related to his indigenous background. "His two grandmothers were kuechua-speakers, and althouhg Vallejo always spoke and wrote in Spanish, we can reasonably assume that the bilingual environment in which he grew up made him more sensible to the complex relationship between words and meaning".
Is this deeply felt insight of the radical instability of meaning that makes Vallejo so relevant for a writer who lives in the boundaries between two or more languages, particularly for the Spanish-language wirter experiencing the linguistic shock of living in a place like New York.
But the greatest good news of yesterday's Tribute is that it confirmed the universality of Vallejo's poetry. "I think this was the first homage to Vallejo in the US, at least of this magnitude," said Chilean poet and long-time New Yorker Cecilia Vicuña.
The audience was also celebrating Eshleman's translation, the product of a lovingly crafted work that spanned fifty years.
"Reading Clayton's translation is like watching a snake slither around rocks," said Forrest Gander. "He gets the flow of Vallejo's lyric energy interrupted by the material density of the invented words that stick out of the flow. The combination of that lyric flow and those rocky words, both in the original poems and in the translation, is what makes Vallejo's poetry so interesting to me."
I spent the rest of the evening exchanging opinions and emotions with Bolivian poet Eduardo Mitre, fellow Argentine poets Lila Zemborain and María Negroni, Eva Gasteazoro, Mónica de la Torre and other friends. We left Saint Mark's and walked into the night with the certitude of having been part of an inaluable ceremony, one those precious moments in which the enduring light of poetry defeats the opacity of death. | | |
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| 4-30-07 5:14PM: Luis Luque Lucas said...
Soy un escritor español con 6 libros publicados. Mi última novela El ciego que nació en siete ciudades, es una novela histórica que tiene por personaje central a Homero y su obra, y todos los personajes de la historia de la Grecia arcaica y clásica. Busco editorial norteamericana que traduzca y publique mi novela en inglés. ¿Podría usted orientarme en tal sentido? Mi sitio web www.elciegoquenacioensieteciudades.com
También repondo al e-mail. luquelucasluis@gmail.com
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