I won’t list all the books I have in a bag to donate, because it will make me quail. They are books I would keep if I did not have others. Famous anthologies of avant-garde writing, famous editions, Suleiman’s Subversive Intent, still-valid Footprint guides to Central America, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, things like this. But the photocopied book I am recycling deserves actual comment, as it’s a book I’d like to own–as a book. It’s Roberto Paoli’s recopilación of his articles on Vallejo.
This is a good book, one of the first good ones to appear, in my view (there is so much bad work on Vallejo). So before I recycle it I am going to reproduce some of my suggestive marginalia.
19: colligation through rhetoric, as all knowledge passes through language
Key: dialectic of ternura/lo absurdo
Trilce is hermetic because it lacks a projection of time (16)
Central to all the poems is the desarraigo, the having-left-tradition-and-group, and the feelings of guilt this produces
NOT: interested in hedonism/sensuality/beauty (is this the “Indian” element according to Paoli? One must check … yes, Europeans are interested in those things, says Paoli)
DOES NOT: reflect European movements in the way other Spanish American writers of his time do, and there is no esthetic fetichism (20)
Physicality is important, we are body before spirit (and I noted that Paoli was insightful on Vallejo’s relationship to tradition)
Vallejo’s “vanguardismo” isn’t just a use of avant-garde instruments; “es más bien el aflorar de una lengua sepulta y olvidada” (9)
Vallejo DOES have the alma/voz indias (that’s why I liked him instantly), but not the indianista themes
29: good on indigenismo and the importance of the prose writing, and very good on how he differs from other modernist poets
21-22: there is no final utopia, no total liberation
It’s a materialist reading and the second chapter is good on the biographies of Vallejo. I would like to own this book as a book and one can: I’ll acquire it at some point, or I will reread it in book form at a beautiful library.
(I could work on Vallejo now. I could have then, too, if I felt I had more authority. But I was entirely capable then as well.)
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 