Malanga Chasing Vallejo: Selected Poems: César Vallejo
New Translations and Notes: Gerard Malanga
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In the forceful, staggering poetry of César Vallejo, poet and photographer Gerard Malanga discovered a kindred spirit. Driven by a deep sense of spiritual kinship and with the encouragement of Vallejo's widow, Malanga's translations reveal a profound perspective on Vallejo's work that brings into focus the brutal desperation behind his genius. Malanga Chasing Vallejo gathers 82 of Vallejo's poems in a bilingual edition that is marked by the spiritual connection between poet and translator. A work of the heart, these poems are presented from the position of a fellow member of the underclass, providing a street-level entry point for readers who can relate to the hunger feeding every verse and the ache of loneliness that no amount of modern technology can obscure. In addition to the poems, Malanga's heartfelt introduction describes the process of his 45-year commitment to this project. The book also includes a poem about Vallejo by Malanga, rare photos of Vallejo, and transcriptions of several never-before-published letters to Malanga from Vallejo's widow, Georgette de Vallejo, which guided his translation efforts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peruvian-Parisian writer Vallejo (1892 1938), one of the great Spanish-language modernists, became both a searing poet of linguistic innovation and a heartbreaking writer on human disconnection. Americans do not lack for versions of Vallejo, but this bilingual selection has three merits. It's a new and largely careful introduction to most of Vallejo's career, from The Black Heralds (1919) to "Espa a, Aparta De M Este C liz," a late long poem on the Spanish Civil War. It comes with letters and documents, in an appendix, from the poet's widow Georgette. And it comes from Malanga, who began as a player in Andy Warhol's Factory and has since become a prolific, successful poet, filmmaker, and portrait photographer on his own. Malanga has been translating Vallejo since 1969; he does well with the poet's sense of fatigue and with his strange blend of alienation and yearning. What seems enticingly bizarre in Vallejo's Spanish can end up, in Malanga, simply unidiomatic: "I cry out, then, without stopping/ either of living, without turning/ either in the joust I venerate." Malanga sometimes sticks to literal sense, but not always. His translations probably will not become the standard, but they are welcome anyway; the attention they bring to the Spanish can only do good.
