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Los heraldos negros (Escritores de América)
Escritores de América
140 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 1918
64 people are currently reading
1153 people want to read
About the author
César Vallejo
309 books375 followersCésar Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century. Always a step ahead of the literary currents, each of his books was distinct from the others and, in it's own sense, revolutionary. Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia's translation of "The Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo" won the National Book Award for translation in 1979.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
January 10, 2018
The heart of a poet usually brims with love, misery; both. In that sense, a great assortment of struggles emerges, echoing the burden of the indecisive soul. The feeling of being absorbed, captured by the vicissitudes of everyday life, the unexpected events of a predictable occupation. Existential gaps for which no bridge seems to be enough. Love gliding down a mountainside. Incomplete, unwanted, evanescent.
The kind of love that runs through the veins of a poet – in this case, César Vallejo – seems incomprehensible. Since its obscurity mystifies me, I occasionally end up losing interest. I can't relate to it that much. Sometimes, I don't even try. Other times, I wished I hadn't.
Melancolía, dejame de secarme la vida.
“Avestruz” (21)
My first Vallejo. I enjoyed reading the poems I was able to connect with, naturally; not many but enough. This poet thoroughly explored themes such as religion and love in a book published in 1918. It was his first book and still, there is a halo of maturity in his work. This collection has been named after the first poem, "Los Heraldos Negros" ("The Black Heralds"); its beauty and complexity explains such honor. Its verses, shrouded in mystique, illustrate how Vallejo links the human sorrow and disappointment to several religious images, as he ascribes some misfortunes to the amalgamation of free will and the activity (or lack of it) of a supreme being. There is a palpable sense of loss and guilt in a world where explanations are everything but perspicuous. His harrowing “I don't know!” breaks the silence and leaves me wondering about that enigmatic poet; the possibility that everything might have always been in his hands.
Los Heraldos Negros
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma. ¡Yo no sé!
Son pocos; pero son. Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.
Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma,
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Estos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.
Y el hombre. Pobre. ¡Pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes. ¡Yo no sé!
*
The Black Heralds
There are blows in life, so powerful… I don't know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
the undertow of everything suffered
welled up in the soul… I don't know!
They are few; but they are… They open dark trenches
in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.
Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas;
or the black heralds sent to us by Death.
They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloodstained blows are the crackling of
bread burning up at the oven door.
And man… Poor… poor! He turns his eyes, as
when a slap on the shoulder summons us;
turns his crazed eyes, and everything lived
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his look.
There are blows in life, so powerful… I don't know! (11)
Logically evocative, irrationally beautiful. Most of Vallejo's poems deal with universal themes such as love, death, fate, absurdity, his land and customs; often taking refuge in religion, which is generally used to portray human existence amid an ocean of uncertainties; the ebb and flow of meanings and indifference. The chimeric balance between our choices and predestination. The sense of a futile quest. A tiresome undertaking fueled by our adamant nature. An unavoidable instinct. A boulder rolling up and down, unceasingly.
Espergesia
Yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
...Hay un vacío
en mi aire metafísico
que nadie ha de palpar:
el claustro de un silencio
que habló a flor de fuego...
*
I was born on a day
when God was sick.
...There is an empty place
in my metaphysical shape
that no one can reach:
a cloister of silence
that spoke with the fire of its voice muffled... (81)
As I mentioned before, excessive amounts of religious references/praises don't keep me interested for a long time. That is the reason some poems captivated me while others were somewhat tedious to me. Nevertheless, the following poem demonstrates this writer's brilliance.
Los Anillos Fatigados
Hay ganas de volver, de amar, de no ausentarse,
y hay ganas de morir, combatido por dos
aguas encontradas que jamás han de istmarse.
Hay ganas: de un gran beso que amortaje a la Vida,
que acaba en el áfrica de una agonía ardiente,
suicida!
Hay ganas de... no tener ganas. Señor;
a ti yo te señalo. con el dedo deicida:
hay ganas de no haber tenido corazón.
La primavera vuelve, vuelve y se irá. Y Dios,
curvado en tiempo, se repite, y pasa: pasa:
a cuestas con la espina dorsal del Universo.
Cuando, las sienes tocan su lúgubre tambor...
cuando me duele el sueño grabado en un puñal,
hay ganas de quedarse plantado en este verso!
*
Weary rings
There are desires to return, to love, to not disappear,
and there are desires to die, fought by two
opposing waters that have never isthmused.
There are desires for a great kiss that would shroud Life,
one that ends in the Africa of a fiery agony,
a suicide!
There are desires to... have no desires, Lord;
I point my deicidal finger at you:
there are desires to not have had a heart.
Spring returns, returns and will depart. And God,
bent in time, repeats himself, and passes, passes
with the spinal column of the Universe on his back.
When my temples beat their lugubrious drum,
when the dream engraved on a dagger aches me,
there are desires to be left standing in this verse! (69)
Poetry, Vallejo's defense. A reproach, a devotional song, a wistful contemplation.
Melancholy, stop drying up my life.
"Ostrich" (21)
April 6, 15-Aug 7, 16**
* Also on my blog.
** I decided to rewrite almost everything; one of those days...
Read
June 27, 2025I don't rate books anymore anyway, but it's especially difficult to judge translated poetry. It's more a personal thing, then, because I wouldn't want to get into the thickets of distinguishing between the poet and his translator.
Rather, I can celebrate reading a Peruvian poet of some renown, one whose poetry did not fare so well in his home country (gee, that sounds familiar). He bailed for Paris and was one of so many literary types who railed against Franco and the fascists of the Spanish Civil War. Alas, Vallejo died at the ridiculously young age of 46 in abject Parisian poverty.
As for the poetry, a surprising number of Biblical allusions, many to Judith (watch your head and order the mocktails) and some to the three Mary's surrounding Jesus (who also died at a ridiculously young age). Like many poets of old, Vallejo gave a lot of Muse-ful bandwidth to love and trying to figure out the wiles and ways of women. A taste, then:
Love
Love, you come no longer to my dead eyes;
and my idealistic heart cries for you.
All my chalices are waiting, open
for your autumn hosts and auroral wines.
Love, divine cross, water my desert
with your astral blood that dreams and weeps.
Love, you return no longer to my dead eyes
that dread and desire, your auroral outburst!
Love, I don't want you when you're distant,
raffled in the rouge of a happy bacchante
or in the fragile and cut faction of woman.
Love, come without flesh, from ichor that amazes,
so I, in the way of God, may be a man who loves
and engenders without sensual pleasure!
See? Personifying love and crowning it with a capital "L" is pretty much where modern-day poets fear to tread. Not Vallejo, thank you. A generous poet.
Rather, I can celebrate reading a Peruvian poet of some renown, one whose poetry did not fare so well in his home country (gee, that sounds familiar). He bailed for Paris and was one of so many literary types who railed against Franco and the fascists of the Spanish Civil War. Alas, Vallejo died at the ridiculously young age of 46 in abject Parisian poverty.
As for the poetry, a surprising number of Biblical allusions, many to Judith (watch your head and order the mocktails) and some to the three Mary's surrounding Jesus (who also died at a ridiculously young age). Like many poets of old, Vallejo gave a lot of Muse-ful bandwidth to love and trying to figure out the wiles and ways of women. A taste, then:
Love
Love, you come no longer to my dead eyes;
and my idealistic heart cries for you.
All my chalices are waiting, open
for your autumn hosts and auroral wines.
Love, divine cross, water my desert
with your astral blood that dreams and weeps.
Love, you return no longer to my dead eyes
that dread and desire, your auroral outburst!
Love, I don't want you when you're distant,
raffled in the rouge of a happy bacchante
or in the fragile and cut faction of woman.
Love, come without flesh, from ichor that amazes,
so I, in the way of God, may be a man who loves
and engenders without sensual pleasure!
See? Personifying love and crowning it with a capital "L" is pretty much where modern-day poets fear to tread. Not Vallejo, thank you. A generous poet.
January 9, 2022
La inefabilidad del lenguaje, la paradoja y la consciencia de una vida abocada al sufrimiento de _Los heraldos negros_ rompen la dirección poética del Modernismo de Rubén Darío. Se abre entonces una nueva brecha que se aleja de la mera recreación en la belleza: «Yo nací un día / que Dios estuvo enfermo».
Otro tema muy interesante, difícil de descifrar al principio, es el constante ímpetu por salir del pozo del Yo, buscar al Otro; pues sólo en el Otro uno puede vivir. Una reacción contradogmática (contra cristiana) se mezcla con un sentimiento marxista y teológico (en lo humano).
Dicen que es uno de los mejores poetas hispanoamericanos del siglo XX. Yo personalmente no sé mucho de poesía, pero me han gustado unos cuantos poemas. Son dolorosos y tienen tintes erotanáticos, pero me recuerdan a Alejandra Pizarnik a veces (y eso me gusta).
Otro tema muy interesante, difícil de descifrar al principio, es el constante ímpetu por salir del pozo del Yo, buscar al Otro; pues sólo en el Otro uno puede vivir. Una reacción contradogmática (contra cristiana) se mezcla con un sentimiento marxista y teológico (en lo humano).
Dicen que es uno de los mejores poetas hispanoamericanos del siglo XX. Yo personalmente no sé mucho de poesía, pero me han gustado unos cuantos poemas. Son dolorosos y tienen tintes erotanáticos, pero me recuerdan a Alejandra Pizarnik a veces (y eso me gusta).
September 21, 2010
A classic of peruvian literature:
Los Heraldos Negros
César Vallejo
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios;
como si, ante ellos, la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma...
¡Yo no sé! Son pocos; pero son...
Abren zanjas oscuras en el rostro más fiero
y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros Atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la muerte.
Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.
Y el hombre... Pobre... ¡Pobre! Vuelve los ojos,
como cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido se empoza,
como charco de culpa, en la mirada.
Los Heraldos Negros
César Vallejo
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios;
como si, ante ellos, la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma...
¡Yo no sé! Son pocos; pero son...
Abren zanjas oscuras en el rostro más fiero
y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros Atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la muerte.
Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.
Y el hombre... Pobre... ¡Pobre! Vuelve los ojos,
como cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido se empoza,
como charco de culpa, en la mirada.
September 22, 2021
“A mi hermano Miguel”
In memoriam
¡Hermano, hoy estoy en el poyo de la casa,
donde nos haces una falta sin fondo!
Me acuerdo que jugábamos esta hora, y que mamá
nos acariciaba : «Pero hijos…»
Ahora yo me escondo,
como antes, todas estas oraciones
vespertinas, y espero que tú no des conmigo.
Por la sala, el zaguán, los corredores.
Después, te ocultas tú, y yo no doy contigo.
Me acuerdo que nos hacíamos llorar,
hermano, en aquel juego.
Miguel, tú te escondiste
una noche de Agosto, al alborear;
pero, en vez de ocultarte riendo, estabas triste…
Y tu gemelo corazón de esas tardes
extintas se ha aburrido de no encontrarte. Y ya
cae sombra en el alma.
Oye, hermano, no tardes
en salir, ¿Bueno? Puede inquietarse mamá.
In memoriam
¡Hermano, hoy estoy en el poyo de la casa,
donde nos haces una falta sin fondo!
Me acuerdo que jugábamos esta hora, y que mamá
nos acariciaba : «Pero hijos…»
Ahora yo me escondo,
como antes, todas estas oraciones
vespertinas, y espero que tú no des conmigo.
Por la sala, el zaguán, los corredores.
Después, te ocultas tú, y yo no doy contigo.
Me acuerdo que nos hacíamos llorar,
hermano, en aquel juego.
Miguel, tú te escondiste
una noche de Agosto, al alborear;
pero, en vez de ocultarte riendo, estabas triste…
Y tu gemelo corazón de esas tardes
extintas se ha aburrido de no encontrarte. Y ya
cae sombra en el alma.
Oye, hermano, no tardes
en salir, ¿Bueno? Puede inquietarse mamá.
September 20, 2022
"Los dados eternos"
por César Vallejo
"Dios mío, estoy llorando el ser que vivo;
me pesa haber tomádote tu pan;"
(Oukeey)
"pero este pobre barro pensativo
no es costra fermentada en tu costado:"
(...)
"¡tú no tienes Marías que se van!"
(¡Qué grueso estuvo eso!)
"Dios mío, si tú hubieras sido hombre,
hoy supieras ser Dios;"
(Tóma, paloma)
"pero tú, que estuviste siempre bien,
no sientes nada de tu creación."
(Otro gancho al hígado)
"¡Y el hombre sí te sufre:
el Dios es él!..."
(Awebo, compa. Dos likes pal César)
por César Vallejo
"Dios mío, estoy llorando el ser que vivo;
me pesa haber tomádote tu pan;"
(Oukeey)
"pero este pobre barro pensativo
no es costra fermentada en tu costado:"
(...)
"¡tú no tienes Marías que se van!"
(¡Qué grueso estuvo eso!)
"Dios mío, si tú hubieras sido hombre,
hoy supieras ser Dios;"
(Tóma, paloma)
"pero tú, que estuviste siempre bien,
no sientes nada de tu creación."
(Otro gancho al hígado)
"¡Y el hombre sí te sufre:
el Dios es él!..."
(Awebo, compa. Dos likes pal César)
July 10, 2009
Yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo,
grave...
Que espeso y cabrón
que Dios estuvo enfermo,
grave...
Que espeso y cabrón
January 14, 2020
SUBLIME. (Gracias a Vallejo es que mi existencia es menos cruel, un poquitín al menos).
April 2, 2017
This is one of those books where after reading a poem or two I was hooked. Although Vallejo is heralded as a a notable Hispanic poet, I had only heard of his name. After reading, I see why? Would give it a 4 1/2.
Born in Peru with a very religious background, he created "autochthonic" poetry interspersing native Peruvian language with his own Hispanic tongue while adding elements of Greek and Latin into the fold. Some words he just creates bridging languages.
"Enereida" which combines the Spanish word for January (enero) with "Aeneid" from Virgil reflecting on his aging father.
Mi padre, apenas,
en la mañana pajarean, pone
sus seteniocho años, sus setentiocho
ramos de invierno a solear.
My father, barely,
in the bird-lfilled morning,
puts his 78 years, his 78
branches of winter out to sun.
Beautiful word play. Beautiful imagery. And yet many of his poems are filled with religious thoughts that at first, I thought seemed dated or would turn me off. However, often he made Dios (god) more anthropomorphic ("he lights his own candles (velas)" or "god dresses up as a seller of lottery tickets") and in doing so, made one connect easier with his view of the world.
Yes there is pained material, lots of suffering and "evil things" but one can see from both his native background and his Spanish cultural heritage, he is struggling to find his voice. This book, published in 1919, makes a statement about his Peru in this time period and yet almost crosses the decades till now.
The translation and the excellent introduction, plus his chronology by Rebecca Seiferle adds to the book.
Born in Peru with a very religious background, he created "autochthonic" poetry interspersing native Peruvian language with his own Hispanic tongue while adding elements of Greek and Latin into the fold. Some words he just creates bridging languages.
"Enereida" which combines the Spanish word for January (enero) with "Aeneid" from Virgil reflecting on his aging father.
Mi padre, apenas,
en la mañana pajarean, pone
sus seteniocho años, sus setentiocho
ramos de invierno a solear.
My father, barely,
in the bird-lfilled morning,
puts his 78 years, his 78
branches of winter out to sun.
Beautiful word play. Beautiful imagery. And yet many of his poems are filled with religious thoughts that at first, I thought seemed dated or would turn me off. However, often he made Dios (god) more anthropomorphic ("he lights his own candles (velas)" or "god dresses up as a seller of lottery tickets") and in doing so, made one connect easier with his view of the world.
Yes there is pained material, lots of suffering and "evil things" but one can see from both his native background and his Spanish cultural heritage, he is struggling to find his voice. This book, published in 1919, makes a statement about his Peru in this time period and yet almost crosses the decades till now.
The translation and the excellent introduction, plus his chronology by Rebecca Seiferle adds to the book.
January 28, 2019
Hermoso poemario del gran César Vallejo.
Rompe la tradición europea y académica de la época, descubriendo, entre aromas impregnados de existencialismo y melancolía, una cosmovisión indígena de la que extrae su esencia con versos de elegante ingenio.
En Los Arrieros, me gusta mucho cuando dice:
"Arriero, vas fabulosamente vidriado de sudor.
[...] Las doce. Vamos a la cintura del día.
El Sol que duele mucho."
La sección Canciones de hogar me produjo mucha nostalgia.
Rompe la tradición europea y académica de la época, descubriendo, entre aromas impregnados de existencialismo y melancolía, una cosmovisión indígena de la que extrae su esencia con versos de elegante ingenio.
En Los Arrieros, me gusta mucho cuando dice:
"Arriero, vas fabulosamente vidriado de sudor.
[...] Las doce. Vamos a la cintura del día.
El Sol que duele mucho."
La sección Canciones de hogar me produjo mucha nostalgia.
June 8, 2023
funny words magic man
March 20, 2024
Empecé a leer la poesía completa de Vallejo. Saqué una edición crítica de la biblioteca para leerla de corrido. No pude. Hay demasiado que ver. Terminando "Los heraldos negros" sentí que tenía que tomarme un descanso para asimilar todo. Aunque varios poemas (puede constatarse en las ediciones críticas) son todavía de juventud y de aliento bastante modernista en este libro, los puntos álgidos son increíbles. Nada que no se haya dicho ya.
January 16, 2025
Poemario favorito y poeta favorito ❤️
January 24, 2023
pentru varianta în limba română, editura Univers, 1979, trad. Mihai Cantuniari
"Melancolie, scoate-ți din mine ciocul dulce; / nu te îndopa, flămândo, din grânele-mi de soare."
"Plouă; un fel de crudă imitație."
"aici se plânge dintr-o mie de pupile: /
nu te întoarce; inima mi-am îngropat."
"Departe, / râul s-a îmbătat, plânge avan / lichide preistorii, timpuri moarte."
"Mi-s toate oasele străine"
"aș vrea la ușile din jur să bat mereu / și cuiva, necunoscut, să-i cer iertare"
"închis în cușca de tandrețe"
"Comutator electric / de aparat de visuri mi-era gura."
"Mă simt perfect. Acum / sclipește-o gheață stoică / în mine. / Mă-nveselește funia asta / rubinie / ce-mi scârțâie prin vine."
"De visuri crude, o grimasă licărește. / Și orbul ce-a murit umplut de voci / de nea. Să te deștepți, poet, nomad, / la ziua nemiloasă de a fi om."
"Melancolie, scoate-ți din mine ciocul dulce; / nu te îndopa, flămândo, din grânele-mi de soare."
"Plouă; un fel de crudă imitație."
"aici se plânge dintr-o mie de pupile: /
nu te întoarce; inima mi-am îngropat."
"Departe, / râul s-a îmbătat, plânge avan / lichide preistorii, timpuri moarte."
"Mi-s toate oasele străine"
"aș vrea la ușile din jur să bat mereu / și cuiva, necunoscut, să-i cer iertare"
"închis în cușca de tandrețe"
"Comutator electric / de aparat de visuri mi-era gura."
"Mă simt perfect. Acum / sclipește-o gheață stoică / în mine. / Mă-nveselește funia asta / rubinie / ce-mi scârțâie prin vine."
"De visuri crude, o grimasă licărește. / Și orbul ce-a murit umplut de voci / de nea. Să te deștepți, poet, nomad, / la ziua nemiloasă de a fi om."
April 23, 2025
Me gustó bastante, pero no me lograron llegar nuevamente, hubo algunos que lograron transportarme a otros lugares con sus palabras, pero fueron muy pocos.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 5, 2021
Tal vez seré cancelado, y ya sé que es un clásico de la poesía en lengua española, pero leí este poemario y me pareció horrible.
October 9, 2022
Cuando empecé a leer poesía, “Los heraldos negros” fue uno de los primeros libros a los que acudí. Me costó entenderlo; sin embargo, fui capaz de deslumbrar en sus versos mucho de lo que significa mi país.
Hoy, algún tiempo después de esa primera lectura, vuelvo a este libro con una mirada diferente, más amplia, más madura. Debo reconocer que Vallejo aún me parece un poeta no-sencillo (que no es lo mismo que difícil, dirían los semióticos), pero que, a diferencia de aquella otra vez, hoy he sido mucho más capaz de entender su potencia y su poder. Describir la realidad de una nación no es sencillo, pero qué bien lo hace Vallejo.
Hoy, algún tiempo después de esa primera lectura, vuelvo a este libro con una mirada diferente, más amplia, más madura. Debo reconocer que Vallejo aún me parece un poeta no-sencillo (que no es lo mismo que difícil, dirían los semióticos), pero que, a diferencia de aquella otra vez, hoy he sido mucho más capaz de entender su potencia y su poder. Describir la realidad de una nación no es sencillo, pero qué bien lo hace Vallejo.
November 10, 2020
Yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
Todos saben que vivo,
que soy malo; y no saben
del diciembre de ese enero.
Pues yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
Hay un vacío
en mi aire metafísico
que nadie ha de palpar:
el claustro de un silencio
que habló a flor de fuego.
Yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
Hermano, escucha, escucha…
Bueno. Y que no me vaya
sin llevar diciembres,
sin dejar eneros.
Pues yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
Todos saben que vivo,
que soy malo; y no saben
del diciembre de ese enero.
Pues yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
Hay un vacío
en mi aire metafísico
que nadie ha de palpar:
el claustro de un silencio
que habló a flor de fuego.
Yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
Hermano, escucha, escucha…
Bueno. Y que no me vaya
sin llevar diciembres,
sin dejar eneros.
Pues yo nací un día
que Dios estuvo enfermo.
March 16, 2023
The withered, secluded, uninhabited grass
smothers I don't know what unknown protest:
it resembles the exhausted soul of a poet,
withdrawn in a gesture of defeat.
The tree branches have carved their silhouette,
cadaverous cage, alone and broken,
where my sick heart rests
in a statuesque boredom of terra cotta.
April 3, 2017
Excelente colección de poemas de Vallejo con una mezcla exquisita de sensibilidad religiosa, existencialismo, nostalgia e indigenismo. Una lectura fundamental para todos los latinoamericanos.
October 17, 2021
Vallejo, en Trilce, es un faro deslumbrante.
De eso que deslumbra, en Los Heraldos Negros, no hay sino algunas chispas. Mas ya el gran rayo se gesta.
De eso que deslumbra, en Los Heraldos Negros, no hay sino algunas chispas. Mas ya el gran rayo se gesta.
August 31, 2025
Cónchale, César.
No hacía falta hacerme lagrimear así tan así.
No hacía falta hacerme lagrimear así tan así.
February 17, 2024
Lirismo de invierno, rumor de crespones,
cuando ya se acerca la pronta partida;
agoreras voces de tristes canciones
que en la tarde rezan una despedida.
Visión del entierro de mis ilusiones
en la propia tumbra de mortal herida.
Caridad verónica de ignotas regiones,
donde a precio de éter de pierda la vida.
Cerca de la aurora partiré llorando;
y mientras mis años se vayan curvando,
curvará guadañas mi ruta veloz.
Y ante fríos óleos de luna mueriente,
con timbres de aceros en tierra indolente,
cavarán los perros, aullando, un adiós!
«Sauce»
cuando ya se acerca la pronta partida;
agoreras voces de tristes canciones
que en la tarde rezan una despedida.
Visión del entierro de mis ilusiones
en la propia tumbra de mortal herida.
Caridad verónica de ignotas regiones,
donde a precio de éter de pierda la vida.
Cerca de la aurora partiré llorando;
y mientras mis años se vayan curvando,
curvará guadañas mi ruta veloz.
Y ante fríos óleos de luna mueriente,
con timbres de aceros en tierra indolente,
cavarán los perros, aullando, un adiós!
«Sauce»
October 3, 2019
Totalmente diferente. Se presenta la angustia del ser humano desde un punto de vista individual de una manera excelsa y con imágenes de lo más originales. Vallejo refleja un existencialismo cristiano, a mi parecer, que se ve en poemas como Los dados eternos, por poner un ejemplo. El dolor y frío de la vida se siente y se explica de manera extraordinaria en poemas como Espergesia o Los heraldos negro. De mis poemarios favoritos, definitivamente.
November 23, 2020
"Culebran latigazos, cuando el can ama a su dueño? -No; pero la luz es nuestra".
Este Vallejo de treintitantos tenía el vigor de la colmena. Su manejo de registros sumado a las retorcidas formas de terminar el lenguaje, lo visten de poderoso.
En ningún momento me sentí frente a un libro iniciático, la técnica está muy cuidada.
"Hasta cuándo este valle de lágrimas, a donde yo nunca dije que me trajeran".
Este Vallejo de treintitantos tenía el vigor de la colmena. Su manejo de registros sumado a las retorcidas formas de terminar el lenguaje, lo visten de poderoso.
En ningún momento me sentí frente a un libro iniciático, la técnica está muy cuidada.
"Hasta cuándo este valle de lágrimas, a donde yo nunca dije que me trajeran".
January 16, 2013
Poemas humanos que por ello nos muestran la deshumanizacion del hombre. la soledad, el amor, el sexo, la nostalgia. Poesia total.
September 14, 2019
la escena desoladora que Vallejo formula con sus poemas me hace pensar que este primer libro podría perfectamente haber sido el último.
Read
May 10, 2020"Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma�� ¡Yo no sé!"
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma�� ¡Yo no sé!"
February 17, 2021
Excelso, sublime, impresionante.
August 4, 2013
COSMOPOLITAN EXILES & THE EXILE ARCHETYPE IN WORLD LITERATURE--VLADIMIR NABOKOV, CZESLAW MILOSZ, V.S. NAIPAUL, CESAR VALLEJO, RUBEN DARIO, OVID, CHU YUAN AND ADONIS (ALI AHMAD SA'ID)---FROM THE WORLD LITERATURE FORUM RECOMMENDED CLASSICS AND MASTERPIECES SERIES VIA GOODREADS—-ROBERT SHEPPARD, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Unprecedented mobility is one of the 20th & 21st Centuries' most characteristic attributes, accellerated by the invention of the automobile, propeller planes and then the jet airliners that have brought the distant corners of the Earth ever closer together. Mass emigrations, immigration, refugees from war and political upheavals, displacements of populations and voluntary emigration, either in "pursuit of happiness" or in forced exile from persecution have reshaped nation-states and transformed the face of the globe. Writers and artists have often been at the forefront of such mass movements, sometimes arising from the "push factors" of political persecution resulting from their expression of their views in the face of hostile governments or societies, but also from the "pull factors" of attraction to the cosmopolitan centers of culture such as Paris, London or New York where they might hope to find inspiration, adventure, fellows in art, recognition, or a supportive environment.
Cosmopolitan centers have existed from earliest antiquity in such places as Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Baghdad and Chang'An in Tang China. The First Century Greek biographer Plutarch wrote to his young friend Menemechus who was grieving over recent exile from his native Sardis in modern Turkey, that "the exclusion from one city is the freedom to choose from all....On this account you will find that few men of the greatest good sense and wisdom have allowed themselves to be buried in their own country." Thus exile, voluntary or involuntary, has always proved a double-edged sword, bringing both grief and wider opportunity.
The roll of renown authors who have either been forced into or have voluntarily chosen "exile" for a significant part or the bulk of their lives is legion. Examples include Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand, fleeing from the Russian Revolution, Czeslaw Milos在 and Joseph Conrad, fleeing from occupation of their native Poland by Russia or Germany, Latin American writers from Cesar Vallejo to Ruben Dario, voluntary expatriates such as V.S. Naipaul, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and countless others. Throughout the history of World Literature the same fate or choice has affected writers as diverse as Emile Zola, Dante, Ovid, Chu Yuan (Qu Yuan), Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Trotsky, Marx, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa'id) and Salman Rushdie.
THE EXILE ARCHETYPE IN WORLD LITERATURE
At the same time the condition of exile in various forms and connotations has been the subject matter of countless novels, stories and poems, to the extent that the character of the exile, or the condition of exile has taken on symbolic, even archetypal force in World Literature. Odysseus of Homer is a classical case of a hero driven from his home and homeland by forces beyond his control, either war, as in the "Iliad" or the invisible hand of fate or hostile gods such as Poseidon and Hera in the "Odyssey." Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's reconfiguration of the Odysseus theme in "Ulysses" have become archetypal exiles, either in the form of the "Wandering Jew" or the displaced and outcast artist.
The Archetype of the Exile thus may potentially becomes a powerful symbol emblematic of inherent contradictions in the human condition capable of embodying the inescapable fate of Everyman. Adam and Eve, the ultimate mother and father of us all were the first exiles. What is birth itself but an expulsion and forced exile from the infantile unconscious "paradise," provision and all-enveloping protection of the mothering womb? What are the pains, worries and responsibilities of adulthood and increasing old age but an exile from the "childhood," to which Thomas Wolfe reminds us we can't go home again, and from which we find ourselves farther and farther from our beginnings, more and more alone? What is death but a violent and involuntary forced exile from the world of the living and the persons and things we have loved? Who is not an exile?
Everyman, Freud would tall us, is an involuntary exile from the blissful sexual union of mother and son enforced through the Oedipus Complex. Everywoman, is a an implicit exile from the family of her mother and father which she is forced to leave behind to join that of her husband in an inescapably patriarchal world. Even the American Dream of fulfillment as a "reborn" free person in a new land casts a shadow of exile from a past or homeland displaced and disowned even by our aspirations.
THE EXILE THEME IN ANCIENT WORLD LITERATURE
In the Western Tradition exile has been a central theme since time immemorial. Ovid, author of the "Metamorphoses" and "Art of Love" (Ars Amorata) is often seen as the exemplary case of the writer in exile in classical antiquity. Once feted and celebrated in the highest court circles of Rome, at the end of his life he was banished by the Emperor Augustus to the farthest corner of the Empire, Pontus on the Black Sea, and died in loneliness. His exile produced the works "Tristia" (Sadness) and "Epistolae ex Ponto" (Letters from the Black Sea) in which he poured out his loneliness and sufferings.
Like Odysseus is the parallel case of Aeneas in Vergil's "Aeneid," who himself is exiled from his homeland Troy by the Greek victory enabled by Odysseus' Trojan Horse strategem. Aeneas then "wanders in strange lands" with his father and son, including Dido's Carthage, before realizing his destiny of founding a new homeland, the great empire of Rome. For some like Odysseus the dilemma of exile is to find the means of return to the lost homeland. For some, like Aeneas, the possibility of return does not exist, and for it must be subsituted the possibility of finding a new life, destiny, and homeland elsewhere.
Often the fate of exile is not the fate on a single individual only, but is bound up with the fate of entire nations or peoples. Vergil's epic involves the destruction of the Trojan nation and its re-birth as the greater nation of Rome. In the Bible, the Jewish people as a whole and indiviudal Jews suffer repeated conditions of exile, exodus and return. In Exodus the exile of the Jewish people in Egypt as slaves and their rescue by Moses is recounted, preceded by accounts of Joseph's involuntary exile to Egypt at the hands of his brothers, and followed by accounts of the Jewish people's wanderings in Sinai and the desert prior to entry to the "Promised Land" of Caanan, and the founding, like Aeneas, of a new land of destiny. Later the Jews suffer the Babylonian Exile, then return under the Persians.
Exile as punishment, just or unjust, is also a familiar theme of the literature of exile. Adam and Eve became the first exiles (if we do not count Satan) as the presumably just punishment of God for their transgression of His laws with regard to eating the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. The Prophets continuously warned the Jews of the just wrath of God in puniment for their inequity, of which exile of the whole people was an expected chastisement in the Old Testament. Suffering in exile, even from the time of Adam and Eve is also concomitantly seen as atonement for prior sins and inequity.
Exile and displacement played a prominent role in later Christian literature as well. Most of the Apostles such a Peter and Paul were martyred in exile. The great Medieval Christian epic, "Divina Commedia" or the "Divine Comedy" was composed in Dante's exile from his native Florence, a fate he also shared with many others in the discords between the Black Guelphs, White Guelphs and Ghibellines, such as Machiavelli, and even Petrarch, who was born in exile after his father's banishment and exile from Florence.
In other Ancient traditions exiles also abound. China celebrates the life and death of the archetypal Chinese literary exile, the poet Chu Yuan (Qu Yuan) author of the "Li Sao," or "Song of Everlasting Sorrow"
who was banished by the Emperor, like Ovid, to the extreme wilds of the empire in the south after being defamed by rival courtiers. The Chinese people celebrate the martyrdom of the great poet and patriot in the Dragon Boat Festival, in which offerings of "zongzi" are made to protect his body in the Miluo River, in which he drowned himself in despair during his exile. Siddhartha, Buddha, underwent voluntary exile in search of Enlightenment upon leaving his father's palace upon his first recognition of the existence of death and suffering in the world. Islam is a religion born in exile as Mohammad fled from Mecca to Medina to establish his following, the Ummah, ultimately to return from exile triumphant.
THE EXILE THEME IN MODERN WORLD LITERATURE
In modern World Literature cases of writers' exile abound. Emile Zola fled to London to escape unjust imprisonment for the "libel" of telling the truth in the Dreyfus Affair. Voltaire, imprisoned in the Bastille twice for his cutting criticisms of the despotic French King, church and corrupt aristocracy, escaped to London, where he penned his
complimentary "Letters Concerning the English Nation," praising many points of its superiority and desirability to his own. His "Candide" also features the meeting of four deposed kings in exile. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, famously in Reading Jail, for homosexual offenses committed with Lord Alfred Douglas, after which public scorn and pressure drove him to live in exile from England, protectively changing his public name to Sebastian Melmoth, after "Melmoth the Wanderer."
Scandal drove Lord Byron into exile, including public condemnation of his incestuous sexual affair with his half-sister, He took to wandering across the face of Europe, including residence in Geneva where he befriended Shelley and his wife Mary, author of "Frankenstein," fathering a child out of wedlock with Mary's sister before taking up the cause of Greek national independence from the Turks, a cause in which he fought and died in Greece.
Henry James and T.S. Eliot felt more at home in cosmopolitan London than in the parochial America of their birth, and both ultimately became British citizens. Ezra Pound also lived for long periods in London and Paris, until famously rejecting what he felt were corrupt Western money-driven democracies by siding with Mussolini in World War II, including making radio broadcasts for the Italian regime during the war, which brought about his arrest and forced repatriation to be charged with treason, had not the case been diverted by a convenient commitment to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. He remained in involuntary commitment working on his immortal "Cantos" until years later he was released, only to return to Italy. D.H. Lawrence, also went into voluntary exile, travelling to and writing of Australia, Mexico, Italy, France, Ceylon and the USA, rejecting the money-corrupted West and his native England where he was persecuted during World War I for his pacifist anti-war views and for his novels of sexual consciousness, exploration and liberation, most of which were suppressed as alleged "pornography," a fate he shared with James Joyce with regard to "Ulysses," another lifetime exile from his native land.
Hemingway joined the exodus of American writers of the "Lost Generation to Europe, where he in his classic "The Sun Also Rises" descrobed the bittersweet and deteriorating condition of the cultural exile:
"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all of your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around in cafes."
VLADIMIR NABOKOV----COSMOPOLITAN EXILE
The experience of exile is as crucial to Vladimir Nabokov own experience as a writer as it is to that of many of the characters in His novels. We have already explored his exiled flight from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, which he shared with his family from London to Berlin, and then again fleeing the Nazis to Paris and the United States. His most famous novel set in America is "Lolita" in which a middle-aged man, Humbert Humbert, who had previously lost his own teen-aged love, becomes enmeshed in an illicit passion for a pubescent teen-aged girl, which was subsequently made into a famous movie. Humbert, like the exiled Nabokov, arrives in a small college town where he rents a room with a widow, then falling perversely in love with the daughter Lolita he marries the mother to be near the girl, becoming her stepfather. He then molests the girl, taking over her life and going on the road with her to avoid police and social condemnation. Nabokov's protagonists are often homeless or exiled, and as such they often out of nostalgia for what they have lost in their lives, like Humbert, yield themselves to odd and perverse obsessions to deal with their loss and lonliness. Other of his novels, such as "Pale Fire," touching on homosexuality, and "Ada, or Ardor" dealing with incest follow similar dynamics.
CESAR VALLEJO---PERUVIAN AND INCAN EXILE & RUBEN DARIO, NICARAGUAAN FOUNDER OF MODERNISMO
Cesar Vallejo was born of a Spanish priest and an Incan-Indian mother in Peru, but spent most of his life in exile. His first book, "The Black Messengers" raises the inconsolable plaint of the Inca heritage of his maternal geneology. In 1920 he was imprisoned for political reasons, then abandoned his country never to return, living in Paris, Madrid and other European cities in poverty, or eking a scant living as a journalist or writer. He became a committed socialist, and his writing during the Spanish Civil War, such as "Tungsteno" expressed solidarity with the Anti-Fascist cause.
Ruben Dario (1867-1916) was one of the great poets of Latin American literature, often recognized as the father of "Modernismo" or Modernism in Hispanic Literature. Born in Nicaragua, his life as a writer and journalist took him on a journey of forced or voluntary exile through El Salvador, Chile, Buenos Aires, Peru, Mexico and Spain. In Spain he covered the Spanish-American War from the Spanish perspective and later served as Ambassador.
CZESLAW MILOSZ---FROM POLISH EXILE TO NOBEL LAUREATE
Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest Polish poets and in 1980 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I had the honor to know him personally when I studied in the Ph.D. Program at the University of California at Berkeley. His leftist views made him a target after the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and he fought in the Resistance. Under the Communist government he served as a diplomat until, like Orwell and many others being disillusioned by the excesses of Stalinism, he defected to France and then the USA. His book "The Captive Mind" was a criticism of Stalinism and the mentality that sustained it. One of Milosz's renown poems, "Fear-Dream" speaks in the voice of the exile, concluding with: "A refugee from fictitious States, who will want me here?"
V.S. NAIPAUL---VOICE OF UNIVERSAL CIVILIZATION
V.S. Naipaul, Trinidadian-Indian Nobel Prize winner left his home in Trinidad to take up studies in England, later becoming a novelist expressing the overseas Indian experience in "A House for Mr. Biswas" and author of global travel narratives, including visits to his ancestral India in "An Area of Darkess" and the experience of black slaves in exile in "The Middle Passage." In his Wriston lecture he called on the world's writers to be the voice of "Universal Civilization" in World Literature.
ADONIS (ALI AHMAD SA'ID)--SYRIAN POET IN EXILE
Alia Ahmand Sa'id, a socialist and revolutionary writing under the penname Adonis was imprisoned in Syria then took up permanent exile in Lebanon, where he became a leading poet through such works as "The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene" inspiring a school of modernist visionary poetry inspired by the tradition of the Sufi's. A controversial figure in Arabic poetry, he supported the Khomeini Islamic Revolution in Iran, while supporting elements of socialism, revolution and anarchy.
SPIRITUS MUNDI AND THE ARCHETYPE OF EXILE
The experience of exile informs also my own work, especially the Contemporary and Futurist Epic, Spiritus Mundi. Spiritus Mundi was composed entirely in Beijing, China, where I served as a Professor in the fields of World Literature, International Law and other subjects for twenty years during the development and rise of China. Its protagonist, Sartorius, literally circumnavigates the world, from New York to Beijing, the Maldives, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Iran, and Africa in his quest to bring global democracy and peace to the world through the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a globalized version of the EU European Parliament, as a new organ of the United Nations.
All literature carries exile with it. At least at a symbolic level, and often beyond, any true writer is more than an exile. He dwells in a dimension of imagination that, like the kingdom of Jesus, can never be of this world. He transcends geography. In some real, though inevitably partial sense, books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may lay on shelves or in memory. Nonetheless, the true artist, maker and creator cannot be fully exiled in any real sense: His hands are his homeland.
Even beyond this, it seems to me, the writer's relationship with Nation-States is even more pointed. A true writer of genius is symbolically and even actually a Sovereignty unto himself. He is a creator of worlds and of peoples and speaks, like Kings, for a multitude, worthy of the "Royal We." When a great writer like Goethe or Tolstoy meets with mere Kings, Prime Ministers, Presidents or heads of state, we feel that he speaks not as a subject of any state, but perhaps on a par with a Pope who may take diplomatic, moral and spiritual precedence over all of them. Shelley called writers and artists "the true legislators of the world" in the sense that through their imagination and persuasive force they shape the ultimate visions and values which politicians only decades later embody in new laws and constitutions when they have permeated the common consciousness of the people. When a Goethe or Tolstoy or any true writer meets with a mere Frederick the Great or Tsar, we know that it is they who are passing judgment on on those heads of state, and not vice-versa, and that like Quakers, it would be a perversion of truest decorum for the former to bow, or unhat themselves towards the latter.
For a fuller discussion of the concept of World Literature you are invited to look into the extended discussion in the new book Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard, one of the principal themes of which is the emergence and evolution of World Literature:
For Discussions on World Literature and n Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycrit...
Robert Sheppard
Editor-in-Chief
World Literature Forum
Author, Spiritus Mundi Novel
Author’s Blog:
http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpr...
Spiritus Mundi on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17... Mundi on Amazon, Book I: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGO
Spiritus Mundi, Book II: The Romance http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGM8BZG
Copyright Robert Sheppard 2013 All Rights Reserved
Unprecedented mobility is one of the 20th & 21st Centuries' most characteristic attributes, accellerated by the invention of the automobile, propeller planes and then the jet airliners that have brought the distant corners of the Earth ever closer together. Mass emigrations, immigration, refugees from war and political upheavals, displacements of populations and voluntary emigration, either in "pursuit of happiness" or in forced exile from persecution have reshaped nation-states and transformed the face of the globe. Writers and artists have often been at the forefront of such mass movements, sometimes arising from the "push factors" of political persecution resulting from their expression of their views in the face of hostile governments or societies, but also from the "pull factors" of attraction to the cosmopolitan centers of culture such as Paris, London or New York where they might hope to find inspiration, adventure, fellows in art, recognition, or a supportive environment.
Cosmopolitan centers have existed from earliest antiquity in such places as Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Baghdad and Chang'An in Tang China. The First Century Greek biographer Plutarch wrote to his young friend Menemechus who was grieving over recent exile from his native Sardis in modern Turkey, that "the exclusion from one city is the freedom to choose from all....On this account you will find that few men of the greatest good sense and wisdom have allowed themselves to be buried in their own country." Thus exile, voluntary or involuntary, has always proved a double-edged sword, bringing both grief and wider opportunity.
The roll of renown authors who have either been forced into or have voluntarily chosen "exile" for a significant part or the bulk of their lives is legion. Examples include Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand, fleeing from the Russian Revolution, Czeslaw Milos在 and Joseph Conrad, fleeing from occupation of their native Poland by Russia or Germany, Latin American writers from Cesar Vallejo to Ruben Dario, voluntary expatriates such as V.S. Naipaul, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and countless others. Throughout the history of World Literature the same fate or choice has affected writers as diverse as Emile Zola, Dante, Ovid, Chu Yuan (Qu Yuan), Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Trotsky, Marx, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa'id) and Salman Rushdie.
THE EXILE ARCHETYPE IN WORLD LITERATURE
At the same time the condition of exile in various forms and connotations has been the subject matter of countless novels, stories and poems, to the extent that the character of the exile, or the condition of exile has taken on symbolic, even archetypal force in World Literature. Odysseus of Homer is a classical case of a hero driven from his home and homeland by forces beyond his control, either war, as in the "Iliad" or the invisible hand of fate or hostile gods such as Poseidon and Hera in the "Odyssey." Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's reconfiguration of the Odysseus theme in "Ulysses" have become archetypal exiles, either in the form of the "Wandering Jew" or the displaced and outcast artist.
The Archetype of the Exile thus may potentially becomes a powerful symbol emblematic of inherent contradictions in the human condition capable of embodying the inescapable fate of Everyman. Adam and Eve, the ultimate mother and father of us all were the first exiles. What is birth itself but an expulsion and forced exile from the infantile unconscious "paradise," provision and all-enveloping protection of the mothering womb? What are the pains, worries and responsibilities of adulthood and increasing old age but an exile from the "childhood," to which Thomas Wolfe reminds us we can't go home again, and from which we find ourselves farther and farther from our beginnings, more and more alone? What is death but a violent and involuntary forced exile from the world of the living and the persons and things we have loved? Who is not an exile?
Everyman, Freud would tall us, is an involuntary exile from the blissful sexual union of mother and son enforced through the Oedipus Complex. Everywoman, is a an implicit exile from the family of her mother and father which she is forced to leave behind to join that of her husband in an inescapably patriarchal world. Even the American Dream of fulfillment as a "reborn" free person in a new land casts a shadow of exile from a past or homeland displaced and disowned even by our aspirations.
THE EXILE THEME IN ANCIENT WORLD LITERATURE
In the Western Tradition exile has been a central theme since time immemorial. Ovid, author of the "Metamorphoses" and "Art of Love" (Ars Amorata) is often seen as the exemplary case of the writer in exile in classical antiquity. Once feted and celebrated in the highest court circles of Rome, at the end of his life he was banished by the Emperor Augustus to the farthest corner of the Empire, Pontus on the Black Sea, and died in loneliness. His exile produced the works "Tristia" (Sadness) and "Epistolae ex Ponto" (Letters from the Black Sea) in which he poured out his loneliness and sufferings.
Like Odysseus is the parallel case of Aeneas in Vergil's "Aeneid," who himself is exiled from his homeland Troy by the Greek victory enabled by Odysseus' Trojan Horse strategem. Aeneas then "wanders in strange lands" with his father and son, including Dido's Carthage, before realizing his destiny of founding a new homeland, the great empire of Rome. For some like Odysseus the dilemma of exile is to find the means of return to the lost homeland. For some, like Aeneas, the possibility of return does not exist, and for it must be subsituted the possibility of finding a new life, destiny, and homeland elsewhere.
Often the fate of exile is not the fate on a single individual only, but is bound up with the fate of entire nations or peoples. Vergil's epic involves the destruction of the Trojan nation and its re-birth as the greater nation of Rome. In the Bible, the Jewish people as a whole and indiviudal Jews suffer repeated conditions of exile, exodus and return. In Exodus the exile of the Jewish people in Egypt as slaves and their rescue by Moses is recounted, preceded by accounts of Joseph's involuntary exile to Egypt at the hands of his brothers, and followed by accounts of the Jewish people's wanderings in Sinai and the desert prior to entry to the "Promised Land" of Caanan, and the founding, like Aeneas, of a new land of destiny. Later the Jews suffer the Babylonian Exile, then return under the Persians.
Exile as punishment, just or unjust, is also a familiar theme of the literature of exile. Adam and Eve became the first exiles (if we do not count Satan) as the presumably just punishment of God for their transgression of His laws with regard to eating the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. The Prophets continuously warned the Jews of the just wrath of God in puniment for their inequity, of which exile of the whole people was an expected chastisement in the Old Testament. Suffering in exile, even from the time of Adam and Eve is also concomitantly seen as atonement for prior sins and inequity.
Exile and displacement played a prominent role in later Christian literature as well. Most of the Apostles such a Peter and Paul were martyred in exile. The great Medieval Christian epic, "Divina Commedia" or the "Divine Comedy" was composed in Dante's exile from his native Florence, a fate he also shared with many others in the discords between the Black Guelphs, White Guelphs and Ghibellines, such as Machiavelli, and even Petrarch, who was born in exile after his father's banishment and exile from Florence.
In other Ancient traditions exiles also abound. China celebrates the life and death of the archetypal Chinese literary exile, the poet Chu Yuan (Qu Yuan) author of the "Li Sao," or "Song of Everlasting Sorrow"
who was banished by the Emperor, like Ovid, to the extreme wilds of the empire in the south after being defamed by rival courtiers. The Chinese people celebrate the martyrdom of the great poet and patriot in the Dragon Boat Festival, in which offerings of "zongzi" are made to protect his body in the Miluo River, in which he drowned himself in despair during his exile. Siddhartha, Buddha, underwent voluntary exile in search of Enlightenment upon leaving his father's palace upon his first recognition of the existence of death and suffering in the world. Islam is a religion born in exile as Mohammad fled from Mecca to Medina to establish his following, the Ummah, ultimately to return from exile triumphant.
THE EXILE THEME IN MODERN WORLD LITERATURE
In modern World Literature cases of writers' exile abound. Emile Zola fled to London to escape unjust imprisonment for the "libel" of telling the truth in the Dreyfus Affair. Voltaire, imprisoned in the Bastille twice for his cutting criticisms of the despotic French King, church and corrupt aristocracy, escaped to London, where he penned his
complimentary "Letters Concerning the English Nation," praising many points of its superiority and desirability to his own. His "Candide" also features the meeting of four deposed kings in exile. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, famously in Reading Jail, for homosexual offenses committed with Lord Alfred Douglas, after which public scorn and pressure drove him to live in exile from England, protectively changing his public name to Sebastian Melmoth, after "Melmoth the Wanderer."
Scandal drove Lord Byron into exile, including public condemnation of his incestuous sexual affair with his half-sister, He took to wandering across the face of Europe, including residence in Geneva where he befriended Shelley and his wife Mary, author of "Frankenstein," fathering a child out of wedlock with Mary's sister before taking up the cause of Greek national independence from the Turks, a cause in which he fought and died in Greece.
Henry James and T.S. Eliot felt more at home in cosmopolitan London than in the parochial America of their birth, and both ultimately became British citizens. Ezra Pound also lived for long periods in London and Paris, until famously rejecting what he felt were corrupt Western money-driven democracies by siding with Mussolini in World War II, including making radio broadcasts for the Italian regime during the war, which brought about his arrest and forced repatriation to be charged with treason, had not the case been diverted by a convenient commitment to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. He remained in involuntary commitment working on his immortal "Cantos" until years later he was released, only to return to Italy. D.H. Lawrence, also went into voluntary exile, travelling to and writing of Australia, Mexico, Italy, France, Ceylon and the USA, rejecting the money-corrupted West and his native England where he was persecuted during World War I for his pacifist anti-war views and for his novels of sexual consciousness, exploration and liberation, most of which were suppressed as alleged "pornography," a fate he shared with James Joyce with regard to "Ulysses," another lifetime exile from his native land.
Hemingway joined the exodus of American writers of the "Lost Generation to Europe, where he in his classic "The Sun Also Rises" descrobed the bittersweet and deteriorating condition of the cultural exile:
"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all of your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around in cafes."
VLADIMIR NABOKOV----COSMOPOLITAN EXILE
The experience of exile is as crucial to Vladimir Nabokov own experience as a writer as it is to that of many of the characters in His novels. We have already explored his exiled flight from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, which he shared with his family from London to Berlin, and then again fleeing the Nazis to Paris and the United States. His most famous novel set in America is "Lolita" in which a middle-aged man, Humbert Humbert, who had previously lost his own teen-aged love, becomes enmeshed in an illicit passion for a pubescent teen-aged girl, which was subsequently made into a famous movie. Humbert, like the exiled Nabokov, arrives in a small college town where he rents a room with a widow, then falling perversely in love with the daughter Lolita he marries the mother to be near the girl, becoming her stepfather. He then molests the girl, taking over her life and going on the road with her to avoid police and social condemnation. Nabokov's protagonists are often homeless or exiled, and as such they often out of nostalgia for what they have lost in their lives, like Humbert, yield themselves to odd and perverse obsessions to deal with their loss and lonliness. Other of his novels, such as "Pale Fire," touching on homosexuality, and "Ada, or Ardor" dealing with incest follow similar dynamics.
CESAR VALLEJO---PERUVIAN AND INCAN EXILE & RUBEN DARIO, NICARAGUAAN FOUNDER OF MODERNISMO
Cesar Vallejo was born of a Spanish priest and an Incan-Indian mother in Peru, but spent most of his life in exile. His first book, "The Black Messengers" raises the inconsolable plaint of the Inca heritage of his maternal geneology. In 1920 he was imprisoned for political reasons, then abandoned his country never to return, living in Paris, Madrid and other European cities in poverty, or eking a scant living as a journalist or writer. He became a committed socialist, and his writing during the Spanish Civil War, such as "Tungsteno" expressed solidarity with the Anti-Fascist cause.
Ruben Dario (1867-1916) was one of the great poets of Latin American literature, often recognized as the father of "Modernismo" or Modernism in Hispanic Literature. Born in Nicaragua, his life as a writer and journalist took him on a journey of forced or voluntary exile through El Salvador, Chile, Buenos Aires, Peru, Mexico and Spain. In Spain he covered the Spanish-American War from the Spanish perspective and later served as Ambassador.
CZESLAW MILOSZ---FROM POLISH EXILE TO NOBEL LAUREATE
Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest Polish poets and in 1980 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I had the honor to know him personally when I studied in the Ph.D. Program at the University of California at Berkeley. His leftist views made him a target after the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and he fought in the Resistance. Under the Communist government he served as a diplomat until, like Orwell and many others being disillusioned by the excesses of Stalinism, he defected to France and then the USA. His book "The Captive Mind" was a criticism of Stalinism and the mentality that sustained it. One of Milosz's renown poems, "Fear-Dream" speaks in the voice of the exile, concluding with: "A refugee from fictitious States, who will want me here?"
V.S. NAIPAUL---VOICE OF UNIVERSAL CIVILIZATION
V.S. Naipaul, Trinidadian-Indian Nobel Prize winner left his home in Trinidad to take up studies in England, later becoming a novelist expressing the overseas Indian experience in "A House for Mr. Biswas" and author of global travel narratives, including visits to his ancestral India in "An Area of Darkess" and the experience of black slaves in exile in "The Middle Passage." In his Wriston lecture he called on the world's writers to be the voice of "Universal Civilization" in World Literature.
ADONIS (ALI AHMAD SA'ID)--SYRIAN POET IN EXILE
Alia Ahmand Sa'id, a socialist and revolutionary writing under the penname Adonis was imprisoned in Syria then took up permanent exile in Lebanon, where he became a leading poet through such works as "The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene" inspiring a school of modernist visionary poetry inspired by the tradition of the Sufi's. A controversial figure in Arabic poetry, he supported the Khomeini Islamic Revolution in Iran, while supporting elements of socialism, revolution and anarchy.
SPIRITUS MUNDI AND THE ARCHETYPE OF EXILE
The experience of exile informs also my own work, especially the Contemporary and Futurist Epic, Spiritus Mundi. Spiritus Mundi was composed entirely in Beijing, China, where I served as a Professor in the fields of World Literature, International Law and other subjects for twenty years during the development and rise of China. Its protagonist, Sartorius, literally circumnavigates the world, from New York to Beijing, the Maldives, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Iran, and Africa in his quest to bring global democracy and peace to the world through the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a globalized version of the EU European Parliament, as a new organ of the United Nations.
All literature carries exile with it. At least at a symbolic level, and often beyond, any true writer is more than an exile. He dwells in a dimension of imagination that, like the kingdom of Jesus, can never be of this world. He transcends geography. In some real, though inevitably partial sense, books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may lay on shelves or in memory. Nonetheless, the true artist, maker and creator cannot be fully exiled in any real sense: His hands are his homeland.
Even beyond this, it seems to me, the writer's relationship with Nation-States is even more pointed. A true writer of genius is symbolically and even actually a Sovereignty unto himself. He is a creator of worlds and of peoples and speaks, like Kings, for a multitude, worthy of the "Royal We." When a great writer like Goethe or Tolstoy meets with mere Kings, Prime Ministers, Presidents or heads of state, we feel that he speaks not as a subject of any state, but perhaps on a par with a Pope who may take diplomatic, moral and spiritual precedence over all of them. Shelley called writers and artists "the true legislators of the world" in the sense that through their imagination and persuasive force they shape the ultimate visions and values which politicians only decades later embody in new laws and constitutions when they have permeated the common consciousness of the people. When a Goethe or Tolstoy or any true writer meets with a mere Frederick the Great or Tsar, we know that it is they who are passing judgment on on those heads of state, and not vice-versa, and that like Quakers, it would be a perversion of truest decorum for the former to bow, or unhat themselves towards the latter.
For a fuller discussion of the concept of World Literature you are invited to look into the extended discussion in the new book Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard, one of the principal themes of which is the emergence and evolution of World Literature:
For Discussions on World Literature and n Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycrit...
Robert Sheppard
Editor-in-Chief
World Literature Forum
Author, Spiritus Mundi Novel
Author’s Blog:
http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpr...
Spiritus Mundi on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17... Mundi on Amazon, Book I: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGO
Spiritus Mundi, Book II: The Romance http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGM8BZG
Copyright Robert Sheppard 2013 All Rights Reserved
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