Born on a Day When God Was Ill

The myth of César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet and hero of the avant-garde, precedes him. He’s the ailing hero of Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain (1984; translation 2010), a mystery novel in which a larger-than-life writer is attacked by a sudden bout of hiccups in Paris. He is also the poet whom Che Guevara recited on the secret recordings he sent to his family in 1967, shortly before his death, reading Vallejo’s The Black Heralds (1919) into a tape recorder from a battlefield in Congo. Vallejo has influenced the absurdist language of Argentine novelist César Aira, the defiant and irreverent verses of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, and the political ballads of Nicaraguan writer and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal. He is perhaps one of Latin America’s most inventive, cosmopolitan, and subversive poets. This month, a new, slim volume of his selected poetry, The Eternal Dice (New Directions, 2025), faithfully translated by Margaret Jull Costa, introduces English readers to the work that helped solidify Vallejo’s elusive mythology and exemplifies his sardonic style. 

Vallejo’s fiercely worldly poetry is somewhat at odds with his origins. He was born in 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, a rural hamlet isolated by the Andes in Northern Peru. He was the youngest of eleven children in a humble Roman Catholic family. His parents were already middle-aged by the time he was born, a fact of which Vallejo seems painfully aware in his first poetry collection, The Black Heralds. (He describes his father, a local dignitary, as a “peaceful” man with an “august countenance” taking naps and pondering Biblical imagery.) Although raised with strong Christian values—he was expected to become a priest—Vallejo’s life was marked by what he perceived as Godlessness and misfortune. He was in and out of school, often dropping out to aid his family. He tried to study literature at the university in coastal Trujillo, the closest city to Santiago de Chuco, but eventually ended up on sugar and coal plantations tutoring the children of wealthy landowners. There, he witnessed the brutal oppression of workers and came into contact with the region’s early expressions of socialism and communism. He started to read Marx, Engels, and Maxim Gorky. In 1915, Vallejo moved to Lima and became involved with the local world of poets, writers, and bohemian layabouts. During these years, he published his first poems and had a scandalous affair with a woman whom he refused to marry. Shortly after, while visiting his hometown, tragedy struck: during a riot, a policeman who resented Vallejo’s politics wrongfully accused him of killing a man. The poet left for Paris after his release from jail, never to return. 

In The Black Heralds, Vallejo constantly grapples with the contradiction between his Catholic education and his experience of the world at hand. Throughout, he is torn between the aspirations of a religious cosmogony and the loss of meaning that, by the time he was writing, could no longer be contained by Christianity. In the poem “The Winning Ticket,” he reimagines the divine as a “bohemian god,” a lottery seller, who cries into the void on the streets of some lost Peruvian city. In the blasphemous “Final Discharge,” the Eucharist is defined by its impossibility—an eternally delayed act, marked by starving children, elbows on the table, and the menacing presence of death. Unable to transcend his need for God, Vallejo makes his sacrilege self-evident. He mocks the trinity, insurrection, and almightiness, and instead urges his Lord: “can’t you do something about death, / about boundaries, about things ending?”

Part of what makes The Black Heralds such a radical debut is the remarkable overlap between its God-is-dead message and its playful form. While Vallejo is working through a new cosmology in a Godless world, he is also attempting to break with the Latin American modernist tradition that he inherited. In a voice that’s both deeply ironic and aware of its misery—as if Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean had a sense of humor—Vallejo plays with sounds and cacophony, accuses God with “el dedo deicida” (“the deicidal finger”), changes Mary, the one and only, for a succession of common “Marías,” and repeats in “Espergesia” that he “was born on a day / when God was ill.” He often deploys the Spanish language in oblique and uncertain ways that, to the native reader, sound both familiar and relatively strange. Jull Costa’s often colloquial English helps clarify what some of these rarer words mean, such as her rendering of the agricultural Spanish term “segar” as “cut,” the heraldic “blasones” as “honors,” and the medical word “auscultar” as “ponders.”

By the 1920s, Latin American poetry had found its new prophet in Rubén Darío. A Nicaraguan who prioritized French modernism over the Spanish tradition of the region, Darío wrote harmonious and somewhat baroque odes with a pompous tone. By contrast, Vallejo was attracted to the decadence and “holy elasticity of Symbolism” he found in the likes of Paul Verlaine and Walt Whitman. The Black Heralds starts with the titular poem, a dark take on Darío’s fanciful Heralds, a grandiose composition in which Darío evokes the muses of history. With what can only be described as a punk attitude, Vallejo proposes a reversal, a denial of the aristocratic values that Darío professed, and instead becomes closer to the misery of the workingman’s plight, almost like a blues: 

There are blows in life so hard . . . I don’t know!
Blows that feel like God’s loathing; as if, beneath those blows,
the undertow of everything we’ve suffered
formed pools of pain in the soul . . . I don’t know!

Gone are the days of Darío’s fanciful flowers, his muses, his swans. Gone is the world of Vallejo’s fathers, too, and the cohesive structure within which Christianity, God, and Beauty worked together as one. Trilce (1922), Vallejo’s second collection, which he partially wrote from jail in Peru, takes this expression even further. Through radical experimentation with language in an even more directly avant-garde gesture, Vallejo tried to conceive the earth from scratch—now denying not only his former Gods, but the structures of language itself. In Trilce I (not included in Jull Costa’s selection), Vallejo reimagines the coastal landscape of Peru and its emergence on earth as having been plagued with feces, created by the power of a presumed God “who’s making all that racket” and where “the guano, the simple fecapital ponk / a brackish gannet / toasts unintentionally, / in the insular heart, to each hyaloid / squall.” According to scholar Jean Franco, author of The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence (1976), a seminal work on Vallejo, this scene rewrites Genesis as full of abject matter, as if warning us that the job of Trilce is to shake up the lowest part of language and human life until reaching an “imperturbable / on the fatal balance line.” 

The rest of Trilce is similarly bewildering. It’s a book suffused by strange orthography, syntax, and punctuation, mostly in poems that are not included in Jull Costa’s translation, such as “XX,” which includes the words “williamsthesecondary” and finishes with the strangely broken-up “an itty bi-/.t.” It also contains words from science and technical progress that are more reminiscent of Italian and Russian futurism than anything in Vallejo’s contemporaries, such as the poem “XXIII,” in which a mother feeding her family asks: “in which alveolus / might remain, on what capillary sprout, / a certain crumb that today perplexed in my throath / doesn’t want to go down.” Vallejo’s poetry at this time is also full of invented and ambiguous words (such as Trilce, about which there are endless theories) and uses common Spanish vocabulary in a way that can distress and shock the reader, as if the poet was trying to sever himself from language. At the end of the poem “LXVIII,” for example, when the reader expects to read “a toda asta” (“at full mast”), Vallejo first changes the repetition of the letter a, perhaps honoring the synalepha, and subsequently assigns each letter to a single verse, playing with the concrete aspect of the poem:

a 
t 
f 
u
l 
m 
a  
s 
T

In Trilce, time is inverted, and so is mathematical logic when, for example, he reframes the scene of birth—possibly, as Jull Costa explains, inspired by the pregnancy of Otilia, the woman he refused to marry. Here, life, which traditional poetry would have plagued with Christological imagery, is reduced to a numerical pattern, an almost Kabbalistic sequence from which the reader is supposed to subtract oblique meaning: 

Ten months hitch on to the next ten, 
and another ten beyond.
Two at least remain in diapers.
And the three months of absence. 
And the nine of gestation.

Although the poems of this selection are beautifully translated and indicate a continuum between some themes already present in The Black Heralds—orphanhood, loss, mourning for a family and God, a taste for sacrilege—there may be too few of them to do Trilce justice. It is a pity to forgo the weirdness of verses such as “I sdrive to dddeflect at a blow the blow” to talk about sex, or of neologisms such as “odumodneurtse!” (a reversal of the Spanish “estruendo mundo,” or “thunder world”), or of Vallejo’s sensual appreciation of the Venus de Milo, a symbol of Western beauty that he values precisely because of its “cut-off, increate / arms” and its refusal of symmetry that, the poet manifests, can only give way for a new type of beauty (“the new odd number / potent with orphanhood!”). 

Once in Europe in 1923, Vallejo became entrenched in an artistic scene, and his poetry—although always faithful to formal experimentation—became more directly political. As a struggling artist in Paris, he befriended Juan Gris, the Spanish cubist painter, and Vicente Huidobro, the Chilean poet with whom, according to Jean Franco, he would later travel to Spain. During this time, Vallejo cofounded his own small magazine, Favorables - Paris - Poema, and expressed his ambivalence toward Surrealism (most notably through his parodic prose poem “The Discovery of Life,” which mocks and exaggerates the classic structure of Surrealist proclamations, portraying them as naïve). He saw Isadora Duncan dance barefoot onstage and became fascinated by the work of French pianist Erik Satie. “In Satie,” Vallejo wrote after meeting him, “one sees the way music was come to be a lofty, pure art . . . Perhaps this is the true path—to kill art by liberating it. Let nobody be an artist.”

Most important for his poetic production, however, was Vallejo’s involvement with local socialists and with the literary and artistic controversies of the time. The question “What should socialist art be?” was on everyone’s tongue, and Vallejo was no exception. But contrary to some positions that privileged committed art over formalism, he stayed true to his experimental self. In a 1927 polemic against Diego Rivera, written for Juan Carlos Mariátegui’s Peruvian magazine Amauta, he spoke against political dogma overtaking the artist’s activity: “Theories, in general, embarrass and prevent creation . . . [the artist] has to arouse, in a dark, subconscious, almost animal manner the political anatomy of man.”

Vallejo’s poetry of this period practiced what he preached. Instead of creating empty odes to the revolution, he composed most of his Human Poems (1939), in which satire and fiercely socialist ideals overlap with formal experimentation, although more shyly than in the Trilce years. In “Height and Hairs,” the poet singles out man against automatization through a series of aggressive questions and exclamations that are supposed to awaken the reader-worker in the midst of the city’s machinery, in a fashion that foresaw Brecht’s distancing effect. “Who doesn’t have lunch and take the tram . . . Who isn’t called Carlos or some other name?” the poet asks, and responds: “Me, and all I did was simply to be born! / Me, and all I did was simply to be born!” In “Considering cooly, impartially,” he revisits capital gain and Marx’s mathematical model of exploitation through the image of a crying worker, for whose boss “the diagram of time / is a constant diorama of his medals.” Even in the poems that sound more directly like a cry for war, such as “The Nine Monsters,” Vallejo maintains an interest in subverting verse, meaning, and using the language of math, now for a revolutionary purpose.

During these years, Vallejo visited the Soviet Union three times and composed his colorful diary Rusia en 1931, in which he approvingly observes the Soviet state apparatus but slowly becomes critical of some Stalinist policies. He drinks with Futurists and Formalists and goes to see Eisenstein’s The General Line with Vladamir Mayakovsky. It is hard to date Human Poems exactly, since the collection was published posthumously and perhaps showcases a wide scope of Vallejo’s changing experiences and attitudes after his visit to the Soviet Union. “The Unfortunates,” for example, seems to have been written in a later stage of Vallejo’s political awakening. Here, he replaces the wandering pain of his earlier poetry with a hopeful dialogue to himself and his peers, promising that the revolution, obliquely named as “the day,” is about to come. In a movement more or less typical for a certain type of Latin American, he seems to go as far as replacing his childhood Christian values for socialism:

The day is about to come; 
the morning, the sea, the meteor, all 
are in hot pursuit of your tiredness, flags flying 
and because of your classic pride, the hyenas, 
count their steps at donkey pace, 
the baker, she’s thinking about you, 
the butcher’s thinking about you, stroking 
his cleaver in which lie imprisoned
steel and iron and metal; never forget
that during mass there are no friends. 
The day is about to come, put on the sun.

By the time he returned from his last trip to Russia, in 1932, Vallejo had been singled out by the French police for his political activities. He was eventually expelled from France and fled to Madrid, where he joined the Communist Party, befriended Federico García Lorca, and became a fierce defender of the Republican cause. As the Peruvian delegate at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, he gave a speech against the fascist threat, arguing that “In the Spanish people, America regards its own extraordinary destiny within human history . . . today she is saving the entire world from nothingness.” By the end of his life, living between France and Spain, he penned Spain, Remove This Cup from Me (1939), one of the most moving tributes to Catalunya recorded by a Latin American. Its titular poem is addressed to the “children of the world,” warning against the catastrophic consequences of Spain, and the Spanish language at large, “falling” under the rule of the Falangists. This poem is haunted by an apocalyptic sense of loss, a kind of desperate tribute to a country soon to be in shambles, and perhaps a language that he had perennially battled both with and against. 

When the war broke out, he returned to Paris one last time, fell ill and, in true Christian fashion, died on Good Friday, at age forty-six. This, too, had been contained in his poetry. In another playful, lyrical stanza that inverts and reinvents time, Vallejo foresaw this very fate:

I’ll die in Paris in a shower of rain,
a day I already hold in my memory.
I’ll die in Paris—and I’m in no hurry— 
perhaps on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.