Continuation of "A TRANSLATION MEMOIR: 45 YEARS WITH CESAR VALLEJO"Dr. Clayton Eshleman
In this poem, Vallejo was claiming that he desired to love, and that his desire for desire led him to imagine all sorts of “interhuman” acts he would have liked to perform, like kissing a singer’s muffler, or kissing a deaf man on his cranial murmur. He wanted to help everyone achieve his goal, no matter what it was, even to help the killer kill—and he wanted to be kind to himself in everything. These were thoughts that, had I had them myself, I would have either dismissed or so immediately repressed that they would have evaporated. But now I realized that there was a whole wailing cathedral of desires, half-desires, mad-desires, anti-desires, all of which, in the Vallejo poem, seemed caught on the edge of no-desire. And if so, what made him reach desiring desire? The need to flee his body? A need to enter his body? To enter another body? I did not know what he meant, but trying to read him made me feel that I was in the presence of a mile-thick spirit. So I kept at it.
In the afternoon I would ride my motorcycle downtown and work on translations in the Yorunomado coffee-shop. I would always sit by the carp pond on the patio. There I discovered the following words of Vallejo: “And where is the other flank of this cry of pain if, to estimate it as a whole, it breaks now from the bed of a man?” I saw Vallejo in a birth bed in that line, not knowing how to give birth, which indicated to me a totally other realization, that artistic bearing and fruition were physical as well as mental, a matter of one’s total energy. I was learning that I had to become a physical traveler as well as a mental one. For most of 1963 and the first half of 1964, everything I saw and felt clustered about this feeling; it seemed to be in a phrase from the I Ching, “the darkening of the light,” as well as in the Kyoto sky, which was gray and overcast yet mysteriously luminous.
As I struggled to get Vallejo’s involuted Spanish into English, I increasingly had the feeling that I was struggling with a man more than with a text, and that this struggle was a matter of my becoming or failing to become a poet. The man I was struggling with did not want his words changed from one language to another. I realized that in working on Vallejo’s Poemas humanos I had ceased to be what I was before coming to Kyoto, that I had a glimpse now of another life, a life I was to create rather than to be given, and that this other man I was struggling with was the old Clayton who was resisting change. The old Clayton wanted to continue living in his white Presbyterian world of “light”—not really light, but the “light” of man associated with day/clarity/good and woman associated with night/opaqueness/bad. The darkness that was beginning to make itself felt in my sensibility could be viewed as the breaking up of that “light.”
In the last half of the only poem I completed to any satisfaction while living in Japan, I envisioned myself as a kind of angelless Jacob wrestling with a figure from an alien alphabet, trying to take its meaning from him. I lose the struggle and find myself on a seppuku platform in medieval Japan, being condemned by Vallejo (now playing the role of a “karo,” or overlord) to disembowel myself. I do so, cutting my ties to the “given life,” and releasing a visionary figure of the imagination, named Yorunomado (in honor of my working place), who had to that point been chained to an altar in my solar plexus. In early 1964, the fruit of my struggle with Vallejo was not a successful linguistic translation but an imaginative advance in which a third figure had emerged from my intercourse with the text. Yorunomado then became my guide in the ten-year process of developing a “creative life,” recorded in my book-length poem, Coils (1973).
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