Continuation of "A TRANSLATION MEMOIR: 45 YEARS WITH CESAR VALLEJO"Dr. Clayton Eshleman
Instead of shaping up as I worked along, the whole project was becoming a nightmare. I was having dreams in which Vallejo’s corpse, with muddy shoes, was laid out in bed between Barbara and myself. By this time I had gotten in touch with Georgette Vallejo and explained that I did not see how I could complete the translation effectively unless I came to Peru and examined the worksheets. I hired a lawyer to draw up a contract, and mailed it to her along with samples from my fourth draft. I received one reply from her that did not respond to any of my requests. But I was determined to go, and with Barbara several months pregnant, and a few hundred dollars, we left in August. Once in Lima, I got a job editing a new bilingual literary magazines to be called Quena from the Peruvian North American Cultural Institute and we moved into a small apartment next to a grade school playground on Domingo Orue in the Miraflores district.
Georgette Vallejo was a small, wiry middle-class French woman in her late sixties. Supported by the Peruvian government, she lived rather spartanly, yet not uncomfortably, in an apartment also in Miraflores appointed with pre-Incan pottery and weavings. I was in a very delicate position with her, because I not only needed to see the first edition and the worksheets, but also, on the basis of my fourth draft, needed her permission to be able to get a publishing contract. I had not been in her apartment for fifteen minutes when she told me that my translations were full of “howlers,” that Vallejo was untranslatable (she was at this time working on a French translation of his poetry), and that neither the first edition nor the worksheets were available to be seen.
The months that followed were stressful and cheerless. Because I was working for the Institute (which turned out to be attached to the American Embassy in Lima), most of the Peruvian writers and critics that I met thought I was an American spy. I only realized whom I was working for when I turned in the 300-page manuscript for the first issue of Quena to my boss at the Institute. He told me that the translations of the poems of Javier Heraud could not be published in the magazine because, although they were not political themselves, Heraud after visiting Cuba had returned to Peru and after joining a guerrilla movement in the jungle had been killed by the army. Because his name was linked with Cuba and revolution, my boss told me, the Institute did not want to be involved. I refused to take the translations out of the manuscript and was fired.
One bright spot in the situation was that at the end of 1965 I met Maureen Ahern, an American with a PhD from San Marcos University, who was then married and living with her family on a chicken farm in Cieneguilla, about twenty miles outside of Lima. Maureen agreed to read through my sixth and seventh drafts of the manuscript with me, so I began spending a full day each week at her place, riding out and back with her husband who worked in Lima. While this arrangement for the most part worked out very well, a near disaster occurred in March, a week or so after my son Matthew was born. The night that I was to go to Maureen’s I stayed home because her husband was unavailable. Around 9 PM, Barbara began to bleed from her vagina, and after attempting unsuccessfully to staunch the flow I realized that if I did not get her into a hospital immediately she was going to bleed to death. I raced out of our apartment and ran through the halls of the building across the street screaming for help. A door opened, a doctor came out, we bundled her into the back of his Volkswagen, and drove to the nearest clinic. We saved her life, barely. Had I gone to Cieneguilla that evening...
| <<Page 3 | >>Page 5 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||