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César
Vallejo
(1892 - 1938)
César Vallejo was born in Santiago de
Chuco, Perú, in 1892, the youngest of eleven children. His
father wanted him to become a priest as were César's two
grandfathers, but he expressed no interest in a religious
vocation.
Vallejo began writing poetry in 1913; by
1918 he had his first book of poems published,
Los heraldos
negros. Two years later he was unjustly imprisoned for a period
of four months. In 1922 he published
Trilce, then a year later
some prose pieces as well, and that he year he left Peru for
Paris.
In 1928 he traveled to Russia because he
believed that Communism could deliver social justice to the
world. His writing from 1923 until his death strongly identifies
with the plight of a suffering humanity. The next year he spent
traveling back and forth between Paris and Spain.
In 1931 he published his novel
Tugsteno,
the same year he joined the Congress of Antifascist Writers in
Madrid.
Vallejo died in Paris of an intestinal
infection in 1938. His Poemas humanos was published a year after
his death. Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia translated
the Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo, which won the
1979 National Book Award.
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The Black Heralds
Book Description
Throughout his life, Cesar
Vallejo (1892--1938) focused on human suffering and the
isolation of people victimized by inexplicable forces. One of
the great Spanish language poets, he merged radical politics and
language consciousness, resulting in the first examples of a
truly new world poetry.
The Black Heralds is
Vallejo's first book and contains a wide range of poems, from
love sonnets in which he struggles to free his erotic life from
the bounds of Spanish Catholicism to the linguistically
inventive sequence, "Imperial Nostalgias," where he parodies
with considerable savagery the pastoral romanticism of Indian
and rural life.
In this bilingual volume,
translator Rebecca Seiferle attempts to undo the "colonization"
of Vallejo in other translations. As Seiferle writes in her
introduction: "Reading and translating Vallejo has been a long
process of trying to meet him on his own terms, to discover what
those terms were within the contexts of his particular time and,
finally, taking his word for it."
from "Our Bread"
And in this frigid hour, when the earth
smells of human dust and is so sad,
I want to knock on every door
and beg forgiveness of I don't know whom,
and bake bits of fresh bread for him,
here, in the oven of my heart...! |
Cesar Vallejo (1892--1938)
was born in Peru to a family of mixed Spanish and native
descent. He wrote two books of poetry, the second of which was
partly composed during a short prison term. Disappointed by the
reception of his poetry in his own country, Vallejo moved to
Paris, where he became active in Marxist politics and the
antifascist campaign in Spain, while publishing essays,
political articles, a play, and short stories. Vallejo died in
Paris, in utter poverty, on the day Franco's armies entered
Madrid.
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Paris, October 1936
From all of this
I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench
I go away, from my pants,
from my great
situation, from my actions,
from my number
split side to side,
from all of this
I am the only one who leaves.
From the Champs
Elysées or as the strange
alley of the
Moon makes a turn,
my death goes
away, my cradle leaves,
and, surrounded
by people, alone, cut loose,
my human
resemblance turns around
and dispatches
its shadows one by one.
And I move away
from everything, since everything
remains to
create my alibi:
my shoe, its
eyelet, as well as its mud
and even the
bend in the elbow
of my own buttoned shirt.
translated by Clayton Eshleman |
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Black Stone on Top of a
White Stone I shall die in
Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I
already remember.
I shall die in
Paris—it does not bother me—
Doubtless on a
Thursday, like today, in autumn.
It shall be a
Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down
these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil.
Never like today have I turned,
And headed my
whole journey to the ways where I am alone.
César Vallejo
is dead. They struck him,
All of them,
though he did nothing to them,
They hit him
hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of
a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,
The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the
rain, and the roads...
translated by Thomas Merton |
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 3 April 2010
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