Volume 25, Number 20 · December 21, 1978
The Insulted and the Injured
By Michael Wood
César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence
by Jean Franco
Cambridge University Press, 296 pp., $21.95
Poesía completa
by César Vallejo
Premià Editora (Mexico), 413 pp., 120 pesos
Vertical Poetry
by Roberto Juarroz, translated by W. S. Merwin
Kayak Books, 57 pp., $2.00 (paper)
"Harsh World" and Other Poems
by Angel González, translated by Donald D. Walsh
Princeton University Press, 171 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Muestra
by Angel González
Ediciones Turner, 74 pp., $5.25 (paper)
'We cannot live the revolution of others,' Jean Franco writes in her sensible book on César Vallejo, the first full-length study in English of this major poet. But we can, or at least Vallejo could, convert personal suffering into a suggestive vocation, a representation of a general and unacceptable modern condition. Vallejo sought out pain and misery, there was more than a hint of masochism in him. 'Without prior sacrifice, there can be no health,' he wrote, and the pleasure lurking in the proposition is a bit shady. But he never hoarded his suffering, never saw it as a privilege, as something that fell only on him. There is all too much more where that came from, he implies, and the hounded poet prophesying his own death—
Review, 4382 words
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