Papers

Peer-Reviewed

“Mediating Andean Modernity: The Literary Oracular in Muerte por el tacto by Jaime Saenz,” Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista de Estudios Bolivianos, fall 2021

Abstract: Upon his return from Berlin in 1939, Jaime Saenz started working in La Paz for intelligence agencies and public relations offices of Bolivia and the United States, which led to correspondent positions with Reuters and McGraw-Hill World News. His trajectory into Cold War Bolivian state nobility seemed all but guaranteed. However, on the brink of this breakout moment, he renounced his job – and professionalism altogether – committing himself to a life of literature and alcoholism as his marriage unraveled. In response to repeated interventions, he justified his every loss with a further indictment of the precautious, which was an outgrowth of his belief in the existence of a higher truth that was both accessible and impervious to analytical reason. In this article, I ask how Saenz’s poetry from the 1950s metabolized the rhetoric of indictment which it had inherited from the Tellurism of the Chaco generation. How might Muerte por el tacto (1957) be symptomatic of a broader aim of restoring to modern poetry its oracular legitimacy? On what grounds did Saenz indict precautious defenders of historical culture? And how did such an indictment mediate “national energy” (Tamayo) as it came into language through the nativist discourse of the land? Paying focal attention to regimes of revelation in Saenz’s early poetry and the historical conditions of its production, this article updates a discussion among Transatlanticists about the legitimization of irrationalism in 20th-century poetics and politics by assessing the socio-symbolic value of the oracular in the regionalist discourse of modernism.

“Jaime Saenz and the urbe of La Paz,” Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Edited by Jeremy Tambling. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2021.

Abstract: The modernization of La Paz in the first half of the 20th century produced hostility between the city and the urbe – between the city as the social manifestation of national citizenship and the urbe as a geographical region along with its inhabitants regardless of their political community. In the 1970s, Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz reflected on this conflict in his prose fiction and, curiously, in a city guidebook where he depicted streets, neighborhoods, geographical landmarks, and personalities of La Paz. His representations of the city invite us to wonder if this guidebook was really intended for the foreign traveler, or if it was the critical performance of a text which critically deviated from the genre before the perceptive eyes of urban readers. This entry offers a biographical sketch on Jaime Saenz in the political landscape of early-20th-century Bolivia and describes his representations of La Paz in the parodic prose poems of his 1979 city guidebook, Imágenes paceñas: lugares y personas de la ciudad.

“César Vallejo’s Paris in Peru,” Palgrave Encyplopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Edited by Jeremy Tambling. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2021.

Abstract: Like many poets of his generation, the Peruvian César Vallejo entered the world of journalism after having lost faith in the old system of patronage which had characterized the field of literary production since colonial times. In 1923, Vallejo moved to Paris and worked as a correspondent for several newspapers and magazines that were published in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo and the capital city of Lima. In this entry, I provide a biographical sketch of Vallejo’s early life to his arrival in Paris, situating his journalism in the transatlantic sphere of vernacular print culture, before moving on to characterize his mediation of Paris as it appears in chronicles which discreetly invited a mass readership of Peru to assess critically the claims of liberal culture.

“Vallejo aporético: la individualización en La piedra cansada,”Archivo Vallejo, 1:1, January–June 2018, pp.185–201.

Abstract: A finales de 1937, César Vallejo regresa de Madrid a París donde escribe España, aparta de mí este cáliz, y rigurosamente corrige su más lograda obra teatral La piedra cansada, una tragedia sofocleana situada en el imperio incaico del siglo XV. Si es en este momento de crisis social que el peruano se muestra más comprometido que nunca con la causa republicana, ¿por qué retoma ‘la piedra cansada’, un tropo precolombino de quinientos años atrás? ¿Por qué recurrir al topos andino frente a la inminente caída de la República española? Para contestar estas preguntas, hago hincapié en la contradicción principal del drama —en tanto que uno se individualiza plenamente se vuelve intercambiable en absoluto— con el objetivo de indagar en las múltiples modalidades de la ceguera que vienen a caracterizar al albañil y héroe de la tragedia, el obrero llamado Tolpor.

“El arte de ir en contra: la vanguardia histórica y el programa emulador de César Vallejo,” Actas, edited by Andrés Echevarría and Gladys Heredia Flores. Lima: Cátedra Vallejo, 2016, pp. 303–15.

Abstract: Mientras César Vallejo radicaba en París, refutó el sectarismo estético que percibió en Europa y el plagio que, en su opinión, realizaban de él los artistas de Latinoamérica. Su refutación, basada en la emulación y plasmada en su prosa escrita entre 1927 y 1928, socava el antagonismo propio de la vanguardia histórica. Ante los programas fracasados del siglo XIX y el radical rebatimiento finisecular, Vallejo realiza un acto de emulación tan subversivo que, paradójicamente, nos conduce a indagar ¿en qué medida se convierte en obra vanguardista su crítica contra la vanguardia?

“De la interferencia a la recolección: estrategias de traducción en la obra vallejiana,” Actas vol. 2, edited by Gladys Heredia Flores. Lima: Cátedra Vallejo, 2015, 207–20.

Abstract: Tras la labor heurística que fructificó en las Obras completas de César Vallejo, sus lectores en castellano ya saben, sin lugar a dudas, que el corpus vallejeano resulta más amplio de lo que se imaginaba y más polifacético que el de sus contemporáneos vanguardistas. Quienes leen a Vallejo en inglés, por otra parte, se encuentran obligados a atribuirloal sectarismo literario de entreguerras, porque nosotros, sus traductores, hemos ignorado sus textos extra poéticos —cuando no los hemos menospreciado—, y como consecuencia, Vallejo se ha vuelto paradigma de la vanguardia en vez de una alternativa a ella. Por eso, quisiera detenerme en el concepto de «interferencia», tal como se manifestaba en la traducción durante el último medio siglo, para después proponer el concepto de «recolección» como una oportunidad de repensar nuestra aproximación a Vallejo y de vislumbrar el futuro de su obra en inglés.