César Vallejo, Peru’s Universal Poet

This paper begins by suggesting that travel between China and the Americas occurred long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus from Europe in the Caribbean, and the conference on “Latin America and China in World Literature” is, thus, to be seen as the resumption of a dialogue that had been interrupted rather than a completely new venture. The paper then moves to a discussion of the cultural meaning of magical realism which is seen as the symptom of the cultural upheaval caused by the chasm between the way the inhabitants of the Americas felt and understood reality, as contrasted with the values and rationality of the Western world. The Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, along with other poets such as the Chilean Pablo Neruda, played a crucial role in the articulation and expression of the roots of that cultural upheaval in the early decades of the 20th century—their signature can be divined, for example, behind the linguistic innovation of the novels of the Boom Generation—and Vallejo’s role in particular is traced in the final section of the essay. Vallejo’s Quechua soul struggles to emerge from within the confines of the Spanish language, and this struggle leads to the emergence of a universalist voice which speaks directly and emotively to nations across the world, as witnessed by the translation of his work into so many foreign languages.