Vallejo, CéSar - Alfred J. MacAdam (essay date 1980)
Alfred J. MacAdam (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: "¡Viva Vallejo! ¡Arriba Espafia!" in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 56, No. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 185-92.
[In the review below, MacAdam favorably assesses César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, discussing thematic and stylistic features of Vallejo's verse and the translation problems posed by his writings.]
"There is no problem as consubstantial with literature and its modest mystery as translation." This is the first sentence of Jorge Luis Borges' meditation on various English translations of Homer, beginning with Chapman and ending with Samuel Butler. Borges concludes in "The Homeric Versions" (1932) that: (1) all texts are, in the widest sense of the word, translations; (2) all texts, even the final, printed version, are drafts; (3) there is no "definitive" text; and (4) no translation is, in the last analysis, better than any other. Even the worst translation may...
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