Of all the celebrated poets of the Spanish language, perhaps none is today so completely unknown outside his native country as Carrera Vilcas. Once hailed as a genius all over Latin America, and read widely in translation in the United States, he has become the province of obscure treatises by Mexican professors of literature, and his name has been erased from the English-speaking world. Yet, for those who care to pursue his footnote in the annals of world literature, there is a powerful and moving story about what it means to be a poet.
Carrera Maria Vilcas was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on 22 October 1898, the same year that Amado Nervo and Jesús Valenzuela founded La Revista Moderna (The Modern Review). His father, Elián Vilcas, was a retired brewmaster from the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma in Monterrey. His mother, Maria Kościuszko, was an exchange student from Poland, who left Mexico for the last time shortly after his birth. This left young Vilcas in his father’s custody but, as Elián continued to work on commission for many local micro-breweries on both sides of the border, he often left his son with an elderly neighbour, Juana Gutierrez. It was she who, when Vilcas was thirteen, first exposed him to poetry in the form of an issue of La Revista Moderna. Nervo’s piece La Raza del Bronce (The Bronze Race), spoke powerfully to Vilcas’ own mixed heritage, and he decided from that point forward to be a poet himself1.
Most of Vilcas’ early work, inspired by Nervo, is centred on social issues. It deals with his own struggle to find a place within Mexican society, both as an illegitimate child, and as a half-Pole. He treats the alienation of his friends at school as well, many of them mestizos or, like himself, „mitad de gringo”. The scholar interested in literature, however, can glance quickly over most of these pieces and move on. A short poem, entered in his journal for 13 January 1913, betrays the juvenile expression of this work, although the sentiment is honest enough:
Collección de Animales Salvajes (Menagerie)
We walk by in school uniforms--
uniforms which leave us naked as the animals.
Naked to their criticism, naked to their jeers.
I am a half-Pole,
my companion on the right a half-Native,
my friend on the left a half-American.
Should it follow from this that we are half-men?2
Although we now read these poems by way of gaining a background to Vilcas’ later work, we must remember that they did not shape the view of him as an artist at the time. They were entered privately in his journals, perhaps shared with family or friends, but never published. It was not until he reached the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) that he began to find outlets for his literary creativity.
His arrival at the university did not simply serve to place him in the right circles to find publishers, however. It also drastically redefined the character of his work by introducing him to Nobia, with whom he fell deeply in love3.
His work from his first encounter with her (recorded in his journal for 18 September 1916)4 on is therefore known as his „Red Period”. A much greater maturity is evident in these pieces, as Vilcas began to relate himself to this new emotional tide and his sexuality, a topic which he had not previously explored. His first published piece was run in an independent publication assembled by some students in the recently formed High Studies National School (now the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature)5. Their journal, inspired by the work of Futurist writers in Italy, was called El Camino del Futuro, and accepted the following poem by Vilcas in his freshman semester:
Oda Apasionada del Joven a su Avión (The Amorous Ode of the Young Man to his Aeroplane)
I run my hand along your taught canvas
and feel it give with the pliancy of a woman’s flesh--
a pliancy into which a man can sink
even as he is raised up by it.
I rub my fingers around your pert brass rivets
and focus on the coming moment, any moment now,
when I will climb inside you. Enveloped
by you, and you will raise me up.
and focus on the coming moment, any moment now,
when I will climb inside you. Enveloped
by you, and you will raise me up.
I will play the part of the haughty master
and pretend to everyone that I pilot you.
But the truth is that you will free me
to a place of currents beyond my control.
and pretend to everyone that I pilot you.
But the truth is that you will free me
to a place of currents beyond my control.
Your fuselage and mine will be fused
by the endless sublimity of speed
by the endless sublimity of speed
into an arrow of heedless Eros
recklessly careening over the Earth.
recklessly careening over the Earth.
And there, inside you, I will lose myself--
and yet find you, some part of myself.
Find in you the self which I would be
had God bothered to give me wings6.
Despite the success which this poem achieved in Futurist circles at the UNAM, Vilcas was very conscious of the fact that he had not managed to adhere to all of the tenets of the movement. He wrote to a friend on 3 November 1916, „I love her. I love every bit of her, every facet, every refracted glint of her beauty which plays upon the twisted wreckage of this world as the morning sunlight upon a burst artillery shell in the field. And this is what frustrates me! I cannot bring myself to write, as Marinetti asked us to, ‚with scorn for woman’. How can I? I would celebrate her!”7 It was this fundamental tension which caused Vilcas to part ways with the Futurists by the middle of his second semester.
By that time, in the spring of 1917, he had also made advances toward Nobia. These initial encounters were, however, not wholly successful. In his diary for 3 March, he wrote, „I invited that rare woman over for dinner this evening. She came, which is all good insofar as it goes, but did not seem to perceive the purpose. Had she realized that it was no merely friendly gesture I doubt she would have been so comfortable with me.
After the salad I tried to explain how I feel... I emphasize the word ‚try’ for, bless her heart, I am relatively certain she still does not understand.”8 This frustration found voice, as always, in his poetry. Now freed from the constraints of the expectations of the campus’ Futurist Writers Association, he began to experiment more broadly. He took the opportunity to incorporate elements of traditional Nahuatl9 poetry, in which he interested himself at this period, although there is no evidence that he ever managed to learn any Nahuatl. It was in this vein that he composed a short piece:
El Canto del Tlauhquechol (The Song of the Tlauhquechol)
I sang to you like the red tlauhquechol bird
I spoke as Popocatépetl to Iztaccíhuatl
Had you but heard me--
My words olé as a string of precious stones
which tumbled brilliantly about your ears
like the praise of a victorious matador
Was my colonial Spanish too civilised?
Was it an aquamarine when you desired sapphire?
Perhaps the feral purr of Nahuatl,
like the growling ¡ay! of a dahliajaguar--10
His flirtation with this style was ended abruptly when a close friend, Manuel Torríba, advised him that „Aztec poetry didn’t make any sense in Aztec, and it sure as hell doesn’t make any sense in Spanish.”11 Vilcas’ efforts to win over Nobia, however, continued, at last meeting with success in the early summer of 1917, when he broke his ankle in a university football match and seized the opportunity, after she had descended from the stands to see if he was all right, to simply kiss her. This began a long and happy summer to which almost half of the total pages of his collected diaries are devoted. Nobia appears to have been one of the few women who can be so built-up in the mind at a distance, and yet not disappoint their admirers on closer inspection. There are reams and reams of Vilcas’ work from this time, averaging one piece every day and a half, most of which is worthy of the modern reader’s attention. For the moment, we will content ourselves with one of the finer examples:
La Condición de Mujer (Womanhood)
I wish you had seen yourself in the pool,
your long blonde hair curling darkly about your shoulders
where every sinew seemed drawn like the string of Artemis’ bow.
The steam rising off the water surrounded you,
enshrouding you like a pagan deity
or a jungle cat.
and yet find you, some part of myself.
Find in you the self which I would be
had God bothered to give me wings6.
Despite the success which this poem achieved in Futurist circles at the UNAM, Vilcas was very conscious of the fact that he had not managed to adhere to all of the tenets of the movement. He wrote to a friend on 3 November 1916, „I love her. I love every bit of her, every facet, every refracted glint of her beauty which plays upon the twisted wreckage of this world as the morning sunlight upon a burst artillery shell in the field. And this is what frustrates me! I cannot bring myself to write, as Marinetti asked us to, ‚with scorn for woman’. How can I? I would celebrate her!”7 It was this fundamental tension which caused Vilcas to part ways with the Futurists by the middle of his second semester.
By that time, in the spring of 1917, he had also made advances toward Nobia. These initial encounters were, however, not wholly successful. In his diary for 3 March, he wrote, „I invited that rare woman over for dinner this evening. She came, which is all good insofar as it goes, but did not seem to perceive the purpose. Had she realized that it was no merely friendly gesture I doubt she would have been so comfortable with me.
After the salad I tried to explain how I feel... I emphasize the word ‚try’ for, bless her heart, I am relatively certain she still does not understand.”8 This frustration found voice, as always, in his poetry. Now freed from the constraints of the expectations of the campus’ Futurist Writers Association, he began to experiment more broadly. He took the opportunity to incorporate elements of traditional Nahuatl9 poetry, in which he interested himself at this period, although there is no evidence that he ever managed to learn any Nahuatl. It was in this vein that he composed a short piece:
El Canto del Tlauhquechol (The Song of the Tlauhquechol)
I sang to you like the red tlauhquechol bird
I spoke as Popocatépetl to Iztaccíhuatl
Had you but heard me--
My words olé as a string of precious stones
which tumbled brilliantly about your ears
like the praise of a victorious matador
Was my colonial Spanish too civilised?
Was it an aquamarine when you desired sapphire?
Perhaps the feral purr of Nahuatl,
like the growling ¡ay! of a dahliajaguar--10
His flirtation with this style was ended abruptly when a close friend, Manuel Torríba, advised him that „Aztec poetry didn’t make any sense in Aztec, and it sure as hell doesn’t make any sense in Spanish.”11 Vilcas’ efforts to win over Nobia, however, continued, at last meeting with success in the early summer of 1917, when he broke his ankle in a university football match and seized the opportunity, after she had descended from the stands to see if he was all right, to simply kiss her. This began a long and happy summer to which almost half of the total pages of his collected diaries are devoted. Nobia appears to have been one of the few women who can be so built-up in the mind at a distance, and yet not disappoint their admirers on closer inspection. There are reams and reams of Vilcas’ work from this time, averaging one piece every day and a half, most of which is worthy of the modern reader’s attention. For the moment, we will content ourselves with one of the finer examples:
La Condición de Mujer (Womanhood)
I wish you had seen yourself in the pool,
your long blonde hair curling darkly about your shoulders
where every sinew seemed drawn like the string of Artemis’ bow.
The steam rising off the water surrounded you,
enshrouding you like a pagan deity
or a jungle cat.
Yes, you were the leopard, whose graceful femininity knows no weakness.
The serenity of your expression a radiance of power,
beaded brass dripped from your every pore
and cast itself as the throne of womanhood.
To have seen you thus as a woman would have been to learn one’s true nature.
To have seen you thus as a man was to learn one’s place.12
The resumption of studies in the fall brought a great blow to Vilcas. Nobia was selected for a student exchange, and departed at the end of September for Spain.
After that point, not a single word of verse occurs in any of Vilcas’ papers. On the 12th of October, he confided to his diary, „It’s all gone... Whatever there was of my gift has left with her. I want, more than anything, to tell her how I love her, to make certain that she knows. And yet I can’t. It is the spring all over again, but this time the fault is mine.”13 His friends made efforts to raise his spirits, reminding him frequently of the limited duration of her absence. Manuel Torríba wrote to their mutual friend, Carlos Largo, „What am I to do with him? Reason has no traction on his mind [...] I can’t even get him to write limericks anymore!”14
Vilcas became increasingly frustrated with himself. He wrote her letters every day, but was always unsatisfied with the expressiveness of his prose. In one such letter, dated 14 November, he voiced his anguish to Nobia, „I say ‚I love you’ and ‚I miss you’--what clichés! It is so much more than that, so much more! And yet I cannot find the words for it. My pining for you has put me beyond words. It has put me on a plane of emotion in which communication must take place by other means, and yet all of those means are cut off from me by the very cause of my anguish in the first place! I love you, please just know it.”15
Vilcas’ letters stopped two weeks before Nobia’s return. When she came back to Mexico City, Torríba brought her to Vilcas’ dormitory, where he was curled up in a ball in the corner, surrounded by thousands of crumpled sheets of paper, on which he had scribbled meaningless wavy lines.16
Vilcas and Nobia were married on the 22nd of May 1919. They were, by all accounts, very happy together17, and were survived by two children when they both died in 197218. Vilcas never again, however, wrote a line of poetry. Thanks to the efforts of Torríba, his work became widely known in Latin America after the publication of his collected works in 192119, which was well-received by critics. He was brought to the American audience in 1935 by the translations of Miguel Christoffson, an Uruguayan expatriate teaching literature at the University of Wisconsin20. The success of American „Beat” poetry in the early 1950s, however, prompted a reevaluation in which Vilcas’ work was felt to be too old-fashioned. No longer on the reading list for most fashionable universities’ literature departments, his fame began to decline. By the late 1980s, he was almost completely unknown outside Mexico21.
The serenity of your expression a radiance of power,
beaded brass dripped from your every pore
and cast itself as the throne of womanhood.
To have seen you thus as a woman would have been to learn one’s true nature.
To have seen you thus as a man was to learn one’s place.12
The resumption of studies in the fall brought a great blow to Vilcas. Nobia was selected for a student exchange, and departed at the end of September for Spain.
After that point, not a single word of verse occurs in any of Vilcas’ papers. On the 12th of October, he confided to his diary, „It’s all gone... Whatever there was of my gift has left with her. I want, more than anything, to tell her how I love her, to make certain that she knows. And yet I can’t. It is the spring all over again, but this time the fault is mine.”13 His friends made efforts to raise his spirits, reminding him frequently of the limited duration of her absence. Manuel Torríba wrote to their mutual friend, Carlos Largo, „What am I to do with him? Reason has no traction on his mind [...] I can’t even get him to write limericks anymore!”14
Vilcas became increasingly frustrated with himself. He wrote her letters every day, but was always unsatisfied with the expressiveness of his prose. In one such letter, dated 14 November, he voiced his anguish to Nobia, „I say ‚I love you’ and ‚I miss you’--what clichés! It is so much more than that, so much more! And yet I cannot find the words for it. My pining for you has put me beyond words. It has put me on a plane of emotion in which communication must take place by other means, and yet all of those means are cut off from me by the very cause of my anguish in the first place! I love you, please just know it.”15
Vilcas’ letters stopped two weeks before Nobia’s return. When she came back to Mexico City, Torríba brought her to Vilcas’ dormitory, where he was curled up in a ball in the corner, surrounded by thousands of crumpled sheets of paper, on which he had scribbled meaningless wavy lines.16
Vilcas and Nobia were married on the 22nd of May 1919. They were, by all accounts, very happy together17, and were survived by two children when they both died in 197218. Vilcas never again, however, wrote a line of poetry. Thanks to the efforts of Torríba, his work became widely known in Latin America after the publication of his collected works in 192119, which was well-received by critics. He was brought to the American audience in 1935 by the translations of Miguel Christoffson, an Uruguayan expatriate teaching literature at the University of Wisconsin20. The success of American „Beat” poetry in the early 1950s, however, prompted a reevaluation in which Vilcas’ work was felt to be too old-fashioned. No longer on the reading list for most fashionable universities’ literature departments, his fame began to decline. By the late 1980s, he was almost completely unknown outside Mexico21.
1 Marcos Reya, La Biografía de Carrera Vilcas, (Tipografía Nacional: Ciudad de Guatemala, 1964), 1-12.
2 Miguel Christoffson, The Collected Works of Carrera Vilcas, (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1937), 24.
3 Although many biographers have attempted to determine the identity of Nobia, none have managed to.
4 Alicia Dujovne, ed., Carrera Vilcas, él Mismo, (Emecé Editores: Buenos Aires, 1956), 154.
5 Reya, 47
6 Christoffson, 76.
7 Robert Woodard, trans., Carrera Vilcas in Correspondence, (Penguin: New York, 1947), 69.
8 Dujovne, 277. Translation mine.
9 Reya, 62.
10 Christoffson, 112.
11 Woodard, 102.
12 Christoffson, 179.
13 Dujovne, 342. Translation mine.
14 Woodard, 188.
15 Ibid., 237-238.
16 Reya, 154.
17 Ibid., 222-223.
18 Juan Gutierrez, «Carrera Vilcas es muerto» in El Universal, 19 June 1972.
19 Manuel Torríba, ed. Las Obras Completas de Carrera Vilcas, (UNAM: Ciudad de Mexico, 1921).
20 Christoffson.
21 Ibid., xii.
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RACE CAPET is a poet, playwright, and essayist living on the West Coast. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including “decomP”, “Taj Mahal Review”, “The Eclectic Muse”, “Burning Houses”, and others.