At a time when the arts in European capitals tended toward “art for art’s sake,” not realism or social concern, César Vallejo delineated the paradox of conscientious intellectuals whose life of the mind involves metaphysical concerns, while their daily lives evolve in a deficient physical world.

This poem—which catalogs the deprivation of the poor and the spiritual bankruptcy of many others—is one of his clearest expressions of this lived duality, for how can writers be concerned with abstractions (including those of the social sciences, philosophy, and aesthetics) when marginalized people live in horrid conditions? The social concern that was evident in Vallejo’s first poetry collection in 1918 continued into later works such as this one.

This poem sets up paired contrasts between concrete realities (cracking lice, spitting blood, digging for food in trash bins, and so on) and the topics discussed by psychologists, philosophers, and artists of its time. The use of “I” indicates the poet’s disconformity with this apparent divorce between the concerns of artists and intellectuals and those of the common people, and the juxtaposition signals the lack of relevance of one to the other.

Poverty, infirmity, lack of sanitation, death, exploitation, violence, and ignorance neither inform “high culture” nor affect it, and vice versa. But the poetic “I” acts as a bridge to break the separation, to name what is on the streets. Vallejo was vociferous in his criticism of “ivory tower” intellectuals who remained aloof from real conditions and complained that art had become too narrowly defined as an entity and end unto itself.

The poem is dated November 5, 1937, and was first published in 1939. With access to Vallejo’s letters, however, critic Jason Wilson backdates the composition of this poem to 1927, noting that it reflects the either/or debate in Paris between social activism (led by the French Communist Party) and the surrealists, who struggled to find a place within Marxist historical materialism for poetry and the imagination.

The poem tries “to hold the irreconcilable world of proletarian suffering and intellectual debates together in alternative lines” (211). Since Vallejo stopped writing poetry at this time, Wilson concludes that he identified with the have-nots, which was consistent with his marginal status as a Latin American in Paris and with his “understanding that only suffering leads to real knowledge, not books or cerebral debates about ideas” (211).

Bibliography
Vallejo, César. “A man walks by with a loaf of bread on his shoulder.” Translated by Clayton Eshleman. In Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Stephen Tapscott, 103–104. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
———. César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Wilson, Jason. “César Vallejo and ‘El bruto libre’: Notes on the Burden of European Culture.” Romance Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 206–214.

Categories: British Literature, Latin American Literature, Literature