Dianna Niebylski Speaks at Symposium on César Vallejo, Hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago
Introduction
Professor Dianna Niebylski (Hispanic Studies) recently spoke at "The Event of the Poem: César Vallejo Between Language, History, Art, and Translation," a symposium hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago.
César Vallejo stands as one of the most formally radical and ethically urgent poets of the twentieth century. His work does not merely represent crisis — it stages it. In Vallejo, syntax fractures, voice destabilizes, and temporality collapses under historical pressure. Poetry becomes not description, but event: a site where language encounters violence, vulnerability, and collective existence without guaranteeing coherence or consolation.
The Event of the Poem: César Vallejo Between Language, History, Art, and Translation convenes internationally recognized scholars whose work has shaped the study of Vallejo across political theory, philology, affect studies, ethics, translation studies, and cultural criticism. This symposium approaches Vallejo not as a fixed literary monument, but as an active force within contemporary artistic and intellectual inquiry.
Rather than treating poetry as illustrative of philosophical argument, the panel examines how Vallejo’s formal experimentation, particularly in Trilce, Poemashumanos, and España, aparta de mí este cáliz, generates new conditions for thinking about history, embodiment, responsibility, and linguistic instability. Vallejo’s work destabilizes the humanist subject and resists both ideological reduction and aesthetic containment.
A central axis of this symposium considers translation as a second ontological event. If Vallejo’s Spanish already fractures itself from within, what occurs when that fracture migrates across languages? Does translation intensify ontological strain, or does it expose the instability that was always internal to the poem? Should discussion engage his relation to surrealism, the panel will equally examine Vallejo’s proximity to, and divergence from, avant-garde rupture and the limits of rational aesthetic form.