5—
From Early Words to the Vernacular Inflection:
Vanguard Tales of Linguistic Encounter

We must return to silence / To the silence of the words that come from silence.
—Vicente Huidobro, Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas

Let's play with words!
—Miguel Angel Asturias, Guacamayo in Cuculcán

In the poematic prose preface to Vicente Huidobro's masterwork Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas, the poetic speaker temporarily assumes a narrative stance. Here he provides biographical information—"I was born at the Equinox, under the hydrangeas and the airplanes of the heat"—and tells of initiating the poetic quest that constitutes the long poem's seven cantos—"One day I gathered up my parachute ..." (OC 1: 365; EW 3). Altazor's lyric pilgrimage of descent is frequently viewed as a progressive dismantling of language in search of a pure, original word. On the journey's first day, the work's eponymous verbal wizard encounters his Creator, "lovely as a navel" and a simple "hollow in space," and is privy to a direct account of the creation of the universe, of the world, and, after a sip of cognac, of human language: "'I created the tongue of the mouth which man diverted from its role to make it learn to speak'" (OC 1: 366; EW 5).^[1]

Although Altazor was first published as a completed work in 1931,

Huidobro conceived the project in 1919 and first published the preface in 1925. In 1923, Miguel Angel Asturias began writing the Leyendas de Guatemala collection that first appeared in print in 1930. Asturias's lyrical prose pieces are framed by an autodiegetic narration in which the nameless speaker recounts his return to Guatemala to recover and retell its stories. In the work's second piece, "Ahora que me acuerdo," the speaker meets with village elders and demonstrates the linguistic prowess that qualifies him to tell these tales. For this test, he recounts his own transformation into the mythical Cuero de Oro and his journey into the pre-Columbian past. Like the preface to Altazor, this is a story of beginnings. The narrator, as Cuero de Oro, travels to the dense Guatemalan jungle and encounters his ancestors and their makers celebrating the original creation. A key moment in this "delirious night" enacts the coming into being of primal sounds, song, and language out of the silent void that had preceded them: "In the darkness nothing exists. Grasping my one hand with the other, I dance to the rhythm of the vowels of a scream ¡A-e-i-o-u!" (Leyendas 19).

The striking differences between these two stories reveal the tensions that dominated talcs of linguistic encounters and broader polemics about language in Latin America's vanguard movements. I will return to these differences in a moment, but equally important common features provide a point of departure. In the context of the works from which they are drawn, each of these stories constitutes a tale of aesthetic legitimation and of affirming artistic power by identifying with the initial formation of language. In both cases, the source of linguistic legitimacy is a cosmogonic story of prolinguistic beginnings. Both stories evoke the immodest vanguardist enterprise of (re)creating language from the void. In each story, the speaker embodies the avant-garde artist whose claim to engage in this ambitious task derives from a special connection to the origins of words. This connection is clearly related to the obsession with origins I explore in the vanguardist portrayals of America, but these particular talcs are more narrowly focused on language itself. For avant-garde writers, internationally and in Latin America, language constituted both the means and the ends for vast innovative projects. Thus Altazor may be read simultaneously as a bountiful showcase of linguistic virtuosity and as a poetic treatise on the potential and limits of language. Similarly, the Leyendas de Guatemala lays out an array of lyrical possibilities, storytelling modes, and rhetorical strategies derived from the self-consciously modern tapping of indigenous sources. Language also becomes an implicit theme in the

work, and the dramatic piece Cuculcán that concludes the collection openly enacts Asturias's concerns about language.

But for comprehending the linguistic inquiries that unfolded within Latin America's vanguards, the differences between these two texts are as significant as their convergences. Huidobro's version of the formation of language possesses no overt vernacular inflections, although, even with Altazor 's parodic tone, certain elements—one God creating one world—imply a generic Western, monotheistic, Old Testament situation. Linguistic creation in the Leyendas, by contrast, is insistently culturally specific, as it evolves within a pre-Columbian, non-Western, and indigenous Guatemalan context. Altazor's poetic encounter with his creator, moreover, launches a search (some would say a failed one) for an autonomous, linguistically pure idiom, divested of history and immediate referents. Asturias recasts this very idea of linguistic origins and re-creation as a cultural project that implicitly disputes the image of a verbally pure poetic space and sets forth instead an artistic practice of linguistic complication and difference. In the shift from Altazor to the Leyendas, the creative odyssey of an individual poetic persona observing the world from a cosmic perspective becomes the artistic pursuit of a collectivity rooted in pre-Columbian forests. Neither of these works alone can provide an adequate account of the linguistic explorations undertaken by Latin America's vanguardists; both constitute an intense and multivocal dialogue of texts and ideas.

This dialogue emerged through a wide variety of literary exercises and language-oriented activities. As one would expect, language is a clear, often dominant concern in manifestos and poetic collections. Avant-garde verbal experiments and thematic inquiries into language characterized the work of numerous poets in the 1920s and early 1930s. But language themes and experiments appeared in vanguardist prose fiction and dramatic works as well. In addition to the linguistic investigation undertaken through literary texts, a number of vanguardist groups and writers made spoken language their object of study by self-consciously collecting an array of linguistic artifacts to be recontextualized in artistic experiments but also simply for the sake of collecting. The points of contact and diversion I have highlighted between Altazor and the Leyendas de Guatemala typify the dialogues about language that permeated these endeavors. If the similarities between Huidobro and Asturias affirm the centrality of language in avant-garde activity, my juxtaposition of their work here underscores the distinct linguistic debates that characterized Latin America's vanguards: the search for

linguistic purity, for a "ground zero" of verbal expression that becomes entangled with vernacular concerns; the affirmation of ethnic or national linguistic identities within a vanguardist mode; and the elaboration of a cultural critique that includes exploring cultural differences through language and developing artistic practices that will foreground linguistic difficulty and estrangement.

Language in the International Vanguards

I have suggested, and will demonstrate more fully, that in Latin America vanguardist inquiries into language were often marked by concrete cultural problems. Moreover, an awareness of language as the site of cultural and social tensions often characterized the historical avant-gardes in general. Although the European movements are not my central concern, they provide the basis for contemporary theories of the avant-gardes, and it is pertinent to look briefly at what those theories suggest about language. The fundamental position of linguistic issues in international vanguardism is widely recognized and virtually unquestioned. But critics and theorists of the vanguards differ noticeably in the degree to which they perceive that language was conceived in vanguardist polemics as a social and cultural problem. In his exploratory piece "Language and the Avant-Garde," Raymond Williams cautions against attributing a specific theory or ideological position on language to the vast array of experiments and attitudes that actually made up the vanguards' approach to the subject. Still, it is difficult not to discern certain attitudes toward language that run through the manifestos and artistic practices of the European avant-gardes. These include a rejection of the cognitive power and experiential viability of rational thought and discourse; a consequent antipathy toward conventions of representation, particularly those associated with narrative; and the exercise of what were construed as prediscursive verbal strategies, oral and written, that would somehow provide a more immediate apprehension of experience. By liberating words from the chains of tradition (grammar, genres, and literary conventions), artists would forge new creative principles, including language practices more in touch with an imagined primary experience and the juxtaposition into nonorganic works of decontextualized words and images. But language was portrayed in vanguardist polemics not only as an issue of style or a path to fuller

apprehensions of reality but also as a phenomenon of social life, heavily implicated in the autonomous claims of aestheticism and in a perceived disunity between representation and experience, dream and action, art and life.

This multifaceted characterization explains in part why vanguard practitioners expressed such radical ambivalence toward language, which constituted for them the greatest obstacle to original artistic expression and the greatest hope for renewal as well. In short, language was to be torn apart and rebuilt. The new art, according to writers like Apollinaire, would seek a scope "vaster than the plain art of words" ("The New Spirit and the Poets" 228), and Tristan Tzara's infamous "NO MORE WORDS!" announced Dada's campaign to pulverize semantic units into primary elements of sound and rhythm (Motherwell 84). At the same time, Tzara saw language—when properly used—as a utopian path. Demolishing the academy would yield a "fabulous form of action," and this, in turn, would reintegrate art and life and provide an antidote to literature, "a notebook of human imbecility to aid future professors" (Approximate Man 169). And André Breton portrayed the unleashing of words as a continuing critical activity with an antihierarchical spirit: "The hordes of words which ... Dada and Surrealism set about to let loose as though opening a Pandora's box ... will slowly but surely make their way into the silly little towns and cities of literature ... and here confusing without any difficulty the poor and the rich sections, they will calmly consume a great number of towers" (Manifestoes of Surrealism 152).

Raymond Williams has cogently noted the double-edged quality in vanguardist approaches to language. Language, he observes, "was being simultaneously identified with the blocking of 'true consciousness' and, to the extent that it could emancipate itself from its imprisoning everyday forms and, beyond that, from the received forms of 'literature,' as itself the medium of the idealised 'pure consciousness'" (40). But Williams's short piece on the subject is also exceptional in addressing, albeit briefly, the fact that some vanguardists saw language also as "material in a social process" (Williams 43). Most recent studies of the language of the avant-gardes, however, attend to the relationship between linguistic experiment and the quest for new levels of consciousness through the desired primary experience of created languages.^[2] Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger, two major theorists of the vanguards, have relatively little to say about language at all. Poggioli notes briefly the social significance of the linguistic revolt: a childlike

secret language that constitutes "simply one of many forms of avantgarde antagonism toward the public" (38). But he directs more attention to the search for "linguistic purity" and "transrational languages" that, in his view, aligns the avant-gardes with the nineteenth-century aestheticist tradition and twentieth-century European modernism in general.

Although Bürger also says little about language directly, his work suggests how vanguardist linguistic investigations may be addressed as cultural critique. In contrast to Poggioli's elision of the differences between the avant-gardes and modernism, Bürger insists that the former constitute a break with the aestheticist tradition precisely in their focus on the social status of art. He proposes that vanguardists challenged the autonomy of art from life and the nineteenth-century aestheticists' efforts to resacralize art by restoring its aura.^[3] Generally, however, Bürger subsumes the problem of language under artistic style and technique. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, in his foreword to the English translation of Bürger's work, examines differences between Poggioli and Bürger and notes that, for the latter, "the development of the avant-garde has nothing to do with a critical consciousness about language; it is not a continuation of tendencies already present in Aestheticism" (xiv). While aestheticism and modernism as defined in the Anglo-American tradition, Schulte-Sasse asserts, might be reduced to an "attack on traditional writing techniques" and to a "purely linguistic negation, " Bürger shows that the avant-gardes can only be understood as an attack on art as an institution (xv; my emphasis).

I have no argument with this reading of Bürger's differentiation between modernism and the avant-gardes, but Schulte-Sasse's phrase "purely linguistic negation" harbors a limited view of language and of the uses to which vanguardists put it. Bürger's own work implies a broader perspective. Although he may subsume language under artistic means, his views on the latter point to a more complex conception of language as a socially shaped phenomenon. Bürger asserts that, by making available the artistic means of all periods, the avant-gardes challenged an evolutionary hierarchy of styles. This idea may be logically extended to the avant-gardes' exploration of language as socially and culturally constructed. Juxtaposing languages from multiple realms and inventing new languages from scratch were similarly antihierarchical activities that underscored the existence and significance of those socially constructed hierarchies. Returning to Williams's work, moreover, he insightfully perceives this very quality in the vanguards' varieties of ver-

bal performance: "The rclapse to the rhythms of the mass in the middle of an outraging Dadaist spectacle," he argues, is a "reminder of how deeply constituted socially language always is, even when the decision has been made to abandon its identifiable semantic freight" (36).

In Latin America, avant-garde language activities were inventive as well as recuperative, as artists sought to dismantle old languages and create new ones from the void but also to recover "lost" languages from imagined national and ethnic pasts. A close reading of these projects reveals an image of language as the site of historically grounded cultural tensions and the move toward new ways of thinking about language and culture. Paradoxically, the vanguardist trope of a primal verbal universality provides the context and sometimes the direct stimulus for projects affirming linguistic complication and difference.

The Poetics of Linguistic Beginnings

Huidobro's work constitutes the most overt and eloquent Latin American elaboration in the vanguard period of a quest for linguistic purity and a primeval, original language. Huidobro was also Latin America's most prolific manifesto writer and took great pains in cultivating his own theory of poetic creation, creacionismo . In oral presentations and written manifestos, Huidobro developed these ideas, which he reworked and sought to put into practice in Altazor and carlief poetry collections.

Poetry, Huidobro's manifestos affirm, is the "newborn word" developed in the "first dawn of the world." Only those who have not forgotten the "birth cries of the universal birth [or] the accents of the world in formation " are qualified to call themselves poets. Poetry possesses "no past and no future," and its words are to be found "before the beginning of man and after the end of man" (OC 1:654–55; my emphasis). Huidobro dramatized this verbal birth poetically in Altazor, though he evoked similar images in numerous earlier works. In "Nouvelle Chanson" from the 1917 Horizon Carré collection, for example, anonymous new words spring forth spontaneously in a silent, primal scene.

In Altazor itself, the poetic speaker who has heard his god recount the creation of language seeks paradoxically to duplicate that singular act by playing with words, rearranging and breaking them down into particles that resist semantic association. This speaker repeatedly con-

structs creation scenarios for new worlds and new words. Thus the poet's words spring from the vacuum of that inaugural space and silent moment: "The cradle of my tongue rocked in the void / Prior to all time / And will guard forever the first rhythm / The rhythm that gives birth to worlds" (OC 1:377).^[4] As in the verses that provide an epigraph for this chapter, Altazor's probe for original words requires a return to a time before language—"We must return to silence / To the silence of the words that come from silence" (OC 1: 382; EW 49, 51)—and before the world itself—"I speak with a tongue moistened by unborn seas" (OC 1: 383; EW 53). Altazor's journey marks the death of conventional poets, the obliteration of their overused language, and a call for the revivification of words. This new acfivity—"the simple sport of words," the pursuit of "the pure word and nothing more"—leads back to and reemerges from a state of preverbal silence, the "spirit whisper of the wordless phrase" (OC 1: 394; EW 83). The untranslatable verbal fragments of Altazor 's final verses mark the culmination of this progressively disintegrating return to silence.

Laribamba
Laribambamplanerella
Laribambamositerella
Leiramombaririlanla
                                  lirilam
Ai i a
Temporía
Ai ai aia
Ululayu
           lulayu
                   layu yu
Ululayu
            ulayu
                  ayu yu ( OC  1: 423)

And the work's closing primal sounds relinquish even the appearance of words on a page:

Lalalí
           io ia
i i i o
Ai a i ai a i i i i o ia ( OC  1: 423)^[5]

Although Huidobro's seemingly endless tale of linguistic creation is the most all-encompassing, similar imagery permeates numerous vanguardist proclamations. The "Agú" manifesto, published in Chile by

contemporaries and friends of Pablo Neruda, calls for the reanimation of language through a return to verbal beginnings: "In the beginning the emotion was / Agú. The elemental. The alogical voice. / The first scream of the flesh" (MPP 81). Borges and other Argentine ultraístas defined the new metaphor they sought in "the game of linking words" as the "primordial element" (MPP 99). And a Puerto Rican euforismo manifesto conjured up a primitivist scenario for the "first word" of poetry: "I smash metrics and rhyme and pierce the future with my scream ... of the warrior who launched the first stone" (LHA 233). Similarly, Mexico's estridentistas called for stripping down words to the bone, and signers of the "Somos" manifesto in Venezuela's little magazine válvula celebrated the language of "silence or the scream" (MPP 279). In a lecture during Brazil's 1922 Week of Modern Art, Menotti del Picchia urged his generation of artists to seek "the fresh flesh of the word" in a "Procrustean bed" (GMT 291), and in the "Prefácio interessantíssimo" manifesto that introduces his Paulicéia desvairada poetry collection (1922), Brazil's Mário de Andrade sought a new lyricism from a preverbal unconscious (GMT 299).

As in Huidobro's Altazor, vanguardist poetry often dramatizes this imagery of origins more forcefully. The poetic speaker in Rosamel del Valle's "Velódromo," for example, boasts that he "give[s] birth to words like the sun and the rain" (INPA 73). Mexican Jaime Torres Bodet's poem "Música" yearns nostalgically for the "pure language" with which the speaker has learned to create with "notes of silence" (Obras escogidas 39). The Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat prefaced his 5 metros de poemas (1927) with an epigraph that qualifies his verses as "insecure poetry like my first speaking" (n.p.). In "Poema del momento extrangero en la selva," by Nicaragua's Pablo Antonio Cuadra, the speaker pursues a moment of linguistic creation "prior to my song / Prior to myself" (50A 116). The Colombian poet León de Greiff, who experimented extensively with linguistic and musical forms, described the creative act ab ovo in one poem—"I have forged my new architecture of words ... clear, cerebral, pure" (OC 1: 353)—and elaborated in another—"And in the empty world / and in the impregnated sibylline world / one hears only the nude voice / the sober voice / the mute voice / the one that says words without known meanings" (OC 1: 367). A similar stress between new sounds and silence marks poem xliv in Trilce (1922) by Peru's César Vallejo in which the poetic speaker summons up the "unseen piano" of his expressive capacity with its "muteness which deafens" (210). Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragón's

lengthy prose poem Pequeña sinfonía del nuevo mundo (1929–32) maps out repeated returns to primordial verbal newness. The poetic speaker rejects "impotent" words that do not create and have "led astray their genesic magic" (264). Instead he seeks out words that "don't dare to be born" (291) and constructs a world without names that prefigures the early days of García Márquez's Macondo when it was neccssary to name by pointing: "The light was fresh, humid, the world freshly painted.... The night wasn't called night nor was the day called day. The mountains, the masts, the constellations, the rivers, the cows did not have names" (325).^[6] Paradoxically, one of the most striking features of this verbally profuse 100-page poetic composition is its sustained homage to "transparent silence" as the source of all poetry (346). Critics often ascribe images of origins to Pablo Neruda's early work, for example, Tentativa del hombre infinito (1926), a poetic voyage sometimes compared to Altazor . Neruda himself did not spell out a primal conception of language in this work, but these tropes of verbal beginnings emerge instead in the critical discourse. Saúl Yurkievich comments, for example, that the work's language takes the reader back to the "larval" and the "germinal" (196).

These diverse imaginings of unmediated verbal worlds posit a universe with no language at all as the site for linguistic creation. Verbal activity in these mute worlds ranges from a preverbal chaos of expression without form to absolute silence. In any case, language appears to emerge from nothingness, but the closer to this original void, the greater the language's power. These images also embody connections between personal and cosmic beginnings. A child learning to speak or a poet generating a new language is an event that takes place not in specific sociolinguistic contexts or historical worlds but in a mythical time-out-of-time and in the imaginary spaces of human and univers(e)al origins. The language thus born should maintain a proximity to its formless, often silent, birthplace through a premorphological and asemantic expressiveness, as in Huidobro's "spirit whisper of the wordless phrase," de Greiff's "mute voice," Vallejo's deafening "muteness," or, in the more chaotic mode, Agú's "first scream of the flesh" or válvula 's language of "silence or the scream."

The international avant-gardes execute this prelinguistic ideal in Dada's sound poems and vowel concerts, the futurists' parole in libertá, or the Russian futurists zaum or transrational language. Marjorie Perloff has demonstrated the relationship between the Russian experiments and Kasimir Malevich's goal of a "zero of form."^[7] In Latin American

vanguardist practice, this pursuit of new languages produces a multitude of verbal experiments. These well-known verses from Altazor epitomize the wordplays, transpositions in morphology and sound, word chaining, and inventiveness typical of vanguardist language play:

Ya viene viene la golondrina
Ya viene viene la golonfina
Ya viene la golontrina
Ya viene la goloncima
Viene la golonchina
Viene la golonclima
Ya viene la golonrima
Ya viene la golonrisa
La golonniña
La golongira
La golonlira
La golonbrisa
La golonchilla                          ( OC  1: 398)

(Look here swoops the swooping swallow
Here swoops the whooping wallow
Here swoops the weeping wellow
Look here swoops the sweeping shrillow
Swoops the swamping shallow
Swoops the sheeping woolow
Swoops the slooping swellow
Look here swoops the sloping spillow
The scooping spellow
The souping smellow
The seeping swillow                       (EW 97)

In the poem "Verdehalago" (1928; Green Flattery, or Flattering Word), Cuba's Mariano Brull constructed comparable sound experiments, called jitanjáforas, by playing with the word verde (green): "Por el verde, verde / verdería de verde mar / erre con erre," or, in another section, "Verdor y verdín / verdumbre y verdura. / Verde, doble verde / de col y lechuga" (83).^[8] The neologisms and grammatical transgressions of poems in Vallejo's Trilce (1922) constitute one of Latin American vanguardism's most radical invented languages, as in lines from poem xxxii: "999 calorías. / Rumbbb.... Trrraprrrr rrach ... chaz / Serpentínica u del bizcochero/enjirafada al tímpano" (163) (999 calories. / Rumbbb.... Trrraprrr rrach ... ssstop / Serpentine u of the biscuit vendor / giraffed into the eardrum [RS 71].^[9] Other writers situated this linguistic inventiveness in explicit cultural contexts,

as in the alliterations, percussive elements, and Africanist linguistic allusions of the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén's "Canto negro" (1931), in which the black man sings, drums, and dances: "Acuememe serembó / aé; / yambó / aé. / Tamba, tamba, tamba, tamba, / tamba del negro que tumba" (OP 1: 122). Linguistic invention constitutes a major story line and the dominant expressive form in Mário de Andrade's Brazilian novel Macunaíma (1928). The work's language—a juxtaposition of regionalisms, including neologisms and Tupi derivations, that forms an original idiom that nobody actually speaks—epitomizes vanguardist verbal invention. The novel's antihero protagonist mimics the novel's linguistic resourcefulness when he makes up a language, incomprehensible to his companions, for hunting a tapir in São Paulo: "Tetápe, dzónanei pemonéite hêhê zeténe netaite" (97). Other vanguardist linguistic experiments include the tongue twisters, onomatopoeias, musical rhyme games, and echolalic effects in parts of Asturias's Leyendas, particularly in the play Cuculcán analyzed below; the radical punning in Brazilian Oswald de Andrade's poetry and manifestos; and the creation of musical languages by structuring literary compositions around musical metaphors in texts from varied genres by de Greiff, Coronel Urtecho and Pasos, Mário de Andrade, Cardoza y Aragón, and Puerto Rico's Luis Palés Matos.

Some of these experiments evolved (like the Leyendas de Guatemala or Guillén's poetry) in contexts of cultural specificity that contradicted, either implicitly or openly, vanguardist claims to linguistic purity. But on another level, all of them also manifested the quest for an invented, original language enacted in Altazor 's ill-fated odyssey. For all its eschewal of context and reference and the transgressiveness of the experiments that it generated, this imagined early verbal world embodied concrete positions on language and culture. In her brilliant analyses of the visual arts in the international avant-gardes, Rosalind Krauss has demonstrated that in vanguardist discourse, originality is equated with a literal origin, a "beginning from ground zero, a birth" (157). She has also shown how the artistic grid incarnates this goal in much of modern art. Although Krauss addresses the visual realm, her observations are useful for thinking about the vanguards' portrayal of linguistic originality. "Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming even more stringent and manifest," Krauss writes, "the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse." The grid shores up the visual arts, she adds, against "the intrusion of speech" (9; my emphasis), and its "abso-

lute stasis" embodies the posture of the avant-garde artist (158). The grid's modernity is also contained in its peculiar construction of space and time. Its flattened out, geometrical substance is "antinatural, antimimetic, antireal" (9). Temporally, the grid proclaims an artistic principle that has never existed before. Its apparent material quality notwithstanding, moreover, the grid provides many artists with a "staircase to the Universal" and a way to talk allegorically about "Being or Mind or Spirit" (10) and thus imbues the avant-garde concept of originality with a mythical air.

Although Krauss addresses an ideal of visual, not verbal, art that is insistently hostile to speech, her characterization of the grid points to analogous features in the avant-gardes' imagined primary language. Bakhtin's conception of poetic language provides a bridge from Krauss's visual "ground zero" to the literary vanguards' verbal void. In light of much twentieth-century poetry that deliberately exploits the heteroglossia of multiple nonartistic languages, Bakhtin's sweeping affirmation that poetic language is monologic (in contrast to the dialogic novel) seems problematic. But in constructing this dichotomy, Bakhtin is working with a circumscribed definition of poetic language in response precisely to the aestheticist impulse to empty language of history or meaning and to invent new languages. This particular view of poetic language is not universal but historically grounded, Bakhfin is quick to note.^[10] Poetic language, in this view, resists the internal dialogization typical of prose and suspends any "mutual interaction with alien discourse" ("Discourse in the Novel" 285). Like the grid that shuts out history and speech (Krauss describes it as an artistic ghetto), poetic language as defined by Bakhtin is complete unto itself and manifests the individual artist's drive for absolute linguistic control.

In poetic genres, artistic consciousness—understood as a unity of all the author's semantic and expressive intentions—fully realizes itself within its own language; in them alone is such consciousness fully immanent, expressing itself in it directly and without mediation, without conditions and without distance. The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed in it, inseparable from it, he makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to its unmediated power to assign meaning (as it were "without quotation marks ") that is, as a pure and direct expression of his own intention. (285; my emphasis; his emphasized in original)

Like Krauss's grid, this poetic language seeks its own kind of universality, unmediated by the contingencies of history and culture embodied in "alien speech," and harbors yearnings for metaphysical complete-

ness through an imagined "'language of the gods'" or a "'priestly language of poetry'" ("Discourse in the Novel" 287). In imagining this kind of unified expression, poetic language struggles to elide language's historical responsiveness to the "day" or the epoch. "At any given moment," Bakhtin observes, "languages of various epochs and periods of socio-ideological life cohabit with one another. Even languages of the day exist" (291). Poetry, in his view, "depersonalizes 'days' in language," that is, the markers of time and culture.

Bakhtin's characterization of this specific kind of poetic language is particularly pertinent to the vanguards' dream of a linguistically pure, original space. Like Krauss's grid, this imagined early world is hostile to the intrusion of historically inflected language, that is, language that anybody might have used. This model for verbal creation—hostility to known languages and the preference for fabricating new ones—is also analogous to the grid in its special relationships to space and time. The grid's flattened geometrical substance parallels the architectural impulse that underlies the vanguardist reconstruction of language "from scratch," replacing the syntactical and lexical building blocks (containing historical markers) with primal screams, sounds, disconnected syllables, rhythms, whispers, and sighs. Latin American vanguardists often construed their language work with spatial metaphors, as de Greiff's forging of a "new architecture of words." Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, a participant in Mexico's Contemporáneos group, observed that the new poetry's play of words had been born from an "architectonic intervention" in language (HV 92), and ultraísta manifestos called for manipulating words like playing cards (MPP 98). Alberto Hidalgo, Peru's poet of simplismo, described in his manifesto "Pequeña retórica personal" the architectural strategy in his "many-sided" poetry: "I make a poem the same way that I would build a house; I place brick by brick" (MPP 221).

The peculiar relationship to time established by the vanguards' verbally pure creative space is even more comparable to Krauss's grid. This creative expression from the void announces its own first-time substance as language that aspires retroactively never to have been used before. Altazor's hyperbolic claim to being "the only singer of the century" epitomizes this stance (OC 1: 415; EW 143). But the imagined linguistic purity supposes its own time-out-of-time through the resistance, in Bakhtinian terms, to the "days" inscribed in the languages of narrative and speech. This ahistorical quality is implicit in ultraísmo 's conception of words "as ends in themselves" (HV 267), in the very

notion of a newborn word, and in the effort to make new poetic languages mean whatever poets intended them to mean or, more important, not to mean at all. There is also overt antipathy to notions of historical time, as in Huidobro's search for a poetry that had "no past and no future" (OC 1: 654), or Altazor's search for "a ritual of shadowless words" that emerge prior to all time (OC 1: 393; EW 83; my emphasis). This image reverberates in numerous manifestos, as in the Puerto Rican noísmo search for an art that refuses to recognize "the limits of time and space" (LHA 244).

The analogy with Krauss's grid of modern art extends further to aspirations for the infinite and the universal. Metaphysical quests for a unity of expression and experience unmediated by rational discourse often frame the vanguardist searches for newborn language. This desire for primal links with the universe so clearly evident in Altazor echoes throughout vanguardist poetry and manifestos in repeated allusions to cosmic chaos and the human anguish it generates. But the search for a language prior to all time intimates a universality of human experience and emotion somehow divested of the historical and cultural accretions that shape actual languages in real-life worlds. It also elides the complications and density of differences in experience and worldview (of the "alien," in Bakhtin's terms) inscribed in mutually unintelligible languages. This idealized pre-Babelic language behind history—the primal scream, the "spirit whisper of the wordless phrase," the "fresh scream of the flesh"—would somehow obliterate the differences among languages. This aim at linguistic universality was often spelled out. We should recall, for example, that Huidobro described the creation of new poetic language as a "universal" birth, and in the creacionismo manifesto he explained that the new poetry "becomes translatable and universal, for new events remain identical in all languages" (OC 1: 677). "A language," the "Granizada" proclamation of Venezuela affirms, "is the universe translated into that language" (MPP 161). Puerto Rico's euforistas proclaimed the unity of races and "the uselessness of frontiers and languages" (MPP 128). In Ecuador, José Antonio Falconí Villagómez (a collaborator with the vanguardist poet Hugo Mayo) produced a manifesto-style "Arte poética (No. 2)," directing artists toward a poetics of linguistic universality, "to speak the universal language / with all the sirens of the World" (MPP 117).

But this purist image of linguisric unity was simultaneously contested from within the vanguardist ranks. Amid the pursuit of a universal idiom behind and before all languages, groups and individual writers un-

dertook ambitious projects for recuperating what were portrayed as nationally or ethnically inflected expressive forms, for incorporating them into literary works, and for affirming their aesthetic worth and experiential validity. Some of these endeavors were expressed in precisely the same allegories of linguistic origins that framed the search for a universal language, but recast in vernacular modes, as writers claimed the imagined sites of early words as features of their own cultural formation. Because of its dialogue with Huidobro's work, the story of linguistic creation in the Leyendas de Guatemala with which I began this chapter presents a fitting example of this vernacular turn. Constructed from sources portrayed as Guatemala's cultural legacy, that story also embodies vanguardist inquiries into the problematic relationships between language and cultural identity formations.

Language Identities in a Vanguardist Idiom

Certainly the insertion of language into national or ethnic identity projects is not in itself a product of the literary avant-gardes. In the Western world, language's pivotal function in defining inclusive and exclusive identities is inscribed in the etymological roots of the word barbarian: "somebody who does not speak Greek."^[11] In the modern era of nation-states, language, ethnicity, and nation interact through the development of administrative vernacular print languages, a phenomenon carefully traced by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . Language and nation or ethnicity are also insistently juxtaposed in modern intellectual history, through romantic nationalist ideologies and the nineteenth-century consolidation of philology as a scientific discipline that sought evolutionary parallels between linguistic, literary, and national development. Because of what Anderson has identified as the "primordialness of languages" and the illusion of language as "rooted beyond almost anything else in contemporary societies" (145), attention to language in cultural contexts always generates tensions between essentialism and historicity. Language may be considered an actor in material culture but also a protagonist in the history of powerful ideas, the embodiment and raw material of myth.

As early as 1882, Ernest Renan cautioned in his address "What Is a Nation?" against forgetting that languages are historical formations and

the temptation to ground national identities on idealized notions of racial, religious, or linguistic purity. From a historical perspective, Renan observed, language is, like race, merely something which is made and unmade (15–16). And yet, as Anderson points out (significantly, in his chapter "Patriotism and Racism"), a national language is also a potent and captivating idea that "looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past" and simultaneously the idealized embodiment, especially in poetry or song, of "a special kind of contemporaneous community" that projects an image of "unisonance" (145). But, as Mary Louise Pratt suggests in a critique of Anderson's work, investigations of links between language and identity formations may also address the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at work in conceptualizing linguistic uniformities through these national or ethnic "linguistic utopias."

These tensions between language as a national myth and language as historically formed, between inclusive and exclusive languages, shape vanguardist discourse on linguistic identities in Latin America. As I have noted in the chapter on Americanist projects, Latin America's vanguard movements coincided historically with a renewed intensity in the discourse of cultural autonomy that had engaged Latin American writers since the post-Independence years. Language issues had played a key role in the nineteenth-century projects seeking national and continental identity, most notably in the polemic between Andrés Bello, in favor of maintaining continental linguistic uniformity, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a qualified advocate of incorporating into literature the linguistic forms actually spoken in the new republics.^[12] The centripetal impulse toward standardization within national boundaries and the linkage of language with state culminated in the century's last three decades with the foundation of national language academies on the French and peninsular models. The centrifugal affirmation of unofficial languages was manifested in the work of writers who sought to textualize orality as a palpable sign of desired cultural authenticities.

But the appearance of culturally patterned linguistic issues in Latin American vanguardist practice represents not merely unresolved autonomy questions that reemerged with the New World spirit surrounding centennial celebrations of independence. The singularity of this renewed inquiry lies in the modern alertness to language itself, to the stories of social and cultural struggle that its own constitution enacts, and to the critical potential inscribed in its own mercurial inconstancy. On one level, these linguistic projects do indeed affirm the creative and critical worth of culturally "authentic" languages; they struggle to bring

into the linguistic and literary marketplace idioms formerly excluded. But in a more radical vein, many of these activities also reflect on the cultural processes and relationships implicit in the pursuit of linguistic uniformity or difference. Although they seek on one level the image of "unisonance" with which Benedict Anderson characterizes the concept of a national language, these projects often also foreground linguistic dissonance and complication.

Nation and Ethnicity in Language Activities

Emerging in the context of activist cultural nationalism that I have described in the introduction, the interest in culturally specific languages constituted a significant aspect of vanguardist activity in several Latin American countries. Brazilian modernismo was marked by a polemically antiacademic spirit, a rejection of prescriptive expressive forms, and the explicit goal to employ the idiosyncrasies of spoken Brazilian Portuguese as the material of art. Even though from the time of its establishment in 1896 the Academia Brasileira de Letras had directed more attention to New World Portuguese than its Spanish American counterparts had done with Spanish, the academy provided a frequent target for innovators' polemics. Graça Aranha, who had given a keynote lecture in the historic Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, articulated the antiacademic position in a 1924 lecture, "O espíritu moderno," before the academy itself. After criticizing the establishment of the academy on the French model as the institutionalization of a nonexistent tradition that was yet to be created, Graça Aranha suggested that creating a specifically Brazilian literature was a project at odds with the whole concept of a language academy. He proposed that the academy incorporate in its dictionary colloquial Brazilian words and expressions and deliberately exclude from its lists language used only in Portugal. In keeping with this philosophy, he suggested that all works published by the academy, all papers prepared by its members, and all works cited with awards be written in "ordinary, common language, expurgated of all archaisms or of ... Portuguese verbal classicism" (GMT 325).

This commitment to spoken language extended to regional, indigenous, and African influences and permeated the work of avant-garde literary artists. In the "Prefácio intcressantíssimo" manifesto that introduces the Paulicéia desvairada poetry collection, Mário de Andrade praised the Brazilian language as "one of the richest and most sonorous" and affirmed his commitment to Brazilian Portuguese (PC 22).

Mário imagined, but never realized, a Gramatiquinha da fala brasileira (a "little grammar" of Brazilian Portuguese). Mário did incorporate vernacular inflections into his poetry, in particular, the 1924 Clã do Jaboti collection (1927). But his major linguistic achievement is the novel Macunaíma (1928) that incorporates elements of regional language, idioms, and proverbs into a hybridized amalgam that has been called a "Discourse for the Defense and Illustration of the Brazilian Language" (Martins 194) and contains, as Haroldo de Campos points out, numerous "metalinguistic elaborations" on language themes (Morfologia 187–92). The linguistic education of the novel's eponymous antihero underscores the point, as he is forced to learn two languages: spoken Brazilian and written Portuguese.^[13]

In the same vein, Oswald de Andrade's "Pau-Brasil" manifesto, a document suggestively titled a "falação" (or chat) in some versions, urges the use of language "without archaisms, without erudition.... The way we speak. The way we are" (GMT 327; SMSR 185). Poems in the Pau-Brasil collection (1924) enact linguistic encounters between "proper" language and language as spoken in Brazil. The concern with language persists in the collection activities of the Antropofagia group described by participant Raul Bopp. The group's projected verbal collections included the creation of a "subgrammar" to recapture "the simplicity of the language, in order to free it from its complex pedagogical gearings" (Bopp, Vida e morte 47). This endeavor was to include dropping cumbersome orthographic elements from written Portuguese and preparing a list of one hundred key words with a "Brazilian flavor." This proclivity for collecting verbal artifacts was manifested more widely in the publication of linguistic studies of regional dialects or indigenous languages, such as O dialeto caipira in the Revista do Brasil or articles on "A lingua tupy" published by the Revista de Antropofagia (Martins 8). A colloquial tone and antiacademic spirit also characterized the poetry of Manuel Bandeira in the modernismo period, for example, in his "Poética" manifesto poem: "I am sick of a lyricism that stops and goes to look up in the dictionary the pure stamp of a word" (BMP 66). His "Evocação do Recife" denigrates those who can only "ape Lusiad syntax" and celebrates the "correct language of the people" because they "speak the delicious Portuguese of Brazil" (BMP 71).

In Peru, the vanguards' antiacademic tone first emerged in the recuperation of Manuel González Prada as a cultural hero. In the prewar decades, González Prada had been the first to recommend that Peruvian art break with Spain and the linguistically conservative Lima spirit,

explore Peru's indigenous traditions, seek linguistic renewal through popular sources, and search for new forms in other literatures.^[14] José Carlos Mariátegui, editor of the vanguardist Amauta, lauded González Prada's revolutionary spirit in El proceso de la literatura, his essay on Peruvian literature from the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), and also in the special issue of Amauta dedicated to his predecessor.^[15] Mariátegui and most of Peru's self-designated vanguardist writers claimed González Prada as a mentor for their attack on the attempt to reinstate colonialist cultural ideals represented by Lima's "futurist" generation. A key member in this group had been José de la Riva Agüero, whose Carácter de la literatura del Perú independiente (1905) had prompted Mariátegui's essay on literature. According to Mariátegui, Riva Agüero and his contemporaries had helped to institutionalize Peruvian culture and literature by establishing the Instituto Histórico del Perú, the Revista Histórica, and the Peruvian language academy.

Against this institutionalization of colonialist models and in keeping with his preference for "natural" language over verbal artifice, Mariátegui proposed that Latin American writers could bridge their distance from everyday experience by using vernacular language. He argued that all classical national literatures had originated from the languages of the street. Thus the Peruvian writers who had contributed most to the creation of a national literature were those who had maintained contact with popular linguistic sources. Mariátegui affirmed that popular language provided a perpetual source of literary innovation and that the innovative potential of popular language was being exploited by even the most cosmopolitan of Spanish America's vanguardist poets, including Borges, whose work frequently adopted the "prosody of the people" (OC 2: 242–44).^[16]

This advocacy of linguistic colloquialism extended to indigenous languages and was played out in Amauta in the vanguardist indigenista poetry of Alejandro Peralta sprinkled with Quechua and Aymara words and in articles on indigenous language.^[17] Linguistic indigenismo also shaped the work of Peru's longest-lasting regional vanguardist magazine, Puno's Boletín Titikaka . This magazine promoted indigenist orthography with the goal of making written Spanish appear visually more like a phonetic transcription of Quechua and labeled such experiments with alternative spellings such as "nwestra ortografía bangwardista" (for "nuestra ortografía vanguardista") and "indoameriqana" (for "indoamericana").^[18] The Boletín 's editor Gamaliel Churata (the pseu-

donym of Arturo Peralta) devoted extensive attention to linguistic investigations in essays, bilingual poetry employing vernacular verse conventions, and the experimental novel El pez de oro that contains countless digressions on the topic and defines the problem of Latin American identity in linguistic terms. The novel comprises a vast experiment in linguistic pluralism as exemplified in the five categories of word entries in its glossary: Quechua, Aymara, hybridizations of the two or of each with Spanish, "plebeianisms" of the Lake Titikaka region (the novel's setting), and neologisms constructed by the author. As in Brazil, these projects evolved in a general cultural environment of linguistic investigations, including, for example, José Gabriel Cosío's Fonetismo de la lengua quechua o runasimi (1924) and the Alfabeto quechua (1925).

In Argentina, national linguistic inquiries by vanguardist writers, though more limited than in Brazil or Peru, reflected continuing debates over popular language in literature dating back to Sarmiento and the post-Independence era. As Francine Masiello documents, the years immediately before the vanguards emerged witnessed rapid developments in cultural, academic, and literary institutionalization in Argentina.^[19] Vanguardist writers addressed the question of whether the spoken language of Buenos Aires and its environs constituted a proper language for literature. The Martín Fierro manifesto includes linguistic independence in its affirmation of cultural autonomy—"faith in our phonetics"—but qualified by a celebration of the country's eclectic cultural inheritance—"a Swedish dentifrice, towels from France, and ... English soap" (MPP 135). Although he later rejected such experiments to the extreme of altering his earlier work, Borges expressed this faith in Argentine phonetics through the lexical and phonological colloquialisms employed in the original versions of his early poetry collections, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) and Luna de enfrente (1925). Soon, however, Borges rejected the cultivation of deliberate linguistic ethnicity, although he also discouraged the proclivity of some writers toward (peninsular) "Hispanophilic" purism. His 1927 lecture "El idioma de los argentinos" expressed a common vanguardist aversion to academic purism in an attack on the pretentious "pseudo-words" and "purest indecisive style" ascribed to the grammar of the academy ("El idioma" 20–21). Although as an ultraísta, Borges had signed manifestos that opposed using everyday language in literature (MPP 113), in the lecture, he suggested that the language of writers should derive from their everyday experience: "the unwritten Argentine language" of "our passion, of our home, of trust, and of conversed friendship" ("El

idioma" 25). Still, he opposed the studied cultivation of popular forms. These included the common language of working-class neighborhoods and lunfardo (colloquial underworld language). He also denied the capacity of such unofficial language, or any kind of slang, to effect significant change in the dominant idiom.

Roberto Arlt's work stands in direct contradiction to this view. Writing from his own life experience with a very, different "unwritten Argentine language" from what had been lived by Borges, Arlt combined in his novels, particularly in Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931), radical innovations in narrative voice and localization with a creative hodgepodge of spoken and, until then, nonliterary languages. These include lunfardo, Argentine regionalisms, foreign words, and metaphors and imagery derived from modern scientific and technological jargon.^[20] In a 1930 journalistic sketch, entitled, like Borges's lecture, "El idioma de los argentinos," Arlt employed a pugilistic metaphor to take a more radical, Bakhtinian-style stand on the influence of unofficial languages on the norm. The human groups with no new ideas to express, he argued, need no new words or "strange turns of the phrase." By contrast, peoples in continuous evolution (as in Argentina) strike out, like boxers, with words "from all angles," words that "anger professors" (OC 2: 486). Groups impose their language through "prepotency," Arlt affirmed here, adding that it would be absurd to confine new ideas in a canonical grammar. He further supported this position that popular language has transformative power in a series of articles that highlighted individual samples from a colloquial Argentine lexicon to show their creative potential and their etymological development.^[21]

The antiacademic tone of their language activities is inscribed in the Nicaraguan vanguardists' group name, the Anti-Academy. The first manifesto proposed bringing to light past linguistic and literary forms belonging to a national tradition (50A 24). The manifesto "Cartelón de vanguardia" polemicized against "the copy, rhetoric, the rules, academism, linguistic purity" (50A 173), and the manifesto "Dos perspectivas" set forth the goal to "conserve our tradition, ... our customs, ... our language" (50A 27). Following these self-directives, the Nicaraguan vanguardists gathered popular sayings, colloquialisms, children's rhyming games, songs, tongue twisters, lullabies, and popular verse forms from the Hispanic tradition. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Joaquín Pasos, and José Coronel Urtecho, among others, incorporated many of these into their poetry and into the experimental performance piece Chinfonía burguesa (1931–36).^[22]

In his retrospective on the group, "Los poetas en la torre," Cuadra later recalled this activity: "And we went to the people to interrogate their voices, their expressions, their living language, their forms, their namings" (188). In addition, Cuadra explained, they adjusted their literary language syntactically to approximate the language of conversation. Cuadra's own "Ars poética" of this period declares the need to "find the poetry of ordinary things," to "sing for anybody / with the ordinary tone" (OPC 1: 88–89). With more overtly vernacular metaphors, Pasos's brief poetic manifesto of linguistic specificity, "Por, en, sin sobre, tras ... las palabras," celebrates "Mombacho words" and urges other poets to clothe their poetic expression in bombacho trousers (50A 139). Moreover, the performance piece Chinfonía burguesa by Pasos and Coronel Urtecho constitutes a manifesto of linguistic nationalism in its language theme and colloquial expressions and verse forms.

Cuban vanguardist activity developed during a period of intense cultural self-definition in Cuban arts and public life. Members of the Grupo Minorista, many of whom founded the Revista de Avarice, committed themselves both to "vernacular art" and to "new art" (MPP 249). The magazine's concern with Cuban and American identities was epitomized in its consecration of José Martí as its cultural mentor, comparable to the Peruvian Amauta 's attention to the work of Manuel González Prada.^[23] As in Brazil and Peru, Cuban intellectuals of this period dedicated themselves to retrieving and collecting cubanismos, as in Fernando Ortiz's Un catauro de cubanismos (1923) and his Glosario de afronegrismos (1924). Works such as these made no claims to a vanguardist character, and Ortiz, a consummate investigator, was neither a vanguardist nor a member of the Grupo Minorista. Still, it is interesting that, as Gustavo Pérez Firmat has carefully documented, the Catauro de cubanismos flaunted the conventions of its genre in the same antiacademic spirit so pervasive in new art ventures.^[24]

The self-conscious cultivation of autochthonous language within a context of aesthetic innovation appeared primarily in the early poetry of Nicolás Guillén and, to some degree, in Alcjo Carpentier's dramatic experiment Manita en el suelo (1931) and his novel ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933). Guillén constructed an image of linguistic cubanismo through lexical and phonological colloquialisms, intonations, and stylized percussive elements associated with popular speech and Afro-Cuban culture, as well as through rhythms, acoustical elements, and responsive conventions derived from popular music. The verses from "Si tu su-

piera" in the Sóngoro cosongo collection (1931) are typical: "Aé / bengan a be; / aé, / bamo pa be; / bengan, sóngoro cosongo / sóngoro cosongo de mamey" (OP 1: 105). Here the colloquial "bengan a be" and "bamo pa be" ("come and see" and "let's go see") replace the more normative "vengan a ver" or "vamos a ver." In the manifesto poem "Llegada" that opens the collection, the poetic

speaker allegorizes the "arrival" of non-European elements into Cuban cultural and linguistic life: "Here we are! / The word comes to us moist from the forests / and an energetic sun rises in our veins" (OP 1: 115).^[25] Guillén's poetry of this period focuses on oral expression, not only by incorporating song and colloquial elements but also by employing forms that evoke verbal situations and encounters. These include the piropo, the verbal engagement of a woman by a man on the street in "Sóngoro cosongo," the street vendor's cry in "Pregón," and the riddle in "Adivinanzas." In the collection mode that permeated vanguardist activity, Guillén actively gathered pregones from different parts of Cuba and carefully studied their musical, improvisational, and structural features. He even suggested, parodying conventional academic undertakings, establishing a "Municipal Academy of Pregones " in Camagüey, to educate new voices that would replace the ones being lost (Prosa de prisa 1: 25).

Although there was some disagreement among Puerto Rico's vanguardist groups about cultivating deliberately vernacular art, Luis Palés Matos, Puerto Rico's principal creator of afronegrista poetry, suggested the Puerto Rican and Antillean poets should draw on the linguistic richness of the region's African cultures (cited in LHA 48).^[26] In addition to Palés Matos's negrista poetry, poetic compositions such as the "Fugas diepálicas" by J. I. de Diego Padró or the "Orquestación diepálica" by Palés Matos and de Diego Padró enacted oral situations of poematic exchange and response, even when the participating voices were not always human. Thus concluding verses in the latter orchestrate bird, animal, and insect "voices" attributed to an Antillean world.

Pit . . . pit . . . pit . . . co-quí-co-co-quí . . . quí
Pitirr-pitirr, chi-chichichuí, chi-chichichuí . . . 
Chocla, chocla, cho cla, mmmeee . . . . . . 
Caaacaracaca, pío, pío, caaaracacaaa . . . 
Juá, juá, juá, juá; uishe-ó, uishe-ó, uishe-ó
Cucurucú! qui qui ri quí ¡Cocorocó!                  (LHA 166)

In other countries, such as Mexico and Chile, the cultivation of linguistic specificity did not constitute a major component of vanguardist

groups' agenda, although it did surface in memorable ways in the work of individual writers. Xavier Icaza's generically unstable, satirical novel Panchito Chapopote, for example, combines a telegraphic, synthetic vanguardist style with an eponymous antihero, Panchito, who in character and language is intended to embody the "Mexican people" of the post-revolutionary era. Pablo de Rokha's surrealist novel Escritura de Raimundo Contreras (1929) inserts stream-of-consciousness narration into the linguistic reality of a Chilean huaso . And although there was no significant vanguardist activity in Guatemala itself, Asturias's Leyendas de Guatemala (written in Paris), which combined the language of the Popol Vuh with elements from Guatemala's popular tradition, presents one of the outstanding results of vanguardist linguistic ethnicity in Latin America. Its final piece, the play Cuculcán (which I examine below) constitutes a discourse on language.

Ancestral Voices and National Essence

These multiple linguistic projects cultivate the spoken word or unofficial language as repositories of national or ethnic identity and insist on the singularity and cultural worth of each vernacular idiom. All of these endeavors seek to insert the languages of concrete cultural experience into a specific literary world, "bringing [them] into writing," a phrase James Clifford uses to describe what ethnographers do when they salvage oral traditions (Writing Culture 113). Because of their focus on cultural difference, on the surface these undertakings appear antithetical to the vanguardist pursuit of a pristine and primal verbal world, that linguistic utopia in which poets can speak in the newborn language of a time before time. But the figures in which these cultural linguistic goals are often embedded deflect the vanguardist discourse of origins toward a specific cultural experience in which Huidobro's "cries of the universal birth" become instead the birth cries of a culturally concrete linguistic identity.

Vanguardist writers build this image by drawing on the mythical aura surrounding the idea of language itself, those qualities noted by Anderson in Imagined Communities, including "primordialness," an air of "rootedness," and the sensation of looming up from a "horizonless past" (144). What looms up from that imagined past is the image of a rooted ancestral voice through which the artist in tune with his or her culture might speak. In Huidobro's creacionismo, we should recall, only those who have not forgotten "the accents of the world in formation"

are prepared to call themselves poets (OC 1: 654–55). By virtue of the vernacular turn, those in tune with a primordial or ancestral voice become particularly qualified to speak for their specific contemporary human community. This portrayal of language partakes of the same primitivist discourse of origins that I have explored in the vanguardist stories of America. But here the emphasis falls specifically on language, through the search for culturally inflected primal voices and originary words. Thus the unisonance of a universal language becomes the unisonance of a specific national or ethnic experience. In Latin American vanguardist discourse, this link is forged through orality, the concept of a living voice engaged in speech or song.

In this vein, Mário explained in the "Prefácio interessantíssimo" manifesto introducing the urban poetry of Paulicéia desvairada that he had set forth through the city's jungle with his "variegated lute" (PC 30). In that collection's poem "Trovador," the speaker celebrates sentiments of "the men of the first eras" and announces "I am a Tupi strumming a lute" (PC 32–33). Similarly Raul Bopp (of the Antropofagia group), in his lengthy primitivist poem Cobra norato (1928–31), portrayed a speaker whose source is "voices that come from far away" (27), and in "Negro," he invoked "the voice of ignored origins" that weighs in the black man's blood (Cobra norato 127). Similarly, in Guillén's "Llegada" announcing the arrival of black language into Cuban literary culture, the speaker's words derive from a prehistoric source. In the opening scene of the Leyendas de Guatemala, the narrator returns to his homeland to seek out the voices that lie buried under its palimpsest of "sonorous cities." Later, the storyteller proves his creative prowess by returning to the primeval forest where he hears the echoes of the earliest tribes, "where their song began" (18). Similarly, the Nicaraguan vanguardist Luis Alberto Cabrales imagined in "Canto a los sombríos ancestros" a timeless poetic voice, "filled with the ancestral soil and burning" an "ancient voice ... impetuous and agile, like you, ancestors" (50A 127–28).

Not surprisingly, fashioning a linguistic identity through ancestral orality often relied on nature. The organic metaphor, so prevalent in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, is critically reexamined in the 1920s novela de la tierra, as Carlos Alonso has demonstrated in The Spanish American Regional Novel, and also reemerges to be challenged, as I have shown, by the vanguardist portrayals of America. But vanguardist dialogues specifically addressing language are also sustained by

a kind of verbal tellurism through which the ancestral word of cultural identity becomes firmly rooted. The poetic speaker in Asturias's Leyendas provides the most literal example. His song emerges in the jungle's delirious night, as, borrowing from sacred Mayan tales, he begins to grow roots and feels himself a part of the land. Brazilian Plínio Salgado, in his article "A língua tupy" in the Revista de Antropofagia, analyzed phonetic and semantic elements in order to maintain that this "nascent" language provided unmediated contact between humanity and nature, a "true eucharist of man in intimate cosmic union" (Salgado 6). Luis Cardoza y Aragón's Pequeña sinfonía del nuevo mundo presents a disoriented poet in New York out of touch with nature: "Words were impotent, they did not create, they had lost their genesic magic" (263). In Guillén's "Llegada," we recall, the speakers' ancestral voices arise "moist from the forests." Similarly, as Cuadra urged his fellow poets in "Ars poética" to return to the sources of song, his own "Canción del momento extranjero en la selva" discovers ancestral voices in a primeval Nicaraguan setting: "Prior to my song / prior to myself, / in the heart of our mountains" (OPC 147). In the Andean world, the speaker in Oquendo de Amat's "madre campo" from 5 metros de poemas draws initial words from nature with a voice "primitive like the rain and the hymns" (n.p.). And in Ecuador, Hugo Mayo employed a comparable verbal tellurism with a cumbersome image verging on parody: "men fastened like ticks / on the terrestrial pachyderm / unsheathe your orations" ("Bujía polar" 62).

Beyond the imagined ancestral voice, orality gave way to a second essentialist notion. The vanguardist utopian quest for a verbal void as a creative ground zero was marked, as I have shown, by a preference for the most basic units of expression, those that with a gridlike hostility to the "intrusion of speech" barely approximate language at all: Huidobro's "spirit whisper of the wordless phrase," de Greiff's "mute voice," or the "Agú" manifesto's "fresh scream of the flesh." The vanguards' linguistic identity projects redirect this taste for the minimal elements of language toward the search for essential units of cultural definition. Thus the spoken word, or the written version approximating oral models, is portrayed not only with the aura of presence ascribed to an ancestral voice but also as the repository of a deeply structured authenticity. Writers search for a singular sound, word, or phrase that might express the essence of a particular human community. Through this linguistic unit and often with wording that today would be re-

garded as racialist, biology and history, nature and culture converge, and linguistic artifacts personify national character.

In this vein, the Venezuelan "Granizada" proclamation declares that one can classify human groups in accordance with the interjections on which they rely. While this manifesto seems to speak more than slightly tongue-in-cheek, others sound more serious, as when the Martín Fierro manifesto pledges faith in "our phonetics" or in Luis Palés Matos's identification of an Antillean "accent" and "homogeneous cultural rhythm" (LHA 48). In Nicaragua, Cuadra wrote of "vernacular unity" and "vibrations" forming the soul of a people and borne out through race, blood, environment, beliefs, and language (50A 47–48). In Brazil, Menotti del Picchia explained that modernistas wanted to "write with blood" (GMT 291), and in his lecture "O espíritu moderno," Graça Aranha identified occult forces endowing the Brazilian language with its "marvelous enchantment of alluvium and solar splendor" and the capacity to express a "collective spirituality" (GMT 322). Mário celebrated the wonders of the "very admirable ão" of Brazilian Portuguese (PC 22), and Brazil's Antropofagia group, as I have noted, collected words with a "Brazilian flavor," selecting the word mussangulá to incarnate national character: "a variety of philosophical laziness, of a Brazilian cast" and "against everything that is coherent, syllogistic, geometric, Cartesian" (Bopp, Vida e morte 48). In "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano," Guillén's Cuban boxer on Broadway holds the power to "speak in black for real" (OP 120), and, addressing the idiosyncrasies of Buenos Aires language, Arlt singled out certain special words (furbo, fraca, squenun ) as representative of a singular cultural experience.

In its customary fashion, Mário's Macunaíma carries the idea of cultural essence through language to the edge of parody. The eponymous Brazilian hero is born in the depth of a virgin forest in a primeval moment of silence. As if aware of his duty and destiny as a national hero to provide an ancestral voice, Macunaíma prolongs this silent moment for six years and, when forced to talk, only exclaims, "Ai! que preguiça!" (Oh! What laziness!) (5). Its parodic tone notwithstanding, Macunaíma's highly colloquial first sentence has, from the time the novel was first published, been interpreted as a verbal icon of essential Brazilianness.^[27] More important, perhaps, Macunaíma 's parodic gesture toward its own creation of an ancestral voice and a verbal essence points to contradictions shaping the vanguards' cultural linguistic ventures and to their potential for a more critical impact.

Linguistic Estrangement as Cultural Critique

The idea that a national or ethnic essence can be summed up in a privileged verbal artifact is consonant with ideologies of cultural nationalism. As Anderson suggests, the imagined community of a nation becomes the imagined community constituted by the speakers of a given language. But Pratt addresses in "Linguistic Utopias" limitations inherent in these imaginings. It is not uncommon, Pratt notes, for the notion of "speech community" sustaining utopian visions of linguistic nationalism to be appropriated by subgroups within a given national entity to affirm the intrinsic value of those groups, as in concepts such as "black English" or "women's language." Such projects, she observes, can be "extraordinarily empowering," as they challenge "the normative forces of standard grammar" and insist on "heterogeneity, on the existence and legitimacy of lifeways other than those of dominant groups" (56). But Pratt compares the limitations of such ventures to nineteenthcentury dialect studies that addressed language as a "nexus of social identity" but failed to see it as the "site of social struggle" in which dominant and dominated participate (56).

In Myth and Archive, Roberto González Echevarría has posited a somewhat related idea in expounding a theory of Latin American narrative. Bringing together Bakhtin and Foucault, he develops the idea that Latin American writers construct a position from which to legitimize their own stories by mimicking the rhetorical strategies of hegemonic, nonliterary discourses dominant in certain historical epochs. In this model, a Bakhtinian notion of a dialogic resistance to official discourse is tempered by a Foucaultian insistence on the power of that dominant discourse to shape individual stories. González Echevarría seeks, in part, to show the interaction of the two in Latin American development as a discursive struggle between the hegemonic practice and the individual writer staking out a legitimate position from which to speak. Pratt's work suggests a comparable approach to the problem of language identifies by addressing language as the site of interaction between languages of power and languages of resistance, a struggle in which both participate.

Anderson's inquiry into the role of language in nationalist ideologies points to an additional problem in the concept of a language community, empowered or not. The idea of a national language, Anderson observes, especially in poetry or song, can project a feeling of uni-

sonance. Considering Pratt's points about subcommunities, this could be true whether the speech community in question is official and empowered or a more marginal group through which a broader-based national identity is sought, such as blacks in a predominantly white Western society or Indians in Peru. The unisonance of the resisting speech community would be substituted for the unisonance of the dominant language, as one essentialist model of authenticity would seek to displace another. In constructing linguistic identities in Latin America, vanguardist artists used the discourse of origins, specifically, through images of the ancestral voice and cultural essence, to affirm cultural autonomy in art. The mythical return to the beginnings of an imagined ancestral language and the elevation of primary linguistic forms (sounds, interjections, phrases) to the status of cultural entities sustain the same ideal of self-present linguistic unity we saw in Huidobro's poetics. Thus the quest for linguistic difference paradoxically leads back to another "universal" language, different only because of its specific cultural context.

On one level, then, vanguardists worked to bring idioms formerly excluded into the literary marketplace, a project of cultural resistance grounded in affirming new models of authenticity. But in a more radical vein, many of these activities also reflect on the cultural relationships implicit in notions of linguistic uniformity and difference. At times these writers focused on orality not as a privileged site of linguistic presence but so as to reenact specific historical situations and to reveal language as a locus of cultural disputes and interactions. Against the unisonance implicit in a linguistically pure poetic space—or in its vernacular version, the primordial ancestral voice—many vanguardist language activities also foreground linguistic plurality, dissonance, and complication.

Grammar through History and on the Streets

The antiacademic stance—against grammar, the dictionary, the genre, the book—constitutes, as I have noted, a cliché of the vanguardist enterprise. In Latin America, attacks on grammar as the nexus of normative forces and cultural institutions and, above all, as the incarnation of the written word permeate vanguardist activities with or without an autochthonous agenda. Huidobro's Altazor himself calls for "circuit breakers in the sentences" and "cataclysms in the grammar" (OC 1: 393; EW 81 ). Few vanguardist manifestos, in fact, fail to attack

normative language, and, in most cases, these norms are romantically portrayed as stiflers of freedom, emotion, and creativity, as the antithesis to a desired heightened consciousness or transrational language. The affirmation in Venezuela's aphoristic "Granizada" proclamation is typical: grammar serves only to justify the injustices of language (MPP 161). Oliverio Girondo developed this position more fully in his aphoristic exercise Membretes (Veinte poemas, 1932). Life, Girondo observed here, is a long process of "brutalization" in which syntax and the dictionary handicap our natural ability to transform a chair into an ocean liner (96). In Ecuador, José Antonio Falconí Villagómez's "Arte poética" manifesto rejects rhetoric and the academy "because there are no longer any grammarians in the orb" (MPP 117). Also typical is Mário de Andrade's deflection of the antigrammar assault to the vernacular mode. In his manifesto, "A escrava que não é Isaura," the pursuit of "pure lyricism" liberates words from the "syntactic patrol" (GMT 306).

But the attack on grammar, and the orality-writing dichotomy that sustains it, represents more than a romantic rebellion against rules and responds to specific historical circumstances. Certainly these activities reconsider the interaction between oral and literate cultures inscribed in the original European-indigenous encounter. They also address the long-standing struggle between centripetal and centrifugal linguistic forces, or what Angel Rama described in La ciudad letrada as a struggle for literate control of cultural information embodied in the "lettered city" of Latin American life and the democratizing elements within it. As Haroldo de Campos suggests in addressing Brazilian modernismo, a literary focus on oral culture resonates in special ways for societies with large illiterate populations in which to write and speak well are signifiers of privilege and keys to social mobility ("Uma poética" 30). Thus the vanguards' recuperative linguistic undertakings constitute a pragmatic rapprochement between the language of literature and the language of everyday life and underscore language's complicity in social conflict.

This feature becomes most evident in works that allegorize and invert colonialist exercises in linguistic control. If we look one more time, for example, at Guillén's poem "Llegada," which announces the arrival of black language and experience into contemporary Cuban culture, we can see the inversion of a prior encounter. In their first arrival into this Western literate society, blacks controlled neither language nor cultural information. "Llegada" announces, however, the poems (in Sóngoro cosongo and in Motivos de son before it) that will seek to empower the

surviving oral tradition by "bringing it into writing" (Clifford) and to underscore the role that language played in that first encounter. Thus the power to tell that story belongs to those who take possession of the word. Similarly, the Brazilian "Antropófago" manifesto, which inverts European primitivism through a "bad savage" who ingests that culture for his own ends, portrays a historic encounter in linguistic terms. Here Father Vieira, a Portuguese Jesuit colonizer and master of the spoken and written word, takes control of illiterate native inhabitants as Brazilian sugar is "signed away" (GMT 355; LB 39). But the manifesto, like the illiterate king with whom he dealt, appropriates Father Vieira's lábia ("lip" or "gift of gab") and retells the story with the inelegant Brazilian Portuguese supported by Antropofagia members, imbuing it with the power of the written word.

In an Andean context, vanguardist indigenista writers sought to invert the linguistic terms of the colonial encounter by using Quechua and Aymara words and concepts in their poetry and by writing Spanish to conform to indigenous phonology, just as the Spanish colonizers had transliterated indigenous languages through written Spanish. Gamaliel Churata's surrealist novel El pez de oro presents the most striking inversion story, as an autodiegetic narrative voice assumes the form of the totemic Golden Puma to retell Columbus's landing. The account interweaves words from Columbus's written diary with a variety of oral indigenous verse forms constituting the Andean world's oral account of the event as a natural catastrophe. Mário's Macunaíma, as I have noted, enacts an even more intricate reversal, as the eponymous hero, whose spoken language brings into writing an amalgam of Brazilian colloquialisms, parodies the language of the Portuguese explorers to describe for those at home in the virgin forest his adventures in modern São Paulo. The variety of linguistic registers in Macunaíma's letter gives testimony to the complicity of language in cross-cultural encounters. His patronizing description of the paulistas ' language inverts the discovering culture's written account of the oral language spoken by a group it considers inferior, a situation that calls to mind defining as barbarians those who do not speak the conqueror's language. The description also lays out the hierarchy between orality and writing circumscribing such engagements.

Nas conversas, utilizam-se os paulistanos dum linguajar bárbaro e multifário, crasso de feição e impuro na vernaculidade, mas que não deixa de ter o seu sabor e força has apóstrofes, e também nas vozes do brincar.... Mas si de tal desprezível língua se utilizam na conversação os naturals desta terra, logo que

tomam da pena, se despojam de tanta asperidade, e surge o Homem Latino, de Lineu, exprimindo-se numa outra linguagem, mui próxima da vergiliana, no dizer dum panegirista, meigo idioma, que, com imperescível galhardia, sc intitula: língua de Camões! (84)

(In their conversations the Paulistas use a barbarous and multifarious dialect, uncouth and polluted with colloquialisms, but which does not lack gusto and forcefulness in figures of speech and coital idioms.... But although such vulgar and ignoble language is used in conversation, as soon as the natives of these parts pick up a pen, they divest themselves of such crudities and emerge every whir as Homo latinus (Linnaeus), expressing themselves in another language, closer to that of Virgil, to speak as a eulogist in a mellow tongue which, full as it is of everlasting grace, could be called—the language of that immortal bard—Camões!) (EAG 78)

But vanguardist linguistic undertakings also characterize language as the instrument of confrontation in more contemporary social situations. In the manifesto "Dos perspectivas," for example, Cuadra spelled out the historical setting for the Nicaraguan vanguardists' linguistic nationalism: the need to create and preserve national language because of the invasion by "a different race" and an "interventionist civilization" (50A 27 ). Thus Cuadra's "Poema del momento extranjero en la selva" establishes its telluric link with ancestral voices not only to construct a fiction of linguistic identity but also to offer a form of resistance to U.S. involvement in Nicaraguan affairs in the 1920s and 1930s. Guillén's "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano" allegorizes the confrontation of culture and class between a black Cuban and Yankee urban modernity through the talc of a boxer on Broadway in which linguistic punches mingle with the more palpable kind. In these lines, the match is posed through language: "Your English / only a bit more shaky than your feeble Spanish / is good enough inside the ring / for you to understand that filthy slang / spit from the jaws of those you waste / jab by jab" (OP 119; RM 55). The poem concludes that while Europe seeks black culture through music, the Cuban may vaunt his heritage pugilistically by speaking "in black for real" (OP 120).^[28]

Several of Oswald's Pau Brasil poems portray sociolinguistic standoffs. The poem "o gramático" ironically contrasts how blacks using colloquialisms and a learned grammarian would tell the same story. Similarly, "pronominais" contrasts two ways of requesting a cigarette: in the grammatical speech of a professor, a student, and a "knowing" mulatto or in the everyday language of the "Brazilian nation" as spoken by the "good black" and the "good white" (Poesias reunidas 114). Other vanguardist works take these grammatical confrontations to the

street on a grand scale, situating them within social and artistic hierarchies of the epoch. Thus Huidobro's satirical play En la luna dramatizes the relationship between language and power in an endless sequence of political coups marked by each group's seizure of linguistic control and display of verbal virtuosity. Mário's "As enfibraturas do Ipiranga," the poetic performance manifesto concluding the Paulicéia desvairada collection, presents an oratorio in verse that characterizes its São Paulo participants by verbal style, social class, and aesthetic position. The oratorio, set initially on the esplanade of São Paulo's Municipal Theater, is also to be performed from diverse sections of the city designating the class of its participants. As a multivocal linguistic event, this piece represents language as the contentious site of cultural change. In a more humorous vein, similar lines are drawn by the Nicaraguan performance piece Chinfonía burguesa by Pasos and Coronel Urtecho. Here, too, characters' varied styles embody social positions or attitudes, of the bourgeoisie, the outmoded modernista artist, and a popular tradition epitomized in the irreverent language of the maid that dominates in the piece.

Oswald took the fight against grammar to the streets in the threescene radically experimental play A morta (1937), dramatizing the struggle of a lyric poet to break with aestheticism and reengage his art with the world. As I have described in the chapter on theater, in scene 2, "The Land of Grammar," an urban battle between "moribund" linguistic norms and the "living" language of speech unfolds in the context of Western bourgeois values and traditions. Protagonists in this scene are linguistic forms engaged in a clamorous battle for control: the "dead," including fixed phrases, grave interjections, lustrous adjectives, and seignorial archaisms, and their "living" opponents, including gallicisms, solecisms, and barbarisms. Cremators support these living "characters," advocates of linguistic and social renewal, while a policeman maintains order and shores up the dead who are also backed by conventional politics, the press, industry, and literature. Here the pursuit of oral language reveals the social interactions intertwined with linguistic processes, in a scene that equates aesthetic renewal through language with the impulse for social change.

Roberto Arlt and Mário de Andrade both characterized language as the locus of contentious change through irreverent approaches to etymology. The etymological enterprise harbors both normative and dissident potential. Traditional etymological activity carries with it the normative and metaphysical impulses of comparative philology. The

underlying myth sustaining the etymological enterprise was often the dream of a common original language also prevalent in vanguardist poetic quests but discredited by modern historical linguistics. In addition, the search for older versions and meanings of words betrays a prejudice that the oldest form is somehow the truest and the most correct, an attitude also inherent in traditional approaches to teaching grammar. Moreover, etymology's filiation with comparative philology and the latter's textual tradition align etymology with the power of the written word despite the changes brought about in language by speech. Arlt and Mário both debunked etymology's normative features and redirected etymological inquiry toward complex social and historical developments implicit in language change. They also pointed etymology toward contemporary usage and away from linguistic preservation in written texts.

In his aguafuertes articles on Buenos Aires language, Arlt attacked grammarians ("the dusty and bad-tempered gang of library rats") and characterized everyday speech as the inventive source of creative and changing ideas (OC 2: 487). His etymological analyses of Buenos Aires colloquialisms do briefly compare Spanish and Italian sources, but his language stories move from past to present in a direction contrary to that of classical etymology. Primarily he examined these words as they are used in contemporary life and provided rich material on sociolinguistic contexts through anecdotes about specific situations and speakers. These stories and their transpositions into Arlt's novels suggest a language constantly in flux and resistant to grammatical or lexical norms. Most important, in Arlt's view, language develops through human exchange and through contentions interaction for control of word and context. Arlt's pugilistic metaphor echoes Guillén's: the grammarian is well trained in the grammatical scholasticism of boxing, whereas the inventive Buenos Aires speaker throws punches "from all angles" (OC 2: 486).

As one comes to expect from this work, Mário's Macunaíma parodies etymology's penchant for fixing definitive moments of linguistic change. In the course of his São Paulo ventures, Macunaíma, still struggling to learn spoken Brazilian and written Portuguese, racks his brain to remember the word for buttonhole when a young woman places a flower in his lapel. He improvises with an obscenity, and, to the consternation of philologists, his linguistic innovation, the shift from botoeira to puíto (roughly, "buttonhole" to "arsehole" in Goodland's translation) catches on and spreads rapidly through São Paulo. Learned

articles explain the change through the laws of "catalepsy, ellipsis, syncope, metonymy, metaphony, metathesis, proclesis, prothesis, aphaeresis, apocope, haplology and popular etymology." Thus etymologists trace a change that actually results from Macunaíma's proclivity for the obscene back to its "classical" (and legitimizing) sources: "the word 'buttonhole' had become transmuted into the word 'arsehole' via an intermediate Greek word, 'bumphole.' ... But although the word 'bumphole' had never been found in any medieval documents, the highbrows swore it had existed and had been current in vulgar speech" (89; EAG 82–83).

Though diverse in tone and style, these contestations of normative forces in language all focus on the intricacies of language usage, the contingencies of history and society entangled with language change, and the power issues at work in tensions between norms and innovation. These language stories also call attention to the multiple and unstable ways in which language can mean, an enterprise that fundamentally undercuts the vanguards' own ideal of linguistic unity, whether this ideal is motivated by vernacular concerns or informed by more universalist claims.

Polyphony, Dissonance, Impurity

I showed earlier that vanguardist discourse on primal, original language often projects an ideal of linguistic unity that will somehow eradicate the differences among mutually unintelligible languages. Any language, in this view, is translatable into any other language, because, as Huidobro put it, "new events remain identical in all languages" (OC 1: 677), or, in the words of Venezuelan José Antonio Ramos Sucre, "a language is the universe translated into that language" (MPP 161). In Bakhtinian terms, this language (of poetry, he would say) is sufficient unto itself and assigns meaning "without quotation marks" that might bear witness to alien presences. But, at the same time, the vanguardist dialogue on language undermines its own ideal by persistently tracking down whatever in language remains inaccessible or difficult to comprehend. In fact, vanguardist works and language activities, even some with no explicit autochthonous agenda, work to incorporate the linguistically alien, not to make it completely intelligible but rather to keep it always slightly out of reach.

In his essay "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin addressed contradictory qualities in language relationships that are re-

vealed by translation. Languages, Benjamin argued, are "a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express" (72). This "kinship" is not the equivalent to "likeness" but is based on the similarities of intention brought out by the project of translation. According to Benjamin, translation thus reveals ideals of a "pure language" and a longing for "linguistic complementation" in "the great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language," into a tensionless "language of truth" (73–78). This yearning for one true language that Benjamin described certainly recalls the vanguardist quest for a unified linguistic purity. But he also argued that the act of translation is a provisional way of "coming to terms with the foreignness of languages" (75) and that the necessity of translation itself rests on language's historical and actual plurality (75).

Vanguardist language activities in Latin America underscore the alien in language through deliberate exercises in Bakhtinian heteroglossia that foreground linguistic plurality. Antônio Alcântara Machado, editor of the Brazilian Revista de Antropofagia, invoked this principle in the context of linguistic identity: "The Portuguese Language is not the common patrimony of the race. First because there is not race but races. Second because there is not language but languages" ("Vaca" 1 ). But plurality also develops in more concretely aesthetic terms. Countering the imagined linguistically pristine space, hostile like Krauss's visual grid to the intrusion of actual speech, vanguardist manifestos and creative texts fashion polyphonic images in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, through the orchestration of multiple voices, often not harmonious. This concept of polyphony appears frequently in vanguardist manifestos and challenges the also common vanguardist goal, particularly in ultraísmo, of distilling language into a single synthetic image or metaphor. These writers conceived multivoicing as the polyphonous orchestration not only of actual voices but also of discrete linguistic elements, such as words, sounds, or rhythms. Thus Alberto Hidalgo's early poetic manifesto "La nueva poesía" spells out the polyphony metaphor, already with dissonant notes: "may our verses be sonorous and polyphonous / but not make the sound of crystal flutes" (MPP 48). Early Puerto Rican manifestos posit the concept of "polyrhythm" embracing a diversity of ideas and images (MPP 30). Mário explained in the "Prefácio interessantíssimo" manifesto the concept of poetic polyphony using a simultaneous overlay of disconnected phrases (PC 23; JT 12). In the "La poesía" manifesto, Huidobro described a comparable weaving together of voices through the words that have been "ene-

mies since the beginning of the world" (OC 1: 655). And the Mexican estridentistas described "pure poetry" as a succession of "orchestrally systematized" images suggestive of varied ideological phenomena and emotional states (MPP 158).

Creative texts organized through multiple voicing strengthen this image of linguistic plurality. Many are organized around specific musical metaphors or principles. Musical features certainly abound in Spanish American modernismo and Brazilian symbolism and Parnassianism, which preceded the vanguardist movements. Although there are similarities in this musical interest, the emphasis shifts in the vanguardist works. In the earlier periods, the emphasis on musical elements derived from a driving interest in poetic form and sensory effects. In general, writers in the vanguards draw on musical motifs and structures more for their multiple voicing potential. These voices are to engage in a dialogue that maintains their discreteness rather than merges them into one. Thus the words (or voices) that have been hostile since the beginning of time, to extend Huidobro's metaphor, remain distinct or even antagonistic. This is certainly true in Mário's "As enfibraturas do Ipiranga," the oratorio in verse I have described, which brings together with distinct styles, tones, and aesthetic attitudes voices from diverse social classes in São Paulo, and in the Nicaraguan Chinfonía burguesa with its counterposition of bourgeois, aestheticist, and popular voices with distinct approaches to art and life.^[29] Colombia's de Greiff consistently organized poems in Tergiversaciones (1925) and Libro de signos (1930) around musical motifs. Sections of these often lengthy compositions, for example, "Esquicio No. 2 Suite en Do Mayor," mark changes in tone or style ascribed to poetic speakers or shifting musical voices. The numbered sections of this composition include "Praeludium," "Scherzo," "Nenia," "Baladetta," "Giga," "Chacona," "Canción," "Serena," "Zarabanda," and "Final: Erumna." Reinforcing the polyphonous image, these musical forms are drawn from a variety of classical and autochthonous registers. Guillén's Motivos de son collection draws on a specific musical form, the Cuban son, that by definition requires multiple voicings, a principal (and sometimes secondary) voice that emits the main part of the composition (the motivo or the letra ) and the multiple voices (coro or estribillo ) that reply to the principal voice. These voicings correspond also to the varied musical instruments playing the son .^[30] In Puerto Rico, musical metaphors and multiple voicings also characterize poetic experiments by Palés Matos and de Diego Padró. These include the combination of animal sounds in "Orquestación

diepálica" by both writers and the juxtaposition of these with sounds of nature, the city, and musical instruments in "Fugas diepálicas" by de Diego Padró alone. Also in the musical mode, Mário designated Macunaíma a rhapsody, alluding in part to the novel's piecing together of countless forms of Brazilian Portuguese and popular speech.

But vanguardist texts do not always organize their multiple voicings under an all-encompassing musical metaphor, and music itself might constitute simply one language of many. Alejo Carpentier's experimental theatrical piece Manita en el suelo (1931), for example, a one-act opera buffa from the Cuban popular tradition, pieces together fragments from a variety of oral and musical spheres: prayers, common poetry, popular refrains and sayings, songs, sones, and décimas . In a different mode and cultural context, Argentine Oliverio Girondo's six-part poematic prose piece "Semana Santa" from the collection Calcomanías (1925) interweaves bells, prayers, dialogues, and vendors' refrains heard by the poetic speaker during Holy Week in Seville. In Mexico, Xavier Icaza's experimental novel Panchito Chapopote tells Panchito's story through a variety of voices bombarding the contemporary Mexican scene: languages of Mexican corridos, of political and revolutionary rhetoric, of the petroleum industry, of the media, of popular refrains and local gossip, and even of two parrots who overhear key character conversations. Individual entries in Oquendo de Amat's 5 metros de poemas display multiple linguistic registers through a typographically diverse visual panorama reminiscent of Apollinairc's Calligrammes, Huidobro's "cubist" poems, and futurist typographical experiments. Several pieces of this kind present urban panoramas. Although the most striking visual clement in these poems is their distribution of words to form the "picture" of a city, cityscapes are constructed from verbal artifacts synthesizing lyricism with media idioms and imagery and impinging on contemporary urban life, as in the lines from "new york" shown in the figure on the following page.

The effect of these compendiums of multiple languages, verbal styles, or musical rhythms is rarely harmonic. Rather these works record the proliferation of separate languages that are not always mutually intelligible even when they are in direct dialogue. Certain works address this problem thematically, for example, through bilingualism. Guillén's "Tú no sabc inglé" ("You Don't Know English") recounts a linguistic and sexual misunderstanding (portrayed through a bilingual pun) between a Cuban man and a North American woman. Cuadra's bilingual and ironically entitled "Intervención" enacts a comparable scene of lan-

Top center: Soon the trees will break their tics / And all the policemen
are flower bouquets; top left: CONEY ISLAND / The rain is a coin for shaving;
top right: WALL STREET / The breeze bends the stems / Of the Paramount stars;
center: The traffic / writes / a bride's letter; bottom left: Telephones / are liquor
depots; bottom right: Ten runners / naked on the Underwood

guage encounter with a big-footed gringo and a gringa with honey hair: "Tell the yankee:/ go jón / And the gringuita: / veri güel " (50A 115). Also in Nicaragua, José Román's bilingual "Preludio a Managua en B Flat," subtitled "with accompaniments in English," deploys the musical metaphor in a bilingual mode to document the alien presences in that city and including even a "Dios English Speaking" (an "English Speaking God") ( 50A 120; English in original). These works address the confusion and conflict provoked by linguistic interventions rather than the desirability or accuracy of given forms. Similarly, Oswald de Andrade's "vício na fala" ("vice in speech") from the Pau Brasil collection carries out an ironic exercise in translation between "correct" and "incorrect" speech: "To say milho they say mio / For melhor they say mió / For pior pió " (Poesias reunidas 80). In the long poetic composition "Noturno de Belo Horizonte," Mário portrays Brazil's multiple

verbal modes, including the propensity of some to speak "lackadaisical, untroubled," of the cariocas to "scratch the r's in the throat," and of the capixabas to "widen the vowels" (PC 136).

These texts build a heterogeneous and alien image of language resistant to the dreams of universality or purity so evident in much avantgarde discourse on language. Not surprisingly, then, the Tower of Babel, a provocative alternative to the aestheticist ivory towers of autonomous art, appears as a repeated motif. Framers of the second euforista manifesto, for example, call on poets to "raise the Tower of Babel" of their thinking in order to "unite the races" through language from the Yukon to the pampas (MPP 127). On a more critical note, however, the calligraphic poem "Babel" by Chile's Próspero Rivas is visually arranged in the form of a pyramid-style tower. As Klaus Müller-Bergh points out, this poem employs the Babel metaphor to challenge modern Faustian dreams of aesthetic control ("El hombre y la técnica" 290). Directing the metaphor to the linguistic difference inscribed in the biblical source, Mário's "Jorobabel" protests with greater anguish against modern human misunderstanding and disconnection: "Clamor! Nobody understands one another! A God does not come! . . . Babel!" (PC 90). A more aesthetic emphasis and ironic tone permeate the Babel motif in "Charcos," a short poem by Salvador Novo of Mexico's Contemporáneos group, although this poem's vision of modernity is not unlike Rivas's. Here the poetic speaker contrasts the totalizing quests of a subjectivist Western aesthetic tradition with the relativism of a Babelie modern life. In the former milieu, poets reaching for the heavens show signs of a decadent tradition with "heavy tongues." In contrast, the modern poet faces a more fragmented scene of relativity in both the natural and human worlds: "But a stone / (Oh Einstein) / Made a thousand bats fly / from the Tower of Babel" (INPA 205). Both Mário and Novo employ the allusion to Babel to intimate a human fall through language and a relativistic view of language itself. But vanguardist discourse also often portrays linguistic disunity, manifested in the dissonance of "impure" words, as the very goal that writers pursue.

Cultivating linguistic impurities derives in part from the vanguards' studied avoidance of the banal, an orientation revealed in stands against the language of everyday life taken by Huidobro and the ultraístas as well. The value of poetic language, according to Huidobro, is directly proportional to its distance from the language that people speak (OC 1: 654–55). Borges wrote in the ultraísmo manifesto that to "displace

everyday language toward literature is a mistake" (MPP 113). On the surface, then, the numerous efforts to bring spoken language and oral forms into writing would appear antithetical in spirit and intent to creacionismo and ultraísmo ideals. But these apparently antagonistic projects are akin in pursuing what is alien or not ordinary. Although vanguardists with autochthonous goals sought through oral traditions an image of unisonant national identity, they were simultaneously drawn to the spoken word's strident chords for communicating in a critical mode the radical dissonance of specific experience, contemporary and/or vernacular. Thus these writers engaged in a form of cultural or social translation, bringing specific linguistic forms, designated on one level as familiar and collectively "ours," into profoundly unfamiliar literary contexts and to readers for whom they would be strange. In the process, they called attention to language's alien substance and, in the Bakhtinian sense, deliberately spoke "with quotation marks."

Images of dissonance or impurity abound in vanguardist language talcs. Thus, in the "Prefácio interessantíssimo" manifesto that lays out the project of poetic polypbony, Mário lauded "the great enchantment of dissonance" (PC 24), and, within their "decalogue," Puerto Rico's atalayistas constructed a small manifesto of disharmony: "The screeching of a crank door opening is as melodious as the sighing of a flute. The ripping of a sensual dress is more hypnotizing than a Beethoven symphony" (MPP 356). In amore musical but still discordant vein, Mexico's Jaime Torres Bodet, in an ars poetica composition "Música," contrasted the purity of creation in the abstract—a "music" learned in the "pure language" and "notes of silence" on the keys of a "mute instrument"—with the dissonant notes of creation executed in greater contact with life—"between irascible zithers and flutes, what I dreamed of as sonnet wounds me as symphony" (Obras escogidas 38–39).^[31]

Not infrequently, vanguardists actively sought out the discordant, the impure, and the deliberately incorrect. The Dominican Republic postumista manifesto rejects the notion of "poetic words" (MPP 110), and Puerto Rico's euforistas extended this idea to proclaim a verse "full of defects, harsh and coarse" (MPP 124). Writers with vernacular goals were especially drawn to defects and saw linguistic impurities and mistakes as the raw material of invention. Thus Oswald's "Pau-Brasil" manifesto, in pursuing "language without archaisms, without erudition," and "natural and neologic," also praises "the millionaire-contribution of all the errors" (GMT 327; SMSR 185). Oswald's language poems that I have cited, in particular, "vício na fala" (vice in speech),

defiantly bring "incorrect" language into the literary field. In the same spirit, Manuel Bandeira's poematic manifesto "Poética" assaults "the purists" of linguistic correction and praises "universal barbarisms," "the exceptional syntactical construction," and the "difficult and pungent lyricism of drunks" (BMP 66). In "Evocação de Recife," his poetic speaker equates the "erroneous idiom of the people" with the "correct idiom" (BMP 71). Guillén is particularly drawn to those elements in the language of Cuban pregoneros (street vendors) that evolve from the deliberate creative mistake, for example, the cry promoting "mantecao de aguacate" (avocado ice cream) because it rhymes with his refrain for "crema e' chocolate" (cream and chocolate) (Prosa de prisa 1: 26). Similarly, the Nicaraguan "Cartelón de vanguardia" counterpoises the "linguistic purism" it rejects with "linguistic invention" and "the dirty word" (50A 173). Mário's Macunaíma counters his adversary's massive collection of precious stones with an international array of dirty words, and the narrator retelling Macunaíma's story employs the "impure speech" of the Brazilian people (168).^[32]

In the context of vanguardist poetry, critics normally associate the idea of "impurity," as opposed early on by Huidobro, with Pablo Neruda's memorable manifesto "Sobre una poesía sin pureza" (Toward an Impure Poetry), published in 1935 toward the end of Latin America's vanguardist period.^[33] Here Neruda describes a poetry of contact by "man with the earth" and with the material objects of experience. From these, he explains, poets have much to learn. "Used surfaces," their "wearing away," the "prints of the foot and the finger" can express the "confused impurity" of human beings (HV 259). For some this manifesto marks a gradual shift in Neruda's work, particularly from the second stage of the Residencia de la tierra cycle (1933–35), to a more down-to-earth style.^[34] Others associate the concept of impurity with his poetry's hermetic qualities, characterized early on by Areado Alonso as the "poetics of disintegration" in the Residencia collection.^[35] In either case, some Residencia poems express the manifesto's concept of impurity by speaking directly about language. The poem "Sabor," for example, anticipates the manifesto's idea of an experiential "wearing away" in the image of "conversations worn out like used wood" (OC l: 178).^[36] There is certainly some similarity between this impurity as defined by Neruda and its manifestations in more broadly based vanguardist discourse, particularly in Neruda's thoughts about a poetry contaminated by the messiness of human experience. But there is also a difference in emphasis. Neruda's "impure poetry" as outlined in his

manifesto focuses less on a specific image of language itself and more on how poetic language might express in more accessible ways the impurities of the human condition.

While the activities I have been describing manifest a profound interest in "disarticulated" experience, the images of dissonance and impurity they construct point to the alien and the nonorganic qualities of language itself and its potential to speak with quotation marks. There is a deliberate favoring of "bad language," not simply of dirty words like the ones Macunaíma or the Nicaraguan vanguardists collect but of the kind of fala impura (impure speech) used to sing Macunaíma's tale. Vanguardist discourse on language often emphasizes the critical potential of the impurities themselves, the markers of alterity that, like pauses, puns, slips of the tongue, murmurs, echoes, and creative mistakes, interrupt the smooth flow of discourse and make comprehension for listeners or readers a deliberately discontinuous and arduous experience.

Although he did not explicitly theorize in these terms, the major Latin American poet whose work of the vanguard period probably most completely embodies the approach I have just described is Peru's César Vallejo. Particularly in his most hermetic collection, Trilce, Vallejo transformed language drawn from the quotidian realm into the radically inaccessible. Here linguistic difficulty, played out in the poetry's fragmented syntax, morphological distortions, neologisms with colloquial roots, and vocabulary from multiple nonliterary contexts, traces a tortuous course that links poetic speaker and reader. The speaker's verbal virtuosity and the language's deceptive proximity to words from everyday life notwithstanding, language in Trilce remains irrevocably alien and hard to assimilate, as in these lines from the work's first poem: "Un poco más de consideración / y el mantillo líquido, seis de la tarde / DE LOS MAS SOBERBIOS BEMOLES " (43) (A little more consideration, / and the humus liquidates, six in the afternoon / OF THE MOST ARROGANT B FLATS [RS 5]).^[37] As Jean Franco points out, this poetry provides "involuntary revelations offered by language itself which is never completely controlled by the speaker" (121). Christiane von Buelow's brilliant reading of poem number xxxvi in Trilce presents this piece as a vanguardist "nonorganic" work (in Bürger's terms) and (in Benjamin's) an allegory of linguistic fragmentation enacted through the critical "dismemberment" of the Venus de Milo as the symbol of romantic, symbolist, and Spanish American modernista aesthetic perfection. Most pertinent to my points about the vanguardist focus on linguistic disso-

nance and impurity are von Buelow's observations about Vallejo's practices of "grammatical mutation" and "verbal decomposition," his delibcrate obstruction of musicality through "stammering fragments," and the fact that his use of metaphor is limited almost always to catachresis, that is, to the deliberate misuse of language (44, 47–48).^[38] Von Buelow also suggests that this work's "grammatical and semantic ruins" (the linguistic equivalent of the visual ruins of the Venus de Milo) manifest a dialectical process of reconstruction. On the one hand, these evoke the artwork's (and, I would add, language's) imperfection and, on the other hand, they manifest a will to knowledge, to a "linguistic truth always about to emerge" (50). The discourse on language I have been describing throughout this chapter manifests a comparable continuing tension between images of a transcendent linguistic unity and purity and the unending attraction to language's foreign substance and the critical power released by its deliberate misuse against the norms of its historical moment.

Although critics have often ascribed a deeply structured autochthony to Vallejo's poetry, his was not a deliberately vernacular project, and, in fact, Vallejo himself rejected the idea of self-consciously vernacular art.^[39] In contrast, Asturias almost always wrote in a studied vernacular mode. But Asturias also addressed the language issues we see dramatized in Vallejo's poetry, and his decontextualized autochthonous work may also be read allegorically. Regardless of the genre he undertakes, Asturias's writing is highly lyrical, and he tells his most important story about language not in poetry but in a difficult and highly experimental play drawn from pre-Columbian sources. That story, with which I now conclude, dramatizes in visually memorable scenes the language problems that preoccupied Asturias and his vanguardist contemporaries.

A Play of Linguistic Confusion: Asturias's Cuculcán

Asturias's Cuculcán, a dramatic collage of color, sound, motion, and words, is his most overtly ethnographic play and, as a product of his vanguardist years, the most radically experimental. Cuculcán did not appear in print until 1948,^[40] but Asturias described the work in progress in a 1932 essay, "Las posibilidades de un teatro americano."^[41] Like the Leyendas de Guatemala collection to which it was eventually added, Cuculcán draws on the Popol Vuh and the books of

Chilam Balam . James Clifford, who has documented the interaction between ethnography and art in the European avant-gardes, argues that because of its decontextualized quality, deliberately ethnographic writing undertaken either by artists or anthropologists is always allegorical (Writing Culture) . Certainly in Latin America this situation was somewhat different because writers with ethnographic interests were responding to the non-Western cultures that, on some level, constituted part of their own milieu. Latin American artists, as I have documented, drew on ethnographic material in part to affirm the intrinsic worth of these cultures and their unofficial languages. But they also used this material allegorically to speak more broadly about culture, art, and language. In this vein, Asturias's Cuculcán, through its linguistic theme, brings together the dialogue between Huidobro's Altazor and Asturias's own Leyendas —the dialogue with which I began this chapter—and dramatizes the vanguardist concerns about language encompassed in that exchange.

Described by Richard Callan as a chromatic ballet (124), the play enacts a series of encounters between the supreme plumed serpent god Cuculcán (likened in power to the sun) and the Guacamayo, the false god Vukub Cakix and a verbal trickster embodied in a parrot of many colors.^[42] The piece is organized into three sets of three alternating cortinas (or curtains)—yellow, red, and black. These colors correspond to stages in the sun's daily journey through the sky and are reflected in the colors of onstage curtains and the clothing and accoutrements of Cuculcán and his warriors. Other participants in the encounter between Cuculcán and the Guacamayo includc Yaí and Chinchibirín. Yaí, a yellow flower sometimes linked to the moon in Mayan myth, has been destined since birth to mate with the supreme god and then be cast aside. Chinchibirín, a yellow warrior serving Cuculcán, loves Yaí from afar.

Cuculcán incorporates these characters and others into a series of interlocking dialogues and displays of color, light, sound, and dance to enact a sustained debate on the nature of the worlds they inhabit between Cuculcán and the Guacamayo. Declaring repeatedly "I am like the sun," Cuculcán affirms the palpable permanence of the world manifested in the cyclical re-creation of each day (54). The Guacamayo, or "Gran Saliva del Espejo" (Great Saliva of the Mirror), as he is called, harasses Cuculcán and his retinue with a repetitive "Acucúac, acucúac" and by endlessly asserting the transitory and illusory nature of a reality intertwined with language, "a game of mirrors, of words" (87). "What

is seen is seen and is not a fiction!" declares Cuculcán's warrior, Chinchibirín (63). "Nothing exists," the Guacamayo contradicts, "all is a dream in the immobile mirage" (57). Although the play does not resolve this debate, more often than not, the Guacamayo's version of reality prevails, as Yaí's union with the supreme god is portrayed as a fall from innocence that attests to the parrot's verbal power.^[43] Yaí seeks to defend her illusion of love's permanence against her fate to be with Cuculcán for only one night, but, verbally seduced by the Guacamayo, she becomes like him, "word wrapped in words" (86). The parrot offers Yaí paradoxical counsel on love: "It is eternal, but not in the Palace of the Sun, in the Palace of the Senses, where, like all things, it passes, it changes!" (87). The final dance between Cuculcán and Yaí is performed as a fleeting encounter between the sun and the moon, a Mayan motif often favored by Asturias.

The play's title names the supreme plumed serpent god, but the piece focuses more consistently on the Guacamayo who frequently steals the seene. Either in person or through the colors and the retinue that represent him, Cuculcán is omnipresent. But the Guacamayo is far more active on stage as he disrupts the vast and orderly universe that Cuculcán embodies. Visually, kinetically, and, above all, linguistically, the contrasts between the two figures are sharply drawn. The largerthan-life Cuculcán appears on stilts, appropriate to his royal stature. The Guacamayo, according to stage directions, is "the size of a man" and appears initially "standing on the ground" (54). Cuculcán traverses the stage with "priestlike movements" (80), and his rhythmical, circular dance with Yaí emulates the periodic motion of heavenly bodies. By contrast, the Guacamayo's movements are playful, erratic, and clumsy, as he spins around, "entangled" and with "childlike joy" (55). Cuculcán's realm changes regularly with the time of day, but, at any given moment, this world is pervasively monochromatic: yellow, red, or black. The Guacamayo, in contrast, a bird of many colors with plumage like a "Rainbow of Deception" (82), is multiple.

But Cuculcán is primarily a play about language, a sustained debate about the power of an all-encompassing language sufficient to itself, on the one hand, and the duplicity and foreignness of language and its consequent critical power, on the other. Dorita Nouhaud has suggested that the irreverent Guacamayo incarnates the spirit of the vanguardist poet.^[44] I would agree but also argue that both Cuculcán and the Guacamayo personify vanguardist artists, in that they embody the vanguards' contrasting images of language. The Guacamayo may be an

incorrigible verbal trickster, but Cuculcán also invariably speaks with the words of a talented lyricist. In fact, many of Cuculcán's traits in this play, in particular, his relationship to language, recall Bakhtin's characterization of aestheticist poetic language as monologic and unified with its author's semantic and expressive intentions (Bakhtin 285). Cuculcán's language, like Krauss's gridlike ground zero of creation, is hostile to the intrusion of alien speech, that is, to Bakhtinian "quotation marks" from others. By contrast, the Guacamayo, who as a parrot by definition speaks with quotation marks, that is, with the words of others, embodies the persistent foreignness of all language. On the visual level, the work's contrapuntal play of colors between a monochromatic Cuculcán and the chromatically volatile Guacamayo renders visually this profound contrast in the two beings' relationship to language. Linked, like Huidobro's Altazor, to the original sources of creation, manifested here through the sun's cyclical re-creation of each day, Cuculcán incarnates the power of a unified and unisonant cosmos. His similarity to the sun links him with the ordering of time and space, but like the absolute power of the vanguardist grid, his sunlike power is also impervious to the temporal and the contingent: "my rays turn into brilliant wasps and I fly to the honeycombs, to then continue on clothed in the yellow of my image which rises from the water without becoming wet and from the honeycombs without burning" (55). In this spirit, Cuculcán's language affirms the scope of his own power and displays a respect for power itself as well as for the language that expresses it. Thus, although the Guacamayo repeatedly tries to trick Cuculcán into a self-exalting identification with the sun ("You are the sun," the Guacamayo proclaims), the supreme god is careful always to compare himself to and never to equate himself with the sun: "I am like the Sun" (54; my emphasis).^[45] This caution notwithstanding, Cuculcán's unifying language, even as he speaks poetically, circumscribes the orderly natural world of creation that constitutes his domain: "In my morning habitats ... I am joined . . . by those in charge of the Treasure, of the Gardens, of the Granaries, as they inform me as to what happens in my dominions: whether the clouds have made their beds, . . .  whether that which has ripened has not spoiled" (56).

Like the artist who invents a primal language to designate a new world, Cuculcán lays claim to what he names through the frequent use of possessives and affirms the uniformity of his creation: "Yellow is my tree, yellow is my sweet potato, yellow are my turkeys" (74). Cuculcán's language confidently affirms the nature of the world that it names

and, in this aspect, epitomizes what Bakhtin describes as the manifestation in aestheticist poetic language of the speaker's drive for linguistic control. We recall Bakhtin's words: "In poetic genres, artistic consciousness—understood as a unity of all the author's semantic and expressive intentions—fully realizes itself within its own language." Cuculcán's frequent use of possessives in naming his world, moreover, links him inextricably with his own language in the Bakhtinian sense: "The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed in it, inseparable from it" ("Discourse in the Novel" 284; emphasis in original). Cuculcán's regal demeanor imbues his language with the air of the "priestly language of poetry" Bakhtin ascribes to the aestheticist tradition. Cuculcán's speech is also sometimes characterized by simple declarative pronouncements and repetitions of the verb to be, reaffirming the stability of things as Cuculcán defines them. Such statements often exploit the grammatical equation between subject noun and predicate noun (a = b ), a structure that implies a self-sufficient completeness of the metaphor (solar, in this case) and an equilibrium between the word and the world it evokes, for example, "The yellow flint is the morning stone" (74).^[46] Cuculcán's faithful warrior Chinchibirín employs a similar grammatical structure, in which a equals b so totally that the equation could easily be rendered as a = a . Thus Chinchibirín intones the creed of Cuculcán's all-encompassing worldview and affirms the unisonance of his creation: "What is seen is seen and is not a fiction!" (my emphasis). This linguistic structure, with the quality of a word definition, also foregrounds the desire to fix meanings manifested not only in normative linguistic forces but also in the poet's dream of inventing a language to mean exactly what he wills it to mean.

The Guacamayo's response to Chinchibirín's statement "Let's play with words!" (63) affirms the bird's playful approach to language and undermines the reliability of his own words as well as the linguistic uniformity proclaimed by Cuculcán. As a diviner, a storyteller, and a verbal gymnast, the Guacamayo emerges as the disruptive artist figure in Cuculcán's world and dramatizes the vanguardist fascination with linguistic confusion and difficulty. As the "Great Saliva of the Mirror," the Guacamayo embodies linguistic deceit and impurity. His dissonant speech is described as "jerigonza, " gibberish that twists the facts, and, in keeping with a Popol Vuh story of Vukub Cakix, he suffers from a twisted mouth and a painful toothache from having "chewed so many lies" (62). But though the parrot may be an inveterate liar, the auditory,

chromatic, and tactile metaphors and synesthesias that characterize his language emphasize the creative and critical power of his "incorrect" or deliberately misused words. Thus the "bird of enchantment" speaks in a "jerigonza of colors" with words like lies "clothed in precious stones." The "rainbow of his voice" emerges from the Guacamayo's feathers, like the "rich plumage and perfect color" of his words. Most significantly, the Guacamayo's "voicc of fire" constitutes an acute and acerbic critical force that disrupts the orderly flow of discourse and, as the embodiment of alterity, needles, discomfits, and consumes from within those who hear it (50–86). "Your voice," the yellow warrior Chinchibirín tells the Guacamayo, "fills my soul with ticklings" (60). "Your fine thread of colors," Yaí tells the parrot of his language, "perforated my ears in order to contaminate me within" (92).

If the pronouncements of Cuculcán and his followers affirm the stable nature of creation ("what is seen is seen"), the Guacamayo's words assert the unstable and the discontinuous. "Nothing exists," the parrot likes to quip (57), and he patiently explains to Chinchibirín that the afternoon is an illusion and life itself a "fictitious chain of days that leads to nothing" (92). To Cuculcán's pronouncements about the time-outof-time permanence of his own creation, the Guacamayo responds with reminders of the historical and the contingent that, like the love between Yaí and Cuculcán, changes and passes. While Cuculcán's language, in the tradition of the priestly poet, shores up his own identity as a supreme creator, the Guacamayo's words undercut in those who hear him any unified sense of being, fragmenting the simulacrum of a single self into the multiple. Such is the parrot's powerful effect on Yaí whose hands are transformed into mirrors by his saliva, or his words, "in order to multiply myself into vain others ... that are the same as me and that are nothing but an image of myself that I am not" (91).

In keeping with his parrotlike nature, the Guacamayo mimics Cuculcán's orderly syntax, the declarative affirmations that assert a stable word-reality relationship ("The yellow flint is the morning stone"). But the parrot's mimicry is critical, as he appropriates this syntax in semantic paradoxes that assert the existence of nonexistence ("The afternoon is a fiction" [64], "Life is a deception" [60]) or in vanguardist similes that construct a different order of things from that which prevails in Cuculcán's palace: "Women are vegetables" (58). It is precisely by imitating Cuculcán's speech, moreover, that the Guacamayo underscores the heteroglossic in language; unlikc Cuculcán's, his speech contains Bakhtinian quotation marks against which his own words may sound,

foregrounding the interaction of "alien" speech with his own. Moreover, by parodying the normative quality in Cuculcán's proclivity for self-contained definitions, the Guacamayo appropriates and questions both the centripetal impulse in language and the vanguardist poet's own dream—like Altazor's—of inventing from the void a pure and "uninflected" idiom.

This play's contraposition through characters of contrary approaches to language is reinforced by kinetic elements, staging, and dramatic structurc. Cuculcán's "priestly language" of poetry (to quote Bakhtin) is visually reinforced by his "priestlike movements," his regal stature, and his rhythmical dance with Yaí emulating the universes heavenly bodies. The Guacamayo's erratic, clumsy, and entangling movements duplicate the disruptive and discontinuous quality of his stammering and fragmented speech. In staging, the framing device of alternating series of three sets of curtains marks an unending cyclical repetition, as uniform as Cuculcán's language and as the sun's passage through the sky. By contrast, the play's visual and verbal debates enclosed by this frame enact a volatile world (in which the "fruit run like rabbits") through the interplay of darkness, light, and color and the interweaving of voices, onomatopoetic natural and instrumental sounds, and dancelike actor movements. Thus Cuculcán's orderly journey through the days that imitates the universe's primal movements is transformed by the Guacamayo's presence into a symphonic babble orchestrated by the poetic parrot's linguistic play, as indicated in stage directions: "dog barks, chicken cacklings, tempest thunderclaps, serpent hissings, troupial, guardabarranca, and mockingbird warblings, are heard as the Guacamayo names them, just as the cry of children, the laughter of women and to close the commotion and chatter of a multitude that passes " (57).

This cacophonic din invoked by the Guacamayo infects other characters who engage in similar verbal antics. The Popol Vuh figure Huaravarix, for example, composes nocturnal songs with wordplays similar in auditory effect to the tongue twisters of vanguardist poets: "¡El Cerbatanero de la Cerbatana de Sauco ha salido del Baúl de los Gigantes que en el rondo tiene arena y sobre la arena, aguarena y sobre la aguarena, agua honda y sobre el agua honda, agua queda y sobre el agua queda, agua verde y sobre el agua verde, agua azul y sobrc el agua azul, aguasol y sobre el aguasol, aguacielo!" (69).

Even the powerful Cuculcán himself, in words suggestively echoing Huidobro's Altazor on his disintegrating linguistic quest, succumbs to the game of words in the final encounter with Yaí as they twirl around

in opposite directions: "¡Y otra vez girasol de sol a sol, / sol, girasol y gira, girasol!" and, as he describes Yaí, "¡Otra vez picaflor de flor en flor! / Recuerdo de la flor ¿qué fue de la flor?" (97).^[47]

Notwithstanding the carefully structured nine cortinas that frame it, the play is shaped by an alternating but continuing chain of verbal jousting, between the Guacamayo and Cuculcán, the Guacamayo and Chinchibirín, Chinchibirín and Yaí, the Guacamayo and Yaí, and Yaí and Cuculcán. Chinchibirín remarks that he yearns to "win the meet" with the Guacamayo (63). But winning in Cuculcán is based not so much on converting others to one's views as on the virtuosity of the performance and the power of the critique. The idea of a verbal match is reinforced by stage directions that portray Cuculcán's warriors as traders and their confrontation as an unending dance of exchange. The directions for this scene point to the underlying structure of the play itself: "They enter and exit in interminable formation ..., [and] the battle begins to be announced with strident shouts. The red warriors, by their genuflections, look more like traders than warriors. It is a dance of offers and replies" (80; my emphasis). Interestingly, this reference to the performance of a verbal exchange is repeated in a 1959 piece by Asturias on Mayan elements in a contemporary Guatemalan market, "Lo maya en los mereados guatemaltecos." Echoing the stage directions and recalling the visual display from Cuculcán, this bargaining ballet underscores verbal exchange—"a lengthy rosary of offers and rejected demands"—and exalts the virtuosity of the performance—"a dance to the rhythm of the soft murmur of the words that fancy the flight of scores of bees over all of those black heads and bodies of colorful dress appropriate to a ballet" (América 256). But the explicit comparison between the verbal jousting of the Guacamayo's world and a linguistic marketplace had already been made in Cuculcán by the warrior Chinchibirín: "A market is like a Great Guacamayo, everybody talks, everybody offers colored things, everybody deceives" (75). The marketplace metaphor also suggestively imagines language as a conflictive activity of exchange. Thus, like much vanguardist discourse on language, the verbal commerce between Cuculcán and the Guacamayo—the difficult dialogue itself embodied in the warriors' ballet—posits language, even in its performative lyricism, as the site of contentious social exchange and struggles for power.

We must not forget, however, that Cuculcán is an insistently autochthonous work, and it is therefore very tempting to see the Guacamayo's

approach to language as the embodiment of the vanguards' vernacular linguistic projects. In such a reading, we can see that the Guacamayo repeatedly disrupts the priestly Cuculcán's self-present and self-sufficient language with the impure, dissonant, and confusing heteroglossic language of alien "quotations," or, to extend the image, of cultural difference. This reading is reinforced by Asturias's own subsequent references to the Guacamayo as the incarnation of Latin American literary language. With strong echoes from the polychromatic, linguistically agile parrot of his play, Asturias suggested in his 1967 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for example, that Latin American writers had created their own language, that their work constituted a "verbal feat," and that their language itself was "chromatic," "musical," "tactile, plural, and irreverent" (América 156, 158). Later, in a 1969 essay, "América, la engañadora," a piece that speaks extensively about a familiar parrot, Asturias recounted the Popol Vuh's portrayal of the bird as a colorful verbal trickster. But here he also noted the parrot's role as America's ambassador, as Columbus returned to the Old World with a parrot, not a hawk, on his arm, "a diplomat who to his jacket of live colors adds a tangled speech typical of the dialogue that would follow between Europeans and Americans." This deceptive dialogue, he added, served as a self-protective tactic that allowed Latin America to save itself from exoticism-seeking foreigners by "counterfeiting paradises" (América 343).

This reading of Cuculcán is plausible but not complete. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, the stories of linguistic encounter in a vernacular mode drew on both kinds of language images that shape vanguardist discourse: the image of linguistic purity and universality ascribed to a "ground zero" of linguistic creation and the linguistic estrangement manifested in polyphony, dissonance, and impurity. Significantly, Cuculcán 's own drama of linguistic creation incorporates both views into a single primeval event. Thus Cuculcán himself explains that even when the world and its language were emerging for the very first time, confusion, critique, and the Guacamayo were already on the scene.

Su voz. Habla obscuridad. De lejos es lindo su plumaje de alboroto de maíz dorado sobre el mar y la sangre. Todo estaba en las jícaras de la tiniebla revuelto, descompuesto, informe. El silencio rodeaba la vida. Era insufrible el silencio y los Creadores dejaron sus sandalias para significar que no estaban ausentes de los cielos. Sus sandalias o ecos. Pero el Guacamayo, jugando con

las palabras, confundió los ecos, sandalias de los dioses. El Guacamayo con su lengua enredó los dioses por los pies, al confundirles sus sandalias, al hacerles andar con los ecos del pie derecho en el pie izquierdo. (75)

His voice. It speaks darkness. From afar his plumage of the disorder of golden corn over the sea and blood is beautiful. Everything was in the gourds of the darkness scrambled, out of order, formless. Silence enveloped life. The silence was insufferable and the Creators left their sandals to signify that they were not absent from the heavens. Their sandals or echoes. But the Guacamayo, playing with words, confused the echoes, sandals of the gods. The Guacamayo with his tongue entangled the gods by their feet, by confusing their sandals, by making them walk with the echoes from the right foot on the left foot.

In fact, this scene should remind us of another: Altazor's initial encounter with his creator who shares the story of inventing language, the scene with which I opened this chapter. Even Altazor's own pursuit of a pure, original word is marred from the outset by the creator's account of primal linguistic confusion: "'I created the tongue of the mouth which man diverted from its role to make it learn to speak'" (OC 1: 366; EW 5). In both stories, then, with or without an explicit vernacular inflection, the possibility of a confusing, alien language is always present from the beginning, contaminating the poetic utopia of a pristine linguistic space and its pure, original word.

Conclusion

Asturias's Cuculcán tells a story of conflictive interaction between two kinds of language: the autonomous and unisonant language of purity and universality and the discordant language of specific worlds, the languages of power and the languages that challenge power. If this story has a vernacular turn, if it speaks to a specifically Latin American experience, it would be the tale of the linguistic conflict itself, situated in the Mayan marketplace where aesthetic and social debates intersect. But what are we to make in this reading of the alluring figure of the Guacamayo, to which Asturias himself pointed as a cultural icon by naming him in the Nobel speech as the Latin American writer? Asturias intimated a possible answer when he later observed that the Guacamayo on Columbus's arm was America's first cultural ambassador. An ambassador by definition moves between cultural domains, and the ambassador in the linguistic realm is the translator. The translator, as

Benjamin tells us, walks that precarious fine line between what is universal in language—whatever can be said in all languages—and that which remains untranslatable. But the translator's objective is communication from one linguistic and cultural realm to another. The challenge is to work simultaneously with two languages, and so the translator invariably speaks with Bakhtinian quotation marks and, like the mimicking parrot, repeats the words of the original—the other—but inflected by the translator's own intentions and style.

In The Cuban Condition, appropriately subtitled Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Culture, Pérez Firmat portrays the contemporary Cuban writer's dilemma (epitomized in Carpentier's Los pesos perdidos ) as a trap of "linguistic antimony," that is, a "painful and productive indecision between the mother tongue and the other tongue." If the Cuban writer, communicating in alien lands, must "speak in other words," Pérez Firmat concludes that, even in translation, he "finds, and keeps, his word" (157). Although there is a connection between Pérez Firmat's idea and Asturias's Guacamayo as a linguistic and cultural translator, there are important differences of emphasis and kind. As a product of the vanguards, the Guacamayo's "linguistic antimony" does not harbor the painful indecisions ascribed by Pérez Firmat to more contemporary writers. Instead, Asturias's parrot is a more aggressive linguistic ambassador undertaking, in the avant-garde spirit, a specific and affirmative project: to communicate in "universal" contexts, that is, in Cuculcán's royal domain, but also to showcase the untranslatably alien and impure. Likc Guillén's Cuban boxer on Broadway and Macunaíma in São Paulo, the Guacamayo speaks aggressively with a will to discomfit his listeners with the difficulty of his words. Mário maps out a similar poetics of willful intractability in his small poetic manifesto "Lundu do escritor difícil," or "Lundu [a lascivious dance] of the difficult writer," published in the Revista de Antropofagia . Here with a deliberate "angú de caroço" (porridge or hodgepodge) of Brazilian colloquialisms, the speaker takes his reader to task for aping European culture and language but branding as difficult the poet's "Brazilian" language. The lundu 's speaker aggressively assaults the reader with alien words, admonishing that what is difficult is not the words themselves but for the reader to learn what they mean ("Lundu do escritor difícil" 3). In a similar modc, the Guacamayo would force others to hear him, to be aware of his words' alien quality, and, as Yaí complains of the parrot's verbal trickery, to become "infected" or contaminated from within by the strange words.

The Guacamayo's ability to infect the discourse of others is paramount. In his article "European Pedigrees/African Contagions" based on the work of the Nigerians Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe and the African-American Ishmael Reed, James Snead argues that writers in the African tradition seem inclined toward a "certain linguistic or cultural eclecticism or miscegenation " (232; emphasis in original). The linguistic approach in this writing, Snead concludes, presents a model of contagion in which "all cultures, colors, and nationalities are subject to the ubiquity of its 'pandemic'" (245). Most important, just as the Guacamayo confronts Cuculcán's universalizing language, the intent of these writers is to redefine the idea of "universal." As opposed to Samuel Johnson's concept of language as the "pedigree of nations" that sought to "discover lost but recoverable national differences, " Snead argues, "contagion represents the existence of recoverable affinities between disparate races of people" (245).

As a linguistic translator, the Guacamayo operates in a somewhat comparable fashion to embody the exercises in aggressive cultural and linguistic diplomacy undertaken by Latin America's vanguardist writers with a vernacular agenda. In recuperating an ancestral voice and linguistic essences, these writers appealed to romantic models of cultural nationalism that affirmed the unisonant differences of specific Latin American identities. But pursuing linguistic dissonance and incorrectness promoted a different kind of cultural translation. Drawing on a variety of alien languages and speaking always with quotation marks, these writers, like the Guacamayo, sought to shift the site of "universality" from Cuculcán's imperial palace of linguistic purity to the contentious and contagious Mayan marketplace of literary and linguistic exchange. Like the Guacamayo, furthermore, they sought not only to communicate among themselves but also to spread their alien words into a Cuculcán-like all-encompassing domain with its claims to a universal language and to needle and discomfit all participants in the literary marketplace. Their impure words demanded that listeners and readers take notice of the persistent foreignness of many languages and of the untamed and abiding cultural differences to and of which they speak.