The Future, Elsewhere: Inventing Mayakovsky in Twentieth-Century Venezuela

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics II: Translation, Modernists, and Communist World Literature

Abstract

This paper discusses reactions to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s work and to his cultural iconicity in twentieth-century Latin America. In particular, it looks at a moment in 1970s Venezuela when there was renewed interest in Mayakovsky, especially in the work of the novelist and journalist Miguel Otero Silva. Otero Silva’s 1973 speech “Vladimir Mayakovsky y el futuro de la poesía” (“Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Future of Poetry”) reads Mayakovsky’s early futurist compositions as a model of what “socialist art” ought to be: experimental and formally innovative, but not necessarily political in an explicit or predetermined way. The paper reads this against earlier approaches to Mayakovsky in Latin America—such as César Vallejo’s—and the cultural status that the poet came to have in the Soviet Union after his death and in the West during the “rediscovery” of the historical avant-garde during the 1960s and 1970s. Otero Silva’s approach to Mayakovsky was constrained by the availability of translations, and yet for that reason it was more direct than the approach of readers whose understanding of Mayakovsky’s poetry was heavily mediated by his mythology. The paper considers the implications of thinking of Latin America as a site where Mayakovsky’s poetic program could come to be continued or be achieved.

Author

• María Matilde Morales, Harvard U