Essays on Literature, Literary / Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy
Editor: Ollie O. Oviedo, Eastern New Mexico University
Assistant Editors: Royal Prentice, Harvey Stanbrough,
Eastern New Mexico University
Eva y la Fuga (Eva the Fugitive)1:
The Chilean Development
of the Nadja Myth
Anna Balakian
Comparative Literature Department
New York University
Chilean author Rosamel del Valle wrote Eva y la Fuga two years after André Breton's Nadja had appeared in book form. He
was a self-taught journalist and poet who had never been to France but had access to the books of the surrealists. The work,
a modest volume of 84 pages, circulated among his writer friends but was not published until forty years later, and it had not
appeared in any other language than Spanish until 1990 when University of California Press published my translation of it as
Eva the Fugitive. Del Valle worked for some time at the United Nations in New York where he fell in love with a beautiful
French-Canadian co-worker, Thérèse Dulac, whom he married in 1948. He died in 1965, virtually unknown to the general
reading public even in the Latin-American sector; but since then his work has assumed almost legendary significance to many
Hispanic poets of surrealist orientation. I became aware of him and of the circle of his fellow-writers ten years ago when I
visited Chile and have in the last few years studied this text and attempted to translate it. I take this opportunity to bring Eva y
la Fuga to the critical attention of the Comparatists within the broad spectrum of world literature.
The work is a first-person narrative about a haunting experience in which the interventions of the outside world are the
emblems of an inner reality, awakened, pursued, lost but ever recuperable.
Whereas Breton's book begins with the question "Who am I?" Rosamel del Valle's running interrogation focuses on the
identity of the Eva-persona who entered his life, capturing both its interiority and exteriority. It is by exploring her identity that
he expects to understand his own.
The difficulties of translation are many as one follows the poet through the labyrinthine meanderings of a complicated sentence
structure that is dominated by an ever-recurring present tense that gives a sense of the immediacy of apparition and dream
within the province of landmarks of tangible reality. Although surrealists have long known and pursued the power of the
dream, rarely has its omnipresence been so vividly and sometimes fearfully relayed as in Rosamel del Valle's super-position of
dreamtime upon narrative sequence achieved by the persistent use of a present tense rather awkward to translate into English.
Other translation problems are of an ontological nature and inherent to the transfer of meaning from Latin based languages to
Anglo-Saxon ones. As I have pointed out in my recent article on "The Monolith of Romania: Myth or Reality," Latin rooted
substantives often contain a monistic union of concrete and abstract signification, particularly useful to the physical approach to
spiritual problems, basic to the concept of surrealism. There are a number of these key words in Eva y la Fuga which would
be easy to convey without interpretation in French, Italian, and probably Rumanian, but which in English need several
substitutes to carry over the total meaning. Such is the repetitive use of the word, conciencia, which becomes in the course of
the work awareness, knowledge, and reaches out toward the recognition of phenomena which skirt the unknowable and are
as ephemeral as cognizance of dream-existence. How much easier would be the translation into the French conscience with its
parallel load of ambiguity! The same kind of impasse occurs in trying to convey the eerie meanings that radiate from the
recurring use of the word salida, which is exit and doubles for release both of a spiritual and physical nature, and passage from
the rational into the irrational. It is also an emergency exit, a way out of the rigidity of life and associated with a cry for help.
And the word asfixia, which transcends in meaning the sense of physical choking, is a traumatic symptom of the narrator's
spiritual asthma, triggered by all the constrictions of life to which he is subjected each time he is deprived of the Eva principle.
The central image of the voyage into the unfathomable is a well with a star at its edge. But the Spanish word pozo, so easily
conveyed as puits in French, seems to suggest simultaneously abysmal depth and an ever replenishable source of water, thus
conciliating the antithetical significations of life and death, of consciousness and oblivion. Finally and most importantly, the
Fuga of the title and the leitmotif of the narrative can never be given a true and complete value in a single translation because it
means both fugue and flight, conveying both the musical sense of successive movements linked together, and evasion in the
sense of rupture from familiar reality into a sphere from which there can be no return. The epiphany thus created and which
comes to a climax toward the end of the work loses its hypnotic frenzy in English because of the impossibility of finding in
translation one word with the two meanings.
Yet, in spite of difficulties, I think that enough meaning of Eva y la Fuga will come across in this first translation into English,
which I am sure will in years to come be improved by other translators, to suggest the unusual quality of his work.
But this paper essentially concerns questions of influence, reception, and transformation rather than translation. The work
derives obviously from Breton's Nadja, yet its imitative elements are not as significant as its deviations from the Nadja pattern,
and the model and its variant together launch a mythic archetype: the ephemeral and wandering being who flaunts reality and
whose passage through the life of the poet leads him to dangerous and necessary precipices. Eva crosses Rosamel's path
much in the same way that Nadja came on Breton's horizon. She appears unexpectedly and, like Nadja, she is anguished and
totally unguarded. Although like his predecessor Rosamel del Valle conjures meetings with Eva under the witnessing eyes of
companions and in recognizable places, he repeatedly brings into question the authenticity of the character; although the
encounters are projected into street scenes, home, Amusement Park, Bars and other familiar places, the poet suggests an
eerie atmosphere, clima in Spanish, all his own shared only with Eva. Eva occupies a sphere somewhat more questionable
than Nadja's. She is constantly skirting oblivion and draws him to the brink of the pozo: "I see nothingness quiver like a bough
of ashes between my fingers," he remarks. Like Nadja, she is a voyante, she is a medium, and like her she reaches a zone of
"maximum despair" where the pursuer cannot or dare not follow. She is nothing ("You, Eva, come closest to being what is
not") and she is everything with a certain transparency and solubility which makes her penetrate his things and his thoughts: "I
see her floating in a photograph, inside a thought, with eyes, mouth, hands and feet like everybody else's. But more than
anything else inside a thought. Why not recognize her now in the desert, at the side of a well, leaning, contemplating herself in
the water?" She comes to him "with reflections from the zone in which the senses multiply," and the imprisoned self and the self
that is supposed to be his real self "regain a single personality at the contact of love."
Although in my study of Breton I was able to discover a real clinical case by the name of Nadja reported in the notebooks of
Dr. Pierre Janet, to which Breton had access and whose name and appearance provided a circumstantial evidence, this factor
is interesting only as a demonstration that artists do not simply lift medical cases, that they do not even copy living realities as
the girl Breton met in the street. The Nadja of Breton's narrative illustrates how the prototype, gleaned in a case history,
reinforced by its association with a real person, is transformed into an archetype by the creative power of the poet. Much of
the language Breton put into the mouth of Nadja is metalanguage, made of the fibers of his own poetry. Thus he made of the
patient buried in the files of Dr. Janet's casebook a heroine of the poet's fiction, attributing to her the alchemical imagination
which the waif he met in the streets of Paris could never have acquired, and which was Breton's own best sortie from the
rational. For it is obvious that the other channels of the irrational did not succeed in his case to open the doors of the irrational.
He made no secret of the fact that of all his companions he had the most trouble falling into hypnotic states—he was the
magnetizer rather than the magnetized—and even his so-called automatic writing retained much of the insuppressible mark of
his deeply rational erudition. Therefore, the only real symptoms of derangement he could suggest in Nadja were through the
use of the alchemical image of one in the other, and through the symbolism of transmutable glyphs.
In the case of Rosamel del Valle the exterior facts of encounter and the eventual disappearance of the disturbed character
follow a path parallel to Breton's, but the type of context provided for the mythical character of Eva is distinctly different.
Appropriating the language of Claude Levi-Strauss we might say that if Nadja represents the aberrations of the cuit, a free
spirit abused by a highly evolved and decadent society, Eva is a primitive force—her very name suggests it—the cru, the
pre-rational surge rather than the post and anti-rational impulse.
In spite of many insinuations and even confidences about the prostitution practiced by Eva, as by Nadja, Eva is more the
elemental figure absorbing sexual activity as a function whose justification needs no more debate than breathing or eating. Eva
is also much more voluble than Nadja, or let us say that her creator is less reticent in allowing her to express the sense of the
irrational for the simple reason that she treads upon a territory of a vaster irrational texture and with which the author's own
experience is more closely associated. I am speaking of the dream, which is the particular sector of the irrational in which Eva
comes to life, not only in subliminal beatitude but often in brutal nightmares in which she is dismembered and made to bleed.
True, we get through the flights of Eva a topography of Santiago2 that is as dynamically real as that of Breton's Paris,3 but
Eva's real power over Rosamel is manifested in scenes that possess the landmarks of the dream rather than as in the case of
Breton in the framework of a Paris café or even of a nocturnal but real train ride to a chateau. Eva's own flights into the
countryside like the vision of the hotel in Valparaiso (a seaside resort near Santiago) are not made in the company of Rosamel
but are narrated as a dream sequence emerging from her past. Her dialogue whether with Rosamel or reported as part of a
dream-vision by Eva, conveys the condensed language of the dream, divested of the sense of time. Its metaphoric structure is
very closely related to folk culture and chthonian manifestations of nature in which Eva is deeply involved: Rosamel sees her
perched on top of trees, surrounded by glowworms, fireflies, and butterflies that spill gold on her skirt "and everything is Eva."
The encounters are marked with signs that trigger trance conditions in Eva, and in this case the poet is much more a participant
in the mediumesque visions of Eva than an observer. She is for him, as he remarks, "what is deepest in my dreams." In fact,
when she leaves the poet he experiences that strange condition which he calls "asphyxiation" and is abandoned to "the great
waterless night of the void."
The title bears the concept of flight, but this escape mechanism has a complicated connotation possessing a double-edged
power of performance: although there is ample accommodation to physical evasion on the part of Eva, the disappearances,
which are as unaccountable as the appearances, have the appearance of the fade-out techniques of dream transcriptions.
Sometimes it is the others who vanish, creating a mental desert in which Eva and the poet interact and in whose self-created
reality there occurs a sudden vacating of crowded areas of urban comings and goings whether in the presence of the great
Ferris Wheel in Luna Park or of the Towers of the Iglesia de los Sacramentinos. The passage from the familiar to the
unfamiliar leaves the couple in an open-ended space reminiscent of Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, to which
the poet alludes at one point. The successive encounters, despite their recognizable landmark feature, are transformed into a
self-made cosmos and recurring evocations of the image of the pit or well bear the reflection of human despair and the echoes
of a cry for help. The paths traversed are not only the streets of Santiago but the erotic roads of Eva's dream body, sensual
and spiritual at the same time. As a lover the poet infiltrates his own being inside her skin.
Breton had tried and failed to love Nadja although he was intrigued and excited by her in their fortuitous meeting for a brief
span of time. She became the blue wind that passed ever so gently over his destiny causing a release from inhibitions and a
swerve in direction. If Breton could follow Nadja only to a certain point, Rosamel surrenders completely to Eva, identifiable
with a red river and a wind; she is that mingling of radiance and physical necessity which he recognizes as love. But since Eva
is characterized as an elemental force and love is a concept of civilized beings, it is she who does not understand the notion of
love.
Indeed, Eva is no more an imitation of Nadja than was Nadja the case history of Dr. Janet's files. But just as the clinical
patient Nadja may have served as a springboard for the creative imagination of Breton, the same catalytic power, much more
certainly pushed Breton's admirer to the brink of the unfathomable, and Rosamel del Valle succumbed more totally to the
seduction of the irrational forces within his own being even as he conveyed the in extremis condition of the Eva figure by
repeatedly associating the color red with her compulsion for self-annihilation.
In Breton's work we learn more about the poet as a young man than about Nadja, who is merely an episode in his formation.
Indeed, he is already sentimentally and physically free from Nadja when someone, unspecified, informs him that Nadja has
been confined to a mental asylum. In del Valle's book we learn very little about his daily existence: once in a while there are
references to two very good friends, Estéfano and Ignacio, but we have the feeling that they are like Eva herself
dream-figures, witnesses of his oneiric pursuit of Eva; and there are literary colleagues in the background, reminiscent of
Breton's companions, Soupault and Eluard. They are Chilean poets, Neruda4 and Díaz Casanueva5 from whom he receives
letters in the midst of his involvement with Eva. But these signs of his real life are like intrusions and peripheral to his central
attraction to Eva. This is not a search but the récit of a poet in the throes of process: the creation of poetic discourse out of the
forces of the dream. The unique quality of the book lies in from the fact that the writer in his double function as poet and lover
is accessible at any moment, without due notice to the oneiro-erotica to which he opposes no resistance, but at the same time,
as a poet he is ever in command of the cauldron of his poetic vision. In line with the surrealist proposition that life itself is the
ultimate poem, container and contained, the written work is the spillover (débordement) of the poetic experience, the literary
becomes a consequence of the existential. For Rosamel del Valle poetry and love are parallel pursuits, products of the same
soil. His ultimate characterization of Eva's existence is that it somewhat resembles the land whence it is possible that poetry
derives. At the end of Nadja, when Breton addresses himself to a new woman, the reader is curious to know what next will
happen to the modern combination of Don Juan and Percival, love and metaphysical quest being integrally involved in his case,
and release being only a preamble to a re-engagement. In Eva there can be no sequel because what happens is cyclic rather
than linear, and the last words of the epilogue of Eva are: "Nothing prevents me from affirming that her warmth still endures."
(Actually heat is more appropriate for calor.) The fact is that two pages earlier he terminated the narrative with "Nothing really
happens except in dreams." The poetry that has been created emerges from the climate that Eva has produced, and the
climate survives beyond the real or imaginary existence of Eva because it has been amalgamated into the poetry itself.
Supposing that the oft ambiguous existence of Eva had some relation to something that is happening in me like the urge to write a book, for instance, I would have to admit that chance makes us victims of one of its singular games. For the apparent vagueness that appears to reside in each act and even in each impulsive reflex of Eva, does not cease to have some point of contact with the arcane in which my being enters moments before working on the facts and the language of that life which is so totally subterranean that it flows from the passage of Eva at my side as does the desire to fill these pages.
Despite certain differences of focus, the two companion books, Nadja and Eva, belong to a basic matrix. In the convulsive
beauty suggested by the quasi-madness of the two heroines the poet in each case senses a vicarious liberation paradoxically at
the very moment when the propagators of that sense of liberation are running the risk of captivity. In both cases, the poet's
protest against incarceration is only on behalf not only of those classified as insane but of those englobed in the larger
metaphor of the human prison. Whether the random encounter occurs in the context of waking reality or inside the texture of
the dream, its power disturbs the immobility of the human psyche and expands the human space. Desire takes many forms in
surrealism, as its investigators know; the only sin is stasis.
Notes
The version of this paper is based on the one presented at the IXth Congress of the International Comparative Literature
Association (Literary Communication and Reception) and published by AMOE, Innsbruck, as the proceedings of the
symposium (not on the Introduction to Eva the Fugitive published by U of California Press, 1990).
1Professor Balakian translated Eva y la Fuga as Eva the Fugitive (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990.
2The capital of Chile.
3The setting of Nadja.
4Díaz Casanueva (ambassador to the United Nations during the Allende government), also a Chilean surrealist poet and a
friend of del Valle, earned a Ph.D. in science in Germany. Another scientist and surrealist poet was his countryman Nicanor
Parra.
5Pablo Neruda, also a surrealist poet, was the second Chilean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after Gabriela Mistral. He
was a dear friend and companion of del Valle. Like Casanueva, Neruda was also ambassador to several countries, including
India.
Works Cited (and Consulted)
Apollinaire, Guillaume. Alcools. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1927.
Balakian, Anna. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
_____. Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New Mysticism in French Poetry. New York: New York University Press, 1965.
Breton, André. Manifeste du Surréalisme, Poison soluble. Paris: KRA, 1924.
_____, with P. Soupault. Les Champs magnétiques. Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920.
_____. Nadja. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1928.
_____. Second Manifeste du surréalisme. Paris: KRA, 1930.
Franco, Jean. An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature. London: Cambridge UP, 1975.
Valle, Rosamel del. Eva y la Fuga (1930). Santiago de Chile: Monte Avila, 1970.
_____. Eva the Fugitive. Translated, with an introduction by Anna Balakian. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California
P, 1990.
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