Overview

A new translation of the Peruvian poet's most groundbreaking, infamously obstuse work, a collection that stretches the limits of human language and predicted the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 30s. This bilingual edition of Trilce includes glosses by the translators, giving readers and deeper look into these fascinating poems and the writer behind them. César Vallejo's Trilce, first published in 1922, transformed poetry in Spanish utterly, remaking the substance of verse from the word up. Rich in startling neologisms and other forms of verbal play, Trilce is a blazingly vivid revelation of what poetry can be, at once a love poem, a poem of erotic urgency and frustration, a poem of family life, of political fury, a lament for the dead, a work of intense privacy and an address to the world. As a whole, the work may be said to constitute a profound reckoning with time—the time of literary forms and their conjunctions with social and political time; the time of indigenous and traditional cultural forms—which also works to create a new poetic now. Haunting and incantatory, Vallejo's complex set of poems speaks powerfully to us, as we in our time seek to find what needs to be made present. In this new edition of Trilce—the recipient of the prestigious Premio Valle Inclán for the best translation from Spanish into English—the translators Helen Dimos and William Rowe accompany each poem with a gloss. Their incisive commentary on these legendarily challenging poems opens them up to new understanding while inviting readers to find their own pathways to and through them.

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9781681379968

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Reviews

""At times César Vallejo recalls Rimbaud and Baudelaire, but...[he] is more reserved and austere, and simultaneously, more virile and humble. He is the greatest catholic poet since Dante—and by catholic I mean universal."" — Thomas Merton ""[Vallejo] saw the world in piercing flashes of outrage and anguish, terror and pity.... A passionate, tragic poet, he mourned our loss of moral innocence and despaired of the injustice that moves the world."" — Edith Grossman, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Author Information

César Vallejo (1892–1938) was a Peruvian poet who lived most of his life in France and Spain. He published only two books in his lifetime, yet is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the twentieth century. William Rowe is the translator of Raúl Zurita’s INRI and Antonio Cisneros’s A Cruise to the Galapagos Islands. His Collected Poems were published in 2016 by Crater Press. He is an Emeritus Professor of Birkbeck College London University. Helen Dimos is the author of the collections No Realtor Was Compensated For This Sale (The Elephants, 2017) and Intermissions & Things, Auto-bio-graphy (forthcoming). She has worked as a teacher of poetry, composition and English, as a translator principally from the Greek, and as a long-term estate executor, among other jobs. For the past decade she has been bringing together poetry events in Athens, Greece. She is currently working on The Field, an effort to tell histories of family and place through the history of a parcel of land in Crete.

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