Julio Ortega

César Vallejo

A highly-praised translation of a seminal work of Spanish literature is once again available. Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (2001) César Vallejo was born in Peru in 1892. In 1921 he spent three months in prison where he wrote some of the poems in Trilce. In 1923 he left for Paris, where he co-founded a cell of the Peruvian Communist Party. He traveled to Russia, and to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. He died in Paris in 1938, in absolute poverty, devastated by the fall of the Spanish Republic. Trilce, published the same year as Eliot's Waste Land and also masterpiece of early modernism, is a ground-breaking work that has had an indelible effect on all subsequent poetry in its language. It contains 77 poems considered to be Vallejo's most complex and radical work.

Trilce

'Trilce' is one of the great monuments of 20th-Century Hispanic poetry, as important in Hispanic letters as 'The Wasteland' and 'The Cantos' in the anglophone world, and all the more amazing for having been composed in remote Peru. Full of neologisms and symbols, the book is one that needs to be re-translated often, but this is only the second version to appear in the UK, and the fourth in the USA. A fully bilingual book, the Spanish texts are based upon the very latest scholarship, and are presented with full explanatory annotations for the English-speaking reader. Apart from the canonical text of 'Trilce', the book also includes an appendix of a further eight poems that were left out of the final published version of the book, but which it is useful to have available with the core text. The translations are by the Irish poet, and award-winning translator, Michael Smith, and the Peruvian scholar Valentino Gianuzzi.

Trilce

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