Trilce

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.