Trilce [Paperback]

Cesar Vallejo (Author), Michael Smith (Translator), Valentino Gianuzzi (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0907562728 | ISBN-13: 978-0907562726

'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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vallejo's poetry combines excruciatingly personal emotions with imagery that at first appears facetious but turns out to be wordplay with a larger purpose. "Hot bakery of my former biscuits, / pure egg yolk childlike innumerable, mother," begins one of many poems that mourn his mother's death; but it is himself he ends up lamenting, since "everyone keeps charging us / the rent for the world where you left us / and the value of this everlasting bread." The 77 poems reflect upon the poet's dual Spanish and Peruvian Indian heritage in a dialect that mocks Spanish grammar with Incan idioms, plays on the similarities between words and tosses in medical terms (Vallejo attended medical school) to enhance the surreal effect. Seiferle's insightful introduction and footnotes serve as necessary maps to the book's political context--Vallejo's assertion of the Incan side of his identity--and intellectual strengths. The sensitive translation of an extremely difficult text in this bilingual edition commemorates the centennial of Vallejo's birth and the 70th anniversary of the book's original publication; ironically, it also coincides with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Vallejo was born 100 years ago in a small mining town in north central Peru. Both his grandfathers were Spanish priests. His poetry has come to be highly regarded, and this last volume to be translated into English is considered his most difficult. In fact, when it came out in 1922, the critics were so hostile that soon afterward Vallejo left Peru permanently for Paris. Neither as romantic nor as bohemian as he had been in much of his poetry, Vallejo was here straining Spanish syntax, resorting to technical jargon and distorting typography, hyphenation, and punctuation to convey the harshness of a wide range of unsatisfied or unsatisfying thoughts touching on sexuality, loneliness, and death: "Death on its knees pours forth/ its white blood that is not blood." Vallejo has been translated by the likes of James Wright, Thomas Merton, and Robert Bly, so Seiferle's renderings have a lot to live up to. Her edition would have been improved by a glossary of Vallejo's many ambiguous terms; in fact, there are an alarming number of lexical discrepancies. Appropriate for strong poetry and Latin American collections.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Shearsman Books (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0907562728
• ISBN-13: 978-0907562726
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,305,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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