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 the
Paperback
edition.
From Library Journal
This year has produced two translations of Vallejo's least accessible poetic work (the other was translated by Rebecca Seiferle, LJ 6/15/92). For the difference between them, consider that the same line by the great Peruvian author could yield both "The impeacocked sun/ descends and excites hooves/ toward the coldest" (Seiferle) and "The razzed/ sun sets and scrambles the skulls/ even of the coldest." Unlike Seiferle, Eshleman includes 27 pages of lexical notes, and he shares more about his personal philosophy of translation. If, for example, Vallejo deliberately misspells a word, then Eshleman deliberately misspells an equivalent English word. A Vallejo neologism is rendered by an Eshleman neologism. Published the same year as The Wasteland , these 77 poems exhibit a "carnivorous lyricism" that cannot afford to be further obscured in translation. Yet Eshleman concedes that to translate Trilce is to leap into a void and that in modern times it is almost impossible to pinpoint the idiomatic variations of the Spanish spoken in the part of Peru where Vallejo grew up. Because of his confident and honest commentary, an excellent bibliography, and a Vallejo chronology, Eshleman's is the better investment, but his translations are only slightly more successful than Seiferle's.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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