Trilce - Tapa blanda

'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.

Cesar Vallejo was born in 1892 in the small town of Santiago de Chuco in northern Peru. He was able to attend Trujillo University and the University of San Marcos in Lima, although his parents were poor. In 1920 he was arrested while in his home town and accused of being involved in some political disturbances. Although he appears to have been innocent, he was imprisoned for several months and many of the poems in 'Trilce', his second book (1922), refer to this period, which was to have a decisive impact upon both his life and his poetry. In 1923 Vallejo went to Paris and in 1928 and 1929 he made two short trips to the USSR, which were to have a profound effect upon him. In the 1930s he became a militant communist, and was expelled from France, whereupon he moved to Spain. In 1933 he returned to Paris but again left for Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War, first to visit Republican territory and later to attend the International Writers' Congress. He died in 1938. His poetry written after "Trilce" only appeared in book form after his death. Vallejo is regarded as the most important poet of Peru, one of the great figures of Latin American literature, and one of the titans of the pre-war international avant-garde.