Trilce

A new translation of the Peruvian poet's most groundbreaking, infamously obstuse work, a collection that stretches the limits of human language and predicted the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 30s.

This edition of Trilce includes glosses by the translators, giving readers and deeper look into these fascinating poems and the writer behind them.

Cesar Vallejo's Trilce, published originally in 1922 in Lima, undertakes 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; colonial time. Trilce inhabits and departs from the locating actions of these times to create a new poetic now. In Trilce, love is a pathway on which older and newer meanings collide. Haunting and incantatory, this complex set of poems speaks powerfully to us, as we seek in our own time to find what needs to be made present.

This new edition of Trilce, with translations and glosses by Helen Dimos and William Rowe, brings out with alacrity and grace the full range of intellectual and emotional resonances in these poems. And in their incisive glosses, Dimos and Rowe offer porous nets of understanding that at once situate these poems and invite readers to find their own pathways of meaning.