A Celebration of César Vallejo’s Trilce

Litquake presents

William Rowe and Helen Dimos

discussing and reading from the work of César Vallejo

Moderated by Robert Kaufman

Center for the Art of Translation, City Lights, Litquake, and NYRB celebrate the publication of

Trilce

by César Vallejo, translated from the Spanish and with glosses by William Rowe and Helen Dimos

Published by New York Review Books

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.

Trilce is published in a bilingual edition.

César Vallejo (1892–1938) was a Peruvian poet who lived most of his life in France and Spain. He published only two books in his lifetime, yet is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the twentieth century.

William Rowe’s Collected Poems were published in 2016 by Crater Press. He has translated a number of Latin American poets, including Rodolfo Hinostroza, Juan L. Ortiz, Hugo Gola, Magdalena Chocano, Néstor Perlongher, and Mario Montalbetti. Three Lyric Poets, his study of Lee Harwood, Chris Torrance, and Barry MacSweeney, was published in 2009.

Helen Dimos is the author of the collections No Realtor Was Compensated For This Sale (The Elephants, 2017) and Intermissions & Things, Auto-bio-graphy (forthcoming). She has worked as a teacher of poetry, composition and English, as a translator principally from the Greek, and as a long-term estate executor, among other jobs. For the past decade she has been bringing together poetry events in Athens, Greece. She is currently working on The Field, an effort to tell histories of family and place through the history of a parcel of land in Crete.

Robert Kaufman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in–and is past Co-Chair of–the University’s interdisciplinary graduate Program in Critical Theory. Kaufman’s teaching, scholarship, and criticism center on modern poetry, poetics, aesthetics, and critical theory, with special attention to interrelations among poetry written in English, Spanish, German, and French. His recent translation of César Vallejo’s 1937 prose poem “Algo te identifica . . .” (“Something identifies you . . .”) is forthcoming in The Atlantic.