The Eternal Dice : Selected Poems
César Vallejo
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From the publisher
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
The Peruvian poet César Vallejo—one of Latin America’s most famous writers, along with Pablo Neruda—began publishing his poems in 1914 after discovering the works of Walt Whitman, the French symbolists, and the modernist Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Five years later, he published his first book of poems, Los heraldos negros, and in 1922, he published his famous Trilce, which met a cool reception when first published. Vallejo spent many years in Europe, living in Paris and Spain.
Like many of the surrealists, he became a Marxist, and was an ardent supporter of the Republican cause during the Civil War. In his poems, Vallejo poignantly describes human misery, isolation, and anguish. As his translator Margaret Jull Costa explains: “Vallejo edited and redrafted and honed his poetry.
This is the only way in which he could describe the antithetical, paradoxical, oxymoronic universe he was living in, by using language at full tilt, making it perform all kinds of acrobatics. The resulting poems often defy interpretation.” Spanning his career up to his early death, this marvelous, new, bilingual selection of poems confirms Robert Hass’s assessment that Vallejo was “one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer.”