César Vallejo, _Trilce_, trans. Rebecca Seiferle

 In January 1994 (if "AI Overview" is to be trusted) I attended a reading by the late Philip Levine at which, briefly interrupting the reading of his poems, he enthusiastically recommended the poetry of César Vallejo. Not long after that, I stumbled upon this volume (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992) in a wonderful local used book store (A Novel Idea, Lincoln, Nebraska) and promptly bought it. 

Then it remained on my shelf for slightly over three decades until I read Michael Hofmann's recent LRB review of Margaret Jull Costa's new translation of Vallejo (The Eternal Dice, New Directions) and thought, "hmm, don't I have a book of his already?" And there it was on the shelf, not far from a few Vargas Llosa novels, a supernova waiting for me to open it up. 

Well, Levine was right. I remember taking his recommendation to mean that Vallejo's poetry must be a bit like his own--straightforward, plain language, socially conscious--so I was taken by surprise by Vallejo's willingness to firebomb each and every convention: not just prosodic, but also syntactic, and even lexical (for instance, he made up the word "trilce," and no one is sure what it means). 

Vallejo is certainly aware of tradition, certainly aware of history, even pulling in some Quechua elements alongside the Spanish ones, but he is less interested in preservation than in recombining the pieces into something transformatively new. As Joyce left Ireland for the continent in order to write Ireland--"to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"--Vallejo left Peru for Paris in order to write Peru. How Peruvian Vallejo's Peru is I cannot say--maybe the relationship is like that of Blake's "Albion" to England--but it's a lively place to contemplate.

And Trilce was published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, two other great examples of the illuminating reconfiguration of a place, a history, and a culture by the writerly imagination.

It must be a good time for Vallejo-in-English, since we have not only the Jull Costa translation but another new one from NYRB Poets by William Rowe and Helen Dimos. It would be worth my while to read another translation, I think; Hofmann notes that translations vary widely, since the poems are very hard to pin down, and that no one translation can be definitive.

And I have reaffirmed respect for the critical judgements of Philip Levine. I should have known from his championing of Larry Levis that he was not the kind of poet who admires only work aesthetically comparable to his own. His celebration of Vallejo confirms it.