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.”
Vallejo created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms. Vallejo forged a new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human suffering.
— Edith Grossman, Los Angeles Times Book Review
The Eternal Dice introduces English readers to the work that helped solidify Vallejo’s elusive mythology and exemplifies his sardonic style. Through radical experimentation with language in an even more directly avant-garde gesture, Vallejo tried to conceive the earth from scratch—now denying not only his former Gods, but the structures of language itself.
— Julia Kornberg, Poetry Magazine
Vallejo has emerged for us as the greatest of the great South American poets—a crucial figure in the making of the total body of twentieth-century world poetry.
— Jerome Rothenberg, co-editor of Poems for the Millennium
Vallejo never hoarded his suffering, never saw it as a privilege, as something that fell only on him.
— Michael Wood, New York Review of Books
The Eternal Dice by César Vallejo, translated by Margaret Jull Costa provides a concise and thoughtfully arranged volume that honors the important Peruvian poet.
