In recent times, Vallejo's poetry has been increasingly and deservedly attracting the attention of translators in the English-speaking world. Despite this, it is difficult to think of any poetry in Spanish, of any period, that presents the translator with a challenge comparable to that of Vallejo's. Vallejo's poems, especially those of Trilce, offer a bewildering multiplicity of levels of meaning. The translator has to make definite choices in interpreting material which the reader of the Spanish originals can leave unresolved or continually reinterpret. In truth, it can be confidently asserted that any 'translation' of a Vallejo poem is at best a version. And that is what the reader of the present work is here offered.

As in all my past efforts to bring over into English whatever of interest I have found in poetry in Spanish, my primary, unrepayable debt is to my friend Luis Huerga who has laboured unstintingly to save me from error, to buoy me up in troughs of despair and to share my work to the extent that I scarcely know whether it was he or I who produced this line or that, though I refuse to share with him whatever inadequacies English stylists or diligent Hispanists will doubtless look for and probably find.

Note: There are altogether 77 poems in Trilce. The poems printed here are the first 25 of these.

In March 1892, César Vallejo was born in Santiago de Chuco, a small town in the Andean sierra of northern Peru. He died in Paris in April 1938. Increasingly, despite the difficulty of his poetry as compared, for example, with the popular accessibility of the work of the Chilean Nobel prize-winner, Pablo Neruda, this mysterious Peruvian is now being recognized as the major poetic voice of Latin-American poetry of the 20th century.

Vallejo's background was provincial middle-class, though this should not be taken to mean too much, granted the context of the Peru of the time. More importantly, both of Vallejo's grandmothers were Indian; his two grandfathers were priests of Spanish descent. His father, Francisco, earned a decent living as a notary and local official. Still, with a family of eleven to support, of whom César was the youngest, Francisco's earnings would not have gone too far, and money in the Vallejo household was often scarce. Hence César's ambition to acquire a university degree was fulfilled only after a couple of failed attempts.

It was during one of these financially induced failures (1911-1912), when he had to abandon his university studies and work, first as a tutor to the children of a hacendado on an estate near Huánuco. and later as an assistant cashier on a sugar plantation, that Vallejo witnessed, unforgettably, the exploitation and oppression of the mainly Indian workers.

Another disillusionment in Vallejo's early life occurred in July 1920, on his return to his hometown of Santiago de Chuco for the annual fiesta of the town's patron saint. There he found himself embroiled in a local feud in the course of which a store was burnt and a deputy killed. Although innocent of any complicity in the events -- indeed, Vallejo was helping the Sub-prefect to write up the legal documents -- Vallejo was somehow implicated, arrested, charged and subsequently spent 112 days in prison in Trujillo. Moreover, he was compelled not to leave Trujillo for six months after his release. The whole experience had a deeply disturbing and long-lasting effect on Vallejo.