Trilce is Joycean in its complexity and profundity and richness of technique. Its cohesiveness is as much thematic as technical. At one of its many levels, it is a violent eruption of fragmentary memories reflecting the loss of childhood, the shattering of a native world, the painful and sporadic growth into consciousness of a harsh reality often unjust and unloving. Despite this, it contains no sentimentality. It bristles with intellectual irony and subtle humour. In it, language itself -- what happens to it, what we do with it -- is the very substance of revelation. It is utterly free of exoticism: the stamp of genius, as that other great South American writer of the 20th century, Borges, would say.

TRILCE I

Quién hace tánta bulla, y ni deja

testar las islas que van quedando.

Un poco más de consideración

en cuanto será tarde, temprano,

y se aquilatará mejor

el guano, la simple calabrina tesórea

que brinda sin querer,

en el insular corazón,

salobre alcatraz, a cada hialóidea

grupada.

Un poco más de consideración,

y el mantillo líquido, seis de la tarde

DE LOS MAS SOBERBIOS BEMOLES.

Y la península párase

por la espalda, abozaleada, impertérrita

en la línea mortal del equilibrio.

TRILCE I

Who's making that din, and won't let

the rising islands be accounted.

A little more regard

till it's late, early,

and the guano can be better

assayed, the simple dung-trove

the briny pelican gratuitously offers

the island heart

at every hyaloid

fling.

A little more regard

and the liquid manure, six in the evening

OF THE PROUDEST B-FLATS.

And the peninsula arches

its back, muzzled, unconcerned,

on the deadly line of balance.