César Vallejo: Trilce (1922–) [Spanish, English]

Trilce is the second and the most well-known book of poetry by the Peruvian author César Vallejo.

Pared of all ornamental language, Trilce introduces the wrenched syntax that allows Vallejo to get beyond the constraints of received linguistic conventions. Writing in A History of Peruvian Literature, James Higgins catalogues the elements of Vallejo’s diction: “Vallejo confounds the reader’s expectations by his daring exploitation of the line pause, which often leaves articles, conjunctions and even particles of words dangling at the end of a line, by his frequent resort to harsh sounds to break the rhythm, by employing alliterations so awkward as to be tongue-twisters. He distorts syntactic structures, changes the grammatical function of words, plays with spelling. His poetic vocabulary is frequently unfamiliar and ‘unliterary,’ he creates new words of his own, he often conflates two words into one, he tampers with cliches to give them new meaning, he plays on the multiple meaning of words and on the similarity of sound between words. He repeatedly makes use of oxymoron and paradox and, above all, catachresis, defamiliarising objects by attributing to them qualities not normally associated with them.”

D. P. Gallagher suggests in Modern Latin American Literature that Vallejo was “perhaps the first Latin American writer to have realized that it is precisely in the discovery of a language where literature must find itself in a continent where for centuries the written word was notorious more for what it concealed than for what it revealed, where ‘beautiful’ writing, sheer sonorous wordiness was a mere holding operation against the fact that you did not dare really say anything at all.” (from Vallejo’s biography by Poetry Foundation)

With a Foreword by Antenor Orrego
Publisher Talleres tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, Lima, 1922
136 pages
via Biblioteca BBVA

Commentary (Michelle Clayton, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, 2011, 329 pp)
Wikipedia (ES)
Wikipedia (EN)

PDF (Spanish), other editions: 1961, 1982, 1986, 1987
HTML (Spanish/English, trans. Clayton Eshleman, 2007)