This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939).

Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo's is a tragic vision--perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature--in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman's long relationship with Vallejo's poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo's life and work.

"Less famous than Neruda or Lorca, the Peruvian Vallejo (1892 — 1938) may stand as their equal among the great Spanish language modernists. At times more demanding than both — and just as devoted to 'eternal love,' 'animal purity' and 'the absolute Encounter' — Vallejo has inspired devotion and imitation across continents. The lyrical, quotable poems of The Black Heralds (1918) record an intense young man's struggle with his Andean and Catholic heritage. Dense in its beauty, packed with neologisms, Trilce (1922) shows Vallejo at his strangest and most original: determined to forge a new language for the New World, the volume weaves together pellucid laments for the lost loves of childhood with 'thrips and thrums from lupine heaps.' The posthumous Human Poems (1939) mingle nostalgia, eroticism and rage as they follow the poet's years in Paris; the more conventional Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939) records Vallejo's devotion to the Loyalist (left-wing, and losing) side of the Spanish Civil War and memorably mourns the fallen. Decades in the making, this faithful and forceful complete text from poet and essayist Eshleman (see page 40 for a review of his newest book of verse) deserves as much notice as any poetic translation can get." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Cesar Vallejo is the greatest Catholic poet since Dante--and by Catholic I mean universal."--Thomas Merton, author of "The Seven Storey Mountain"

"An astonishing accomplishment. Eshleman's translation is writhing with energy."--Forrest Gander, author of "Eye Against Eye"

"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. In Clayton Eshleman's spectacular translation, now complete, this most tangled and most rewarding of poets comes at us full blast and no holds barred. A tribute to the power of the imagination as it manifests through language in a world where meaning has always to be fought for and, as here, retrieved against the odds."--Jerome Rothenberg, co-editor of "Poems for the Millennium"

"Every great poet should be so lucky as to have a translator as gifted and heroic as Clayton Eshleman, who seems to have gotten inside Vallejo's poems and translated them from the inside out. The result is spectacular, or as one poem says, 'green and happy and dangerous.'"--Ron Padgett, translator of "Complete Poems" by Blaise Cendrars

"Cesar Vallejo was one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer, and this gathering of the many years of imaginative work by Clayton Eshleman is one of Vallejo's essential locations in the English tongue."--Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States

"Cesar Vallejo made the Spanish language less stilted, more elastic, inventive and sonorous--in short, he made it more American. Translating his poems into English might well have been one of the punishments in Dante'spurgatory. Clayton Eshleman, instead, has turned the endeavor into a philosophy of life. He's been haunted--and hunted--by Vallejo for decades. His renditions aren't ever finished. They change as he does, and so does the reader. Polish or perish!"--Ilan Stavans, author of "Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language"

"This is a crucially important translation of one of the poetic geniuses of the twentieth century." --William Rowe, author of "Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life"

"Only the dauntless perseverance and the love with which the translator has dedicated so many years of his life to this task can explain why the English version conveys, in all its boldness and vigor, the unmistakable voice of Cesar Vallejo."--Mario Vargas Llosa

"An astonishing accomplishment. Eshleman's translation is writhing with energy."--Forrest Gander "This is a crucially important translation of one of the poetic geniuses of the twentieth century." --William Rowe, author of "Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life" "Only the dauntless perseverance and the love with which the translator has dedicated so many years of his life to this task can explain why the English version conveys, in all its boldness and vigor, the unmistakable voice of Cesar Vallejo."--from the Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa