Poetry
Trilce
César Vallejo · 1922
Synopsis
Seventy-seven untitled poems, numbered in Roman numerals, in a dense language close to hermeticism. Death, time, pain, the mother, the childhood home and orphanhood recur in them, and love becomes a meditation on death and emptiness; syntax breaks, spelling twists, words are invented. The title is itself a coined word, in which some hear both sad and sweet.
Context
Begun in 1918, written for the most part in 1919 and finished in 1922, the book went through the one hundred and twelve days the author spent in prison in Trujillo, from 6 November 1920 to 26 February 1921, wrongly accused of theft and arson during a revolt. It was printed in October 1922, in two hundred copies, in the workshops of the Lima Penitentiary, with a prologue by Antenor Orrego; the prize of a short story competition, won in December 1921, paid for the edition. A second edition appeared in Spain in 1930, during the author's stay there.
Who it is for
Short poems but of extreme difficulty, in Spanish; a bilingual or annotated edition helps in following the coined words and the breaks in syntax.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the summit of its author's work and as a book that transformed Spanish-language poetry, published in the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land.