The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems
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One of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century, the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo now has a translator worthy of his genius
The Peruvian poet César Vallejo—one of Latin America’s most famous poets—was involved in various literary circles and began publishing his poems in 1914 in magazines, after discovering the works of Walt Whitman, the French symbolists, and the modernist Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario. He brought out his first book of poems in 1919, Los heraldos negros, and in 1922, he published his famous Trilce, which met a cool reception. Vallejo spent many years of his life in Europe—in Paris and Spain. Like many of the surrealists, he became a Marxist, and he was an ardent supporter of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. In his poems, Vallejo poignantly describes human misery, isolation, and anguish. As the translator Margaret Jull Costa explains: “Vallejo edited and redrafted and honed his poetry. This is the only way in which he could describe the antithetical, paradoxical, oxymoronic universe he was living in, by using language at full tilt, making it perform all kinds of acrobatics. The resulting poems often defy interpretation…” This marvelous new bilingual selection of poems spanning his career up to his early death confirms Robert Hass’s assessment that Vallejo was “one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer.”
Praise for The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems
The greatest universal poet since Dante.
— Thomas Merton
Vallejo created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms. Vallejo forged a new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human suffering.
— Edith Grossman - Los Angeles Times Book Review
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.
— Jerome Rothenberg, co-editor of Poems for the Millennium
Vallejo never hoarded his suffering, never saw it as a privilege, as something that fell only on him.
— Michael Wood - New York Review of Books
The Eternal Dice introduces English readers to the work that helped solidify Vallejo’s elusive mythology and exemplifies his sardonic style. Through radical experimentation with language in an even more directly avant-garde gesture, Vallejo tried to conceive the earth from scratch—now denying not only his former Gods, but the structures of language itself.
— Julia Kornberg - The Poetry Foundation
The Eternal Dice by César Vallejo, translated by Margaret Jull Costa provides a concise and thoughtfully arranged volume that honors the important Peruvian poet.
— Poetry Northwest
Vallejo is one of the great poets of suffering, if not the greatest. I know of no other poet who descends to such depths of human anguish. And yet, one gets the sense that Vallejo suffers with us, on behalf of us, for us. His passion and compassion feel limitless.
— Dean Rader - Los Angeles Review of Books
Fifty-two new and lucid renderings of César Vallejo’s poems…Costa’s translations bring a needed light to Vallejo.
— Spencer Hupp - Threepenny Review
