Trilce

Cesar Vallejo (trans. and with glosses by William Rowe and Helen Dimos)

In Trilce, César Vallejo subjects time and identity to a series of operations that take their motion from a subtle intuition of capitalist modernity. The voices of the poem do not correspond with a succession of past, present and future. The poem doesn’t simply symbolize or allegorize childhood or family life. In the face of an indeterminate time, identification is impossible. And desire is not simply nostalgia of childhood eroticism, but desire for a different time. Time in these poems expands and contracts, as if the ‘I’ were at an absolute limit between annihilation and expansion of potentiality. Dimos and Rowe’s work reveals these operations through subtle analysis and in so doing rescues Vallejo from the anecdotal and tragic narrative in which he is often placed and where dramatic expression of pain is supposed to be the rule.