Selected Poems
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César Vallejo is one the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His first publication, in his native Peru, was a book called "The Black Heralds", a fine collection of lyric poems in a largely symbolist style. This was followed by the book by which he is best known, "Trilce" (1922), which has become one of the monuments of the Hispanic 'vanguardia'. After "Trilce", now resident in Europe, Vallejo wrote stories, essays, a novel, and several plays, but did not collect any of his subsequent poems for book publication. Since his death, these poems have usually been referred to as the "Poemas humanos" after the title of one of the posthumous volumes. This Selected Poems draws on all of the Vallejo volumes published by Shearsman Books, thus giving an overview of the author's career and a sample of the whole range of his remarkable work.The translations are by the prize-winning Irish poet-translator, Michael Smith, and the Peruvian scholar, Valentino Gianuzzi.
Cesar Vallejo
César Vallejo was born in 1892 in Peru. His first book defined literary Indigenism, while his second, Trilce, foreshadowed many innovations of modernism. In 1923, he moved to Paris where he became a prolific journalist. Contra el secreto profesional, written in the 20s, integrates issues of social justice with innovative poetics. During this period he traveled three times to the Soviet Union. He became a member of the Congress of Antifascist Writers in Madrid and visited the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. His later poetry, Poemas humanos, was published a year after his death in 1938.
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Valentino Giannuzzi
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Valentino Gianuzzi is from Lima, where he was born in 1976. He graduated in Hispanic Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru and has worked as a journalist, translator and assistant editor. He has edited the complete fiction of Peruvian writer Jose Diez-Canseco, and is currently translating selected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. For Shearsman Books he has co-translated the complete poetry of Cesar Vallejo. He is co-editor of the project El Archivo Vallejo. He now teaches at the University of Manchester, after completing a PhD at the University of London.
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