"The Peruvian poet César Vallejo - one of Latin America's most famous writers along with Pablo Neruda - was involved in various literary circles and began publishing his poems in 1914 after discovering the works of Walt Whitman, the French symbolists, and the modernist Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Five years later, he published his first book of poems Los heraldos negros, and in 1922, his famous Trilce, which met with a cool reception when first published. Vallejo spent many years in Europe-in Paris and Spain. Like many of the surrealists, he became a Marxist, and he was an ardent supporter of the Re- publican cause during the Spanish Civil War. In his poems, Vallejo poignantly describes human misery, isolation, and anguish. As his 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." Spanning his career up to his early death, this marvelous new bilingual selection of po- ems confirms Robert Hass's assessment that Vallejo was "one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer.""--