Trilce

Vallejo's poetry combines excruciatingly personal emotions with imagery that at first appears facetious but turns out to be wordplay with a larger purpose. ``Hot bakery of my former biscuits, / pure egg yolk childlike innumerable, mother,'' begins one of many poems that mourn his mother's death; but it is himself he ends up lamenting, since ``everyone keeps charging us / the rent for the world where you left us / and the value of this everlasting bread.'' The 77 poems reflect upon the poet's dual Spanish and Peruvian Indian heritage in a dialect that mocks Spanish grammar with Incan idioms, plays on the similarities between words and tosses in medical terms (Vallejo attended medical school) to enhance the surreal effect. Seiferle's insightful introduction and footnotes serve as necessary maps to the book's political context--Vallejo's assertion of the Incan side of his identity--and intellectual strengths. The sensitive translation of an extremely difficult text in this bilingual edition commemorates the centennial of Vallejo's birth and the 70th anniversary of the book's original publication; ironically, it also coincides with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. (June)