Cesar Vallejo Biography

Cesar Vallejo (March 16, 1892 - April 15, 1938) published only three books of poetry but is
nonetheless considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century. Always a
step ahead of the literary currents, each of his books was distinct from the others and in its
own sense revolutionary.
Life
Csar Vallejo was born the youngest of eleven children in Santiago de Chuco, a remote
village in the Andes of Peru. He studied literature in the Universidad de la Libertad in
Trujillo, Peru. The poet dropped out of the university several times, working at a sugar
plantations where he saw firsthand the exploitation of agrarian workers, a sight that would
influence his politics and aesthetics. Vallejo received a masters degree in spanish literature
in 1915.
Later, Vallejo moved to Lima, where he lived a Bohemian lifestyle, meeting important
members of the intellectual left, and working as a tutor and then a professor. The poet
suffered a number of calamities in the years leading up to the publication of Los Heraldos
Negros: He lost his teaching post after having refusing to marry a woman with whom he
had an affair, his lover died of a failed abortion which he had forced her to undergo, his
mother died in 1920, and he was imprisoned for 105 days after returning home to Santiago
de Chuco and igniting a scandal there.
After publishing Trilce in 1923, the poet, having lost another professorship in Lima,
emigrated to Europe, where he lived until his death in Paris in 1938. He is interred in the
Cimetire du Montparnasse.
Works
Los heraldos negros (1918)
Los heraldos negros is a book with traces of Spanish Modernism in the structure of its
poems. In it, the poet confronts existential anguish, personal guilt, and pain, writing
famously, "Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuerte..., yo no s" ("There are blows in life, so hard...
I don't know") and "Yo nac un da / que Dios estuvo enfermo" ("I was born on a day / when
God was sick"). The book of poetry sold relatively few copies, but was critically well
received.
Trilce (1922)
Trilce, published in 1922, anticipated much of the avant-garde movement that would
develop in the 1920s and 30s. Vallejo's book takes language to a radical extreme, inventing
words, stretching syntax, using automatic writing and other techniques now known as
"surrealist" (though he did this before the Surrealist movement began). The book put Latin
America at the center of the Avant-garde. Like James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and
Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Trilce borders on inaccessibility.
Poemas humanos (1939)
Poemas humanos, published by the poet's wife after his death, is a leftist work of political,
social poetry.