The Black Heralds & Other Early Poems

Before writing his breakthrough poem sequence ‘Trilce’, César Vallejo published ‘The Black Heralds’, his first book of poems, in 1919. Although heavily indebted to the aesthetics of modernismo, Vallejo’s early volume finds a way to escape the merely decorative, and includes poems of indubitable originality, harbingers of his later masterpieces. In this varied book, lyrics of existential angst and romantic frustration appear amid descriptions of family life and Andean landscapes. ‘The Black Heralds’ includes many of Vallejo’s best-known poems, and its deceptive straightforwardness has garnered a lasting appeal among poetry readers. This bilingual edition presents a new translation of ‘The Black Heralds’, and is based upon the latest textual discoveries, such as variants in some copies of the first edition. Aside from the contents of his first book, an appendix gathers all of Vallejo’s early uncollected poems, as well as those which only survive in fragments. Together with ‘Trilce’ and ‘The Complete Later Poems 1923-1938’, this volume makes available, for the first time in English, all of César Vallejo’s poetry. The new translations presented here are by the Irish poet, and award-winning translator, Michael Smith, and the Peruvian scholar Valentino Gianuzzi.