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LITERARY COLLECTIONS
100 Pages, 6 x 9
Formats: Trade Paper
Trade Paper, $20.00 (CA $27.00) (US $20.00)
Publication Date: March 2011
ISBN 9781931824422
Rights: WOR
Roof Books (Mar 2011)
Roof Books, long known for publishing living writers, just couldn’t resist treating its readers to this previously untranslated prose work of César Vallejo in Against Professional Secrets. These poems brilliantly translated by Joseph Mulligan attack the received wisdom of poets in favor of a completely lived existence. Collected from a cardboard box in Vallejo’s archive, this volume represents a series of prose poems that were selected by the author for publication along with material that he was in the process of choosing from before he died including the additions and deletions he proposes. Not only does this work expose the poetic process of the writer that Jerome Rothenberg describes as “the greatest of the great South American poets,” but it also introduces the reader to a poet capable of rewriting himself: "A time of thoroughfare contained my family.”
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 travelled 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.