César Vallejo

Who is César Vallejo?

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was born in Santiago de Chuco, in the Peruvian Andes, in 1892, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest poetic innovators of the Spanish language. His first collection, 'Los heraldos negros' (The Black Heralds, 1919), blended modernist forms with a deeply personal, anguished voice rooted in Andean and mestizo experience. His radically experimental second book, 'Trilce' (1922), broke apart syntax, spelling and meter in ways that anticipated the avant-garde and remain influential today. Vallejo moved to Europe in 1923, living mostly in Paris in poverty while working as a journalist and engaging with Marxist politics; he travelled to the Soviet Union and supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His later poems, gathered posthumously as 'Poemas humanos' (1939) and 'España, aparta de mí este cáliz', express profound human solidarity and suffering. He died in Paris in 1938.

Sources: César Vallejo, 'Los heraldos negros' (1919) · César Vallejo, 'Trilce' (1922) · César Vallejo, 'Poemas humanos' (posthumous, 1939)