Literary Nonfiction. Latino/Lati Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler. As the translator writes in his introduction: "These are not aphorisms in the classical sense of philosophic gemstones cut and polished to epigrammatic perfection. They are more like thoughts-in-progress from the notebooks of a radical modernist poet trying to regain his bearings after a consciousness-shaking encounter with Soviet socialism. Vallejo, one of the most distinctive and challenging individual voices in a period of great creative ferment throughout Europe and especially poets writing in Spanish, appears to have experienced in 1928 an almost religious conversion to Marxism. From Paris, where he had been self-exiled from his native Peru since 1924, he traveled to both Russia and Spain toward the end of that decade, and the dynamic tension between his own subjective, visionary poetics and a desire for solidarity with the masses energizes and haunts these writings."

Author City: Santiago de Chuco PER

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 traveled 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.