Written for the most part during his 112-day imprisonment in Trujillo for a crime he did not commit, Vallejo’s call for freedom speaks to both his literal confinement and literary isolation. There’s now a consensus that Trilce is, in fact, a modernist wonder: off-centering consciousness and self through deranging syntactic operation, linguistic stretches, infinitely rich pools of idiosyncratically layered religious and literary references, all shot through with mundane heartbreak, existential ambivalence, and ambient revolt. One might say that the void into which Trilce was initially released never fully folded in on itself. It kept expanding, bending hours and days, creating a field of language so charged that words begin colliding in a simultaneous rejection of meaning and desire for it. There’s an ongoingness to Trilce, an estranging duration that keeps it relevant while frustrating any attempt to make it “contemporary.” Trilce was never cool, which also means that it has never felt dated.

The latest English edition by Helen Dimos and William Rowe (NYRB Poets, 2026) is Trilce’s fourth major translation into English, each iteration revealing a distinct negotiation of idiom and syntax, one that speaks to the shifting valences of English as it reimagines not only the possibilities of the Spanish, but its own internal limits and capacities. Take for example, the opening stanzas of “Trilce I,” in two translations, the first by Dimos and Rowe, the second by Clayton Eshleman.

“Fecapital,” a neologism combining fecal matter evoked in the poem with the economy surrounding it (I learn from Dimos and Rowe’s gloss that “the guano boom of the late nineteenth century injected liquidity into the Peruvian economy”) makes perfect sense as a non-existing word. While building on Eshleman’s lifelong engagement with Vallejo’s work, Dimos and Rowe revert back to maintaining the semantic density and archaic texture of Vallejo’s Spanish. They move away from what English is conventionally expected to “sound like,” venturing into third territories where both Spanish and English exist at odds with themselves. I’m mindful here of the stylistic debates among translators over whether to make a translation more familiar to new readers or to remain faithful to an original, even at the cost of estrangement. I’d also like to think there’s a third place beyond the poles of domestication and foreignization where translation can question and play with stylistic impulses, disclosing the messy backstage of its own deliberations without sacrificing the pulse of the writing. By skillfully exposing the process without ever losing the poem, Dimos and Rowe are particularly attuned to walking that “mortal line of equilibrium.”

One of the defining features of Dimos and Rowe’s translation is, in fact, a series of brief glosses: concise reflections offering biographical, historical, and interpretive notes alongside each translated Trilce. The translators ask their questions in the open, including the reader in a shared inquiry. Compare Eshleman, who wrote in his essay “A Translation Memoir” (published as an afterword to The Complete Poetry César Vallejo) about his psychic fixation on Vallejo but relegated his tribulations to the translation’s extensively annotated appendix. Only when freed from the ego and the fantasy of mastery does the writing begin to dance between absorption and autonomy, generating—through that very movement—a rhythm endemic to the struggles animating it.

While Dimos and Rowe balance different interpretative keys—materialist, poetic, biographical, religious, philosophical, literary, or historical—the emphasis on anticolonial squarely situates the collection in 2026. “Of the approximately 145 millions indigenous people of the Americas pre-European invasion, as many as 130 million were killed directly or indirectly by the colonizer,” they write as a gloss on Trilce XXV.

The postcolonial ethos of Dimos and Rowe’s translation is fully embedded in the fabric of the translation. Consider, for example, the line in that same poem: “As the lee of each caravel snarls / unravelled without americaning.” “americaning” remains in lowercase, staying close to the politics of Vallejo’s original, whereas Eshleman, perhaps because of the tour-de-force quality of his translation, capitalizes the word. Against the original, the upright “A” stands like an erect flag, an assimilatory impulse displaying its own internal ideology.

Dimos and Rowe’s glosses move gracefully between registers, emphasizing Indigenous words, reminding us, for example, that ñandú, the ostrich-like bird native to South America, is a Guaraní word; providing historical context (“When Vallejo was growing up in Santiago de Chuco, most if not all vehicles would have been horse-drawn carts, and in Lima in the first decades of the twentieth century the soundscape was changing radically as more cars appeared” or “When Vallejo was in jail, where he wrote a substantial part of Trilce, the prisoners were only allowed to use the toilets four times a day”). They also offer more formal and symbolic readings of the poems: “The complex image of the second stanza weaves heterogeneous elements into a forced, unstable oneness,” for example, approaching their translation with the same totality of heart and mind with which Vallejo wrote his poetry.

While excavating the tight citational fabric of the poem, the glosses remain committed to inquiry; resolution would shut down the poem’s internal deferral of meaning. Stylistically associative, elliptical, and fragmentary, the glosses are written in both elegant and conversational prose. They dissolve the stickiness of the translator-author dyad by inviting the reader to enter a triangulation that’s operative beyond the one. Dimos and Rowe embrace translation’s crowdedness, aligning their collaborative ethos with Vallejo’s mistrust of the first person. A non-identity of the self with itself that pervades Trilce in its entirety.

The glosses are invitations to the many, moved by the imperative that Trilce needs to exit its niche (albeit canonical) status and be read as widely as possible. Dimos and Rowe’s translation is very much a step in that direction.

My own encounter with Vallejo is relatively recent. Ammiel Alcalay mentioned him in an interview I conducted with him last year and piqued my curiosity. It’s June 2026. I’m reading Trilce on a weekend break in upstate NY where I’m currently teaching at the Bard MFA. Here, conversations around art sway either toward the formal or the social, and encourage practitioners to commit to a single aesthetic lane. Vallejo offers an example out of this impasse! In addition to his profound literary experimentation, Vallejo was a committed Marxist, a member of the Spanish Communist Party who travelled thrice to Russia to attend literary convening and conferences. In his late poem Spain, Take This Cup From Me, he wrote about the Spanish civil war in support of the anti-fascist Republican forces, and was censored in Europe for his political sympathies. Biographers and critics since his death have often opposed his political convictions to his formal audacity, as if one precluded the other. See, for example, the Poetry Foundation’s egregiously revisionist biography, which describes Vallejo as an “ambivalent Marxist.” He was not!

The reintroduction of his oeuvre through Rowe and Dimos’s accessible yet rigorous translation—with glosses that guide the reader while refusing to close the gap of interpretation—is precisely what our conjuncture, plagued by the rise of fascism and the normalization of genocidal violence, calls for. Vallejo’s intimate knowledge of dispossession, the time he spent in his youth working on sugar plantations in the northern Peruvian coastal region, enabled him to witness the incommensurable heartbreak of the world. More than refusing any partition between politics and aesthetics, Trilce foregrounds how formal innovation is moved by necessity. Like “trilce,” a word that dangles on the edge of meaning while still feeling absolutely essential, the same way that children’s play—promptless and holding no vision—makes what had previously remained unimaginable provisionally possible.