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Scales
Melographed by César Vallejo
Edited by Joseph Mulligan
Translated by Joseph Mulligan
Sales Date: 2017-09-05
The first complete English translation of a Latin American avant-garde masterpiece
First published in 1923, just before César Vallejo left Peru for France, Scales combines prose poems with short stories in a collection that exhibits all the exuberance of the author's early experimentalism. A follow-up to Vallejo's better-known work, Trilce, this radical collection shattered many aesthetic notions prevailing in Latin America and Europe. Intermingling romantic, symbolist, and avant-garde traditions, Scales is a poetic upending of prose narrative that blends Vallejo's intercontinental literary awareness with his commitment to political transformation. Written in part from Trujillo Central Jail, where Vallejo would endure some of the most terrifying moments of his life, Scales is also a testament of anguish and desperation, a series of meditations on justice and freedom, an exploration of the fantastic, and a confrontation with the threat of madness. Edited and translated from the Castilian by the scholar Joseph Mulligan, this first complete English translation, published here in bilingual format and accompanied by extensive archival documentation related to Vallejo's incarceration, this volume gives unprecedented access to one of the most inventive practitioners of Latin American literature in the twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
This Edition
SCALES
CUNEIFORMS
Northwestern Wall
Antarctic Wall
East Wall
Doublewide Wall
Windowsill
Western Wall
WIND CHOIR
Beyond Life and Death
The Release
The Only Child
The Caynas
Mirtho
Wax
ESCALAS
CUNEIFORMES
Muro noroeste
Muro antártico
Muro este
Muro dobleancho
Alféizar
Muro occidental
CORO DE VIENTOS
Más allá de la vida y la muerte
Liberación
El unigénito
Los caynas
Mirtho
Cera
APPENDIX
"The Gravest Moment of My Life" by Andrés Echevarría
FROM TRÍLCE
II. "Time time"
XVIII. "Oh the four walls of the cell"
XX. "Flush with the beaten froth bulwarked"
XLI. "Death on its knees is spilling"
L. "Cerberus four times"
LVIII. "In the cell, in the solid"
LXI. "Tonight I get down from my horse"
Letter to La Reforma [August 12, 1920]
Letter to Óscar Imaña [October 26, 1920]
"Poet Vallejo Jailed in Trujillo," Gastón Roger
Letter to Gastón Roger [December 29, 1920]
"Poet Vallejo Imprisoned," Victor Raúl Haya de La Torre
Petition of Universidad de Trujillo Students
Petition of Trujillo Journalists
Letter to Óscar Imaña [February 12, 1921]
"Imprisonment of César Vallejo in Trujillo Jail"
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
CÉSAR VALLEJO (1892 – 1938) was born in the Peruvian Andes and, after publishing some of the most radical Latin American poetry of the twentieth century, moved to Europe, where he diversified his writing practice to encompass theater, fiction, and reportage. As an outspoken alternative to the European avant-garde, Vallejo stands as one of the most authentic and multifaceted creators to write in the Castilian language. JOSEPH MULLIGAN is a translator and scholar whose work has focused primarily on twentieth-century Latin American vanguardismo. He is the translator of Against Professional Secrets by César Vallejo (2001) and Gustavo Faverón's novel The Antiquarian (2014), and his translations of Jorge Eduardo Eielson's poems appeared in Asymmetries: Anthology of Peruvian Poetry (2015). His translations of Sahrawi poetry appeared in Poems for the Millennium, vol. 4: The University of California Book of North African Poetry (2013). He is editor and principal translator of Selected Writings of César Vallejo (2015). Currently, he is a PhD candidate in the Romance Studies Department of Duke University.
"This first complete English translation of Vallejo's inventive prose work gives readers the context necessary to appreciate Vallejo's text in relation to its volatile and singular historical moment."
~Publishers Weekly (starred review)
""This first complete English translation of Vallejo's inventive prose work gives readers the context necessary to appreciate Vallejo's text in relation to its volatile and singular historical moment.""
~Publishers Weekly (starred review)
""[T]he prose helps complicate the picture of a writer struggling with an unprecedented poetics.""
~David S. Wallace, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Scales is key to understanding Vallejo's work. This extraordinary text is presented here in an excellent translation. The scholarship is impeccable and the documents that comprise the appendix provide in-depth understanding of the historical period in which Vallejo wrote."
~Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Boston College
"Scales is key to understanding Vallejo's work. This extraordinary text is presented here in an excellent translation. The scholarship is impeccable and the documents that comprise the appendix provide in-depth understanding of the historical period in which Vallejo wrote."
~Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Boston College
"Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Vallejo's Trilce and Scales were written at the same time. Just as the Austrian philosopher was advancing his famous judgment on the benefits of silence beyond the limits of language ('Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent') the Peruvian was writing beyond the boundaries of that which cannot be spoken. There, he invented a language radically private and yet overwhelmingly apt to transmit the pathos of human tragedy and comedy to anyone determined to understand it. This is, as it were, a Wittgensteinian paradox: a private language that we all can share. Vallejo may well be the least known literary giant of the twentieth century, and the work of Joseph Mulligan, systematic in the view its gives us into the Peruvian writer's mind, may be one of the most significant contributions of a translator-critic in recent years: good news for the English language.""
~Gustavo Faverón Patriau, Bowdoin College. Author of The Antiquarian
"The publication of Scales demonstrates Vallejo's stature as that of one of a handful of masters of twentieth century Latin American literature. This translation is excellent. Mulligan's involvement with Vallejo has been intense and intelligent, and the contextual materials are illuminating.""
~Pierre Joris, author of An American Suite
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