What Vallejo Do You Want?

Dean Rader considers César Vallejo’s ‘The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems,’ recently translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

By Dean RaderJanuary 19, 2026

• Poetry

CÉSAR VALLEJO IS the poet I love the most who readers generally know the least. He was not as prolific or as overtly political as his friend Pablo Neruda, not as joyful as Federico García Lorca, not as lyrical as Alfonsina Storni or Gabriela Mistral, not as cosmopolitan as Octavio Paz, and nowhere near as inventive or as well connected as Vicente Huidobro. And yet, I am utterly devoted; I think about him and his work on an almost daily basis.

Vallejo led an astonishingly difficult life, hounded by poverty, imprisonment, and a profound sense of un-at-homeness. Born in a small town in the Peruvian Andes in 1892, Vallejo seemed alienated from this world at birth. His grandfathers were Spanish priests, but his grandmothers were Indigenous Peruvians, and Vallejo lived his entire life painfully aware of his mixed heritage. He was the youngest of 11 siblings, and his family’s finances prevented him from a normal course of study. He began attending one university in Trujillo but had to drop out until he could afford to return to school. After taking a job in a mine, he transferred to a different college in Lima, where, again, he struggled to make ends meet. There were stops and starts before ultimately earning his degree. He went on to obtain a master’s in Spanish literature in 1915, which enabled him to be hired at a prestigious high school. Just three years later, however, he was fired for refusing to marry his lover.

Things got worse. That same year, during an uprising in his hometown, he was wrongfully arrested for being an “intellectual instigator” and spent 105 days in prison. Upon his release, he fled to Paris where, on several different occasions, he nearly starved to death. While there, he was arrested for his leftist politics and ordered to leave the country. He then moved to Spain, where he lived with his wife in dire poverty and suffered bouts of illness, political frustration, and literary rejection. In 1933, he was allowed back into France under one condition: he could not engage in political activities. Amazingly, he managed to land a teaching position, which gave him some stability, but that did not last long. The fascist uprising in Spain galvanized his desire to write a new mode of political poetry, and he actually returned there in 1937, visiting the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, his financial situation worsened, as did his spirits. He returned to Paris later that year. Exhausted, penniless, jobless, and broken by the fall of Spain, Vallejo succumbed to a mysterious illness that is, to this date, a source of debate and controversy. He died in Paris in 1938 at the age of 46. He left behind hundreds of pages of unpublished drama, essays, fiction, and, most importantly, poetry.

Only two collections appeared during Vallejo’s lifetime. Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds) was published in 1919 and is a book that changed my life with its bizarre combination of deep compassion and deep interrogation. Robert Bly called The Black Heralds “the greatest single collection of poems I have ever read.” The second book, Trilce (1922), could not be more different. Many of the poems were written when Vallejo was in jail. The poems try hard to break free of the prisons of grammar and poetic form. Indeed, Trilce is one of the most formally radical books in any language. Vallejo was doing surrealism before the surrealists. Words are split, torsed, wrenched, and stretched. There is nothing like it.

Vallejo is one of the great poets of suffering, if not the greatest. I know of no other poet who descends to such depths of human anguish. And yet, he manages to inhabit this level of suffering with no sense of self-aggrandizement or self-mythologization. One gets the sense that Vallejo suffers with us, on behalf of us, for us. His passion and compassion feel limitless. Thomas Merton famously said of Vallejo that he is “the greatest Catholic poet since Dante—and by Catholic I mean universal.” I get Merton’s point; however, I have always thought of Vallejo as perhaps our most Christlike poet—that is, the Christ that is on the cross. That, to me, feels Vallejo-esque: alone, abandoned, misunderstood, martyred. Vallejo’s poems have the uncanny ability to look inward and outward at the same time, as if they are a form of invented public prayer.

That makes translating Vallejo difficult. His work is loaded and laden. Lapidary. Many translators have taken a shot at Vallejo’s poetry, most notably Clayton Eshleman. In 2007, the University of California Press released a massive, 732-page bilingual edition of all of Vallejo’s poems, The Complete Poetry: César Vallejo, edited and translated by Eshleman, who had devoted entire decades of his life to translating Vallejo. And in 2015, Wesleyan University Press published the nearly 700-page, all-English Selected Writings of César Vallejo, edited and translated by Joseph Mulligan. It has been amazing to have so much Vallejo—much of which was posthumously published and only recently translated. However, I don’t know anyone who thinks either collection is the definitive translation of Vallejo. The versions are good, but a little lifeless.

This is why I was excited about The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems, a new collection of Vallejo’s poetry, selected and translated by Margaret Jull Costa. I took the book with me on a recent trip to Peru—excited to read Vallejo in his native land. And Costa’s selections are excellent. Her introduction is engaging and thoughtful and humble. The book is affordable and much easier to carry around than the tomes by Eshleman and Mulligan. And most importantly, she dives into Vallejo. She attends to his suffering. It is a serious book and a serious endeavor. Some readers are going to love these translations. I myself was hoping Costa’s versions would make me experience Vallejo in a refreshing way. But that didn’t happen.

Costa does not do damage to Vallejo’s poetry. Her translations are solid, often “accurate,” and more or less justifiable. They just don’t feel quite right. One possible reason my ear struggled with her versions is that Costa is British, and her English feels a bit more buttoned up than the English I live in, read in, and write in on a regular basis. I have similar issues with Michael Hamburger’s translations of German poets. I get the sense that Costa is trying to make Vallejo sound more proper than he actually does. That is probably not the case, but regardless, I want a grittier Vallejo. A Vallejo rougher around the edges. A Vallejo who sounds like he’s suffering. I want a Vallejo that makes me feel his suffering.

I also believe we tend to favor translations closest to our own vernacular. For Americans, a translation of a poet into British English remains in a foreign language. We can read it, but the poem still feels distant. For me, James Wright is the best translator of Vallejo. I suspect that the similarities in their backgrounds—Wright grew up among the rural poor of Ohio—enabled him to get closer to Vallejo’s tone and mood and cadence and desperation.

Here are the opening lines of a poem entitled “La cena miserable,”

Hasta cuándo estaremos esperando lo que
no se nos debe … Y en qué recodo estiraremos
nuestra pobre rodilla para siempre! Hasta cuándo
la cruz que nos alienta no detendrá sus remos.

Costa translates the title as “The Wretched Supper,” which is fine. However, “miserable” is already in there, doing good work. And with its etymological roots to “misery” and the Catholic notion of “miseria,” “The Miserable Supper” sits more comfortably at the table.

In Costa’s version, the poem reads:

How much longer are we to wait for what
is not our due … And at which turn in the road shall we
straighten our poor knee for the last time! How much longer before
the cross urging us on lays down its oars.

The speaker in the poem is hungry. Impatient. It is a miserable dinner, after all—perhaps an ironic take on The Last Supper. Thus, the extra formal wording of “How much longer are we to wait for what / is not our due” dilutes the poem’s urgency. Same with “And at which turn in the road shall we / straighten.” That “shall” rattles my ear.

I might have gone with something like this:

How long do we have to wait for something
not owed us … and in what riverbend can we stretch
out our poor knees for good.

“Recodo” means “curve” or “bend,” a meander you might find in a river. The move from one word (recodo) to four words (turn in the road) is extraneous and misleading. That said, I sort of like the last sentence, even though I find it wordy. I would trim and accentuate some sounds: how long till the cross calling us drops its oars. Again, nothing Costa does undermines Vallejo’s poems—they just don’t sound, to me, like Vallejo.

Few preferences in this life are more subjective than translation. The only correlatives that come to mind are arrangements of classical music or jazz. For example, I have sought out and listened to many different versions of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1.” I find Alena Cherny’s version clearly superior to anything else. When I think about why, all I can really come up with is that Cherny’s is the most pleasing to my ear, head, and heart. Is it the closest to what Satie had in mind? I have no idea. Do I care? Maybe not. It’s largely emotional. To me, she gets it right. What is right? I don’t know!

Still, I would say the same about translation. We tend to veer toward the version that, for whatever reason, we think gets it right. Here, for instance, are four different versions of a key stanza of one of Vallejo’s best and most loved poems, “The Eternal Dice.” In it, Vallejo imagines a conversation with God in which he suggests that God is pretty ineffective and that man is the real deity. Normally, I would provide the original, but I’m going to refrain. I’m not interested in which is the most “accurate”—they all do fine in that regard—but rather in which one you, dear reader, prefer in English without the Spanish referent. Which of the four, for you, gets it right?

Today, when there are candles in my witchlike eyes,
as in the eyes of a condemned man,
God of mine, you will light all your lamps,
And we will play with the old dice …
Gambler, when the whole universe, perhaps,
is thrown down,
the circled eyes of Death will turn up,
like two final aces of clay.

¤

Now there are enchanted lights in my eyes,
As in a condemned man,
My God, take up all your tricks,
And we will play with the old dice …
Perhaps, oh gambler! in giving the fate
Of the universe all,
The heavy eyes of death will appear
Like two funereal aces of mud.

¤

Today there are candles in my sorcerer eyes,
as in those of a condemned man—
my God, you will light all of your candles
and we will play with the old die …
Perhaps, oh gambler, throwing for the fate of
the whole universe,
Death’s dark-circled eyes will come up,
like two funereal snake eyes of mud.

¤

Today, when there are candles in my witch eyes,
like one condemned to death,
you, my God, will light all your tapers,
and we’ll play with the old dice …
Perhaps, O gambler!, when you cast the die
for the fate of the whole universe,
the hollow eyes of Death will appear,
like two muddy, funereal dots.

I like aspects of all of these. I am a fan of “witchlike eyes” in the first example. I prefer the simplicity and cadence of the second line in the last example (that is Costa, by the way). The question is, who nails the last line? My ear really likes “final aces of clay” (James Wright), but it does not like “muddy, funereal dots.” It’s okay with “two funereal snake eyes of mud” (Mulligan) and “two funereal aces of mud” (H. R. Hays). All of these give us a Vallejo we can appreciate.

As I was typing up these examples, and looking at a few others, I was reminded of the famous quote by the late poet and art critic David Antin: “From the modernism you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve.” It can apply to our purposes here as well: From the poetry you want, you get the translation you deserve. What Vallejo do you want? What poetry do you want? It is important to have a plethora of translations of the same poet; somewhere out there, the right translation of Vallejo is waiting for us. We just have to find it.