22 de noviembre:
“... recordé que la noche anterior ... Ernesto San Epifanio dijo que existía literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual. Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo.
Dentro del inmenso océano de la poesía distinguía varias corrientes: maricones, maricas, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones, mariposas, ninfos y filenos. Las dos corrientes mayores, sin embargo, eran las de los maricones y la de los maricas. Walt Whitman, por ejemplo, era un poeta maricón. Pablo Neruda, un poeta marica. William Blake era maricón, sin asomo de duda, y Octavio Paz marica. Borges era fileno, es decir de improviso podía ser maricón y de improviso simplemente asexual. Rubén Darío era una loca, de hecho la reina y el paradigma de las locas.
– En nuestra lengua, claro está – aclaró –; en el mundo ancho y ajeno el paradigma sigue siendo Verlaine el Generoso."
– Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (1998)
[I remembered that the night before … Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet, Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer, Borges was philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
In our language, of course, he clarified. ‘In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.]
– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives. 1998.
Trans. Natasha Wimmer (2007)
I quoted this passage from Bolaño's immense satire on twentieth-century Latin American literature once before - in a story called "Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex?" from my 2019 collection Ghost Stories. I thought then that it might be amusing to apply it to some of our own local efforts to produce a body of transgressive, avant-garde writing in the 1990s and early 2000s.
I suppose that I'm repeating it here because it does indeed pose a vital question: what is it that makes Walt Whitman a "faggot" [maricón], whereas Octavio Paz can only be awarded the status of a queer [marica]? Both homosexual epithets, I should note, are extremely pejorative in Spanish - maricón more than marica, which can be used in more casual contexts. They do not, however, equate with active or passive sexual roles.
A bit further on, the narrator of this first section of Bolaño's novel, 17-year-old Juan García Madero, puts it rather more directly: “Our situation is unbearable, stuck between the empire of Octavio Paz and the empire of Pablo Neruda.”
Ernesto San Epifanio, it would appear, posits Whitman as a poet of "naked hallucination, total freedom, and raw, uncompromising art", existing outside the margins of institutional comfort. He's therefore grouped alongside figures like William Blake and César Vallejo, poets who prioritized absolute emotional and artistic honesty over social respectability or state-sanctioned approval.
Octavio Paz, by contrast, stands for the towering, heavily state-subsidized literary patriarchy of Mexico. He's comfortable within the confines of state diplomacy, literary institutions, and sanitized high culture. And the reason he's grouped with Pablo Neruda is not - once again - for reasons of sexual orientation, but simply because the latter, too, has grown into a massive political and literary monument - a "G.O.M.", as they used to put it in the U.K. [= "Grand Old Man"] of the Left.
To the "Real visceralista" [Visceral Realist] poets in Bolaño's semi-autobiographical book, being a marica means that your work has been muzzled, stripped of its revolutionary fervour, and is now being used to guard the gates of official culture. A maricón is an undomesticated writer who still poses a clear and present danger to the state.
Whether you see that as a good thing or a bad one depends on your own social (and literary) orientation, I suppose.
There's a lot of social and literary history hiding behind Bolaño's amusing paradoxes. Perhaps the best place to begin, then, is with a brief summary of the significance of Peruvian poet César Vallejo in Latin American culture:
Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith ... called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language."That may sound excessive, but it's important to stress the immense mana Vallejo's work - particularly his 1922 collection Trilce - still holds among lovers of international poetry. Here's a sample poem from that book (The title is untranslatable, though some claim to have seen in it a portmanteau word created from "tres" [three] and "dulce" [sweet]):- Wikipedia: César Vallejo
Trilce - XV En el rincón aquel, donde dormimos juntos tantas noches, ahora me he sentado a caminar. La cuja de los novios difuntos fue sacada, o talvéz qué habrá pasado. Has venido temprano a otros asuntos y ya no estás. Es el rincón Donde a tu lado, leí una noche, entre tus tiernos puntos un cuento de Daudet. Es el rincón amado. No lo equivoces. Me he puesto a recordar los días de verano idos, tu entrar y salir, poca y harta y pálida por os cuartos. En esta noche pluviosa, ya lejos de ambos dos, salto de pronto … Son dos puertas abriéndose cerrándose, dos puertas que al viento van y vienen sombra a sombra - César Vallejo (1922)• In the corner where we slept together so many nights I’m sitting down to plot my exit our defunct bedstead has been thrown out along with what occurred you sneaked in early stole a march and now you’re gone it was in that corner one night I read to you propped up against your body a story by Daudet there that corner nowhere else I’m left counting down the days of summer your comings and goings pale and peevish few increasingly few this rainy night far from the two of us I’m shocked as the doors fly wide open then slam shut two doors caught by the wind shadow to shadow
- trans. JR (5/2010-10/11/2026)
•
It's a love poem, definitely - or, rather, an elegiac, end-of-love poem. But for anyone acquainted with Spanish poetry, it's what it lacks that's most surprising. There's an abundance of clear, exact imagery and carefully chosen words - a deliberate eschewal of cloudy rhetoric and facile phrases. The short, jagged poems of Trilce lobbed a handgrenade right into the middle of a self-satisfied poetic tradition.
Vallejo's social status, too, was - to say the least - unusual. He was no pampered child of the propertied classes, unlike his younger contemporaries Borges or Paz.
born ... in Santiago de Chuco, a remote village in the Peruvian Andes ... [César Vallejo was] the youngest of eleven children. His grandfathers were both Spanish priests, and his grandmothers were both indigenous Peruvians ...Not only did he come of indigenous peasant stock, but he was born into a world where peasant farmers were still tied by the peonage system to the land they worked on. He must have shown exceptional promise as a boy, because:
In 1911 Vallejo moved to Lima, where he studied at the National University of San Marcos; read, worked as a schoolteacher, and came into contact with the artistic and political avant-garde. While in Lima, he also produced his first poetry collection, Los heraldos negros [The Black Heralds] ...Even more vital to his education, though, was the fact that:
Lack of funds forced him to withdraw from his studies for a time and work at a sugar plantation, the Roma Hacienda, where he witnessed the exploitation of agrarian workers firsthand, an experience which would have an important impact on his politics and aesthetics.His radicalisation (and eventual conversion to Communism) was not quite so immediate as that, however:
His mother died in 1918. In May 1920, homesickness drove him to return to Santiago de Chuco. On the first of August, the house belonging to the Santa María Calderón family, who transported merchandise and alcohol by pack animals from the coast, was looted and set on fire. Vallejo was unjustly accused as both a participant and instigator of the act. He hid but was discovered, arrested, and thrown in a Trujillo jail where he would remain for 112 days ...The comparisons with Dante, the quintessential poet-in-exile, may start to make more sense in the light of this backstory. Here's another poem from Trilce, published in Lima in a limited edition of 200 copies shortly before his departure for Europe:
The judicial process was never closed. The poet left jail on ... temporary release. Years later in Europe, he knew that he could never return to his home country. Jail awaited him ...
Trilce - XLVIII Tengo ahora 70 soles peruanos. Cojo la penúltima moneda, la que sue na 69 veces púnicas. Y he aquí, al finalizar su rol, quemase toda y arde llameante, llameante, redonda entre mis tímpanos alucinados. Ella, siendo 69, dase contra 70; luego escala 71, rebota en 72. Y así se multiplica y espejea impertérrita en todos los demás piñones. Ella, vibrando y forcejeando, pegando grittttos, soltando arduos, chisporroteantes silencios, orinándose de natural grandor, en unánimes postes surgentes, acaba por ser todos los guarismos, la vida entera. - César Vallejo (1922)• Just now I’ve got 70 Peruvian soles counting the second-to-last a coin that clinks a stubborn 69 times then as it makes the turn it catches fire a fire toasting my beleaguered eardrums this coin no. 69 collides with 70 climbs to 71 rebounds off 72 multiplies mirrors itself bouncing off all the pinball gears vibrating struggling cackling crackling breaking the silences parading its petrified grandeur through a forest of pillars becoming each number life itself
- trans. JR (4-10/11/2026)
•
There's nothing particularly playful about this short diagnosis of the nature of currency. It's certainly not meant as a Borgesian game of paradoxes and mirrors. To put Vallejo's central image into some sort of context, the selling price of each copy of Trilce was a princely 3 soles:
Publication cost Vallejo 150 soles, which he funded from his winnings in a literary contest ...
The central event of Vallejo's European years was the Spanish Civil War. Before that, he lived:
in dire poverty in Paris, with the exception of three trips to the USSR and a couple of years in the early 1930s spent in exile in Spain ... In 1930 the Spanish government awarded him a modest author's grant. Vallejo became increasingly politically active in the early 1930s, joining the Peruvian Communist Party in 1931 ...The title of the book above, taken from a poem by the young English communist John Cornford, seems to sum up the nature of Vallejo's predicament. He had no money, few readers sympathised with his work, and the whole socio-economic system of the Western world seemed set up specifically to exploit poorer countries such as Peru.
All he could do was analyse and thus, somehow, try to control intellectually the devastation he saw around him:
After becoming emotionally and intellectually involved in the Spanish Civil War, Vallejo had a final burst of poetic activity in the late 1930s, producing two books of poetry ... whose titles and proper organization remain a matter of debate: they were published as Poemas humanos [Human Poems] and España, aparta de mí este cáliz [Spain, take this cup from me].Here's one of the last poems he wrote, published posthumously in the collection Poemas Humanos:
At the beginning of 1938, he [was working] as a language and literature professor in Paris ... On March 24 he was hospitalized for an unknown disease ... and on April 7 and 8 he became critically ill. He died a week later, on April 15 ... His funeral eulogy was written by the French writer Louis Aragon.
Piedra Negra Sobre Piedra Blanca Me moriré en París con aguacero, un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo. Me moriré en París - y no me corro - tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño. Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto, con todo mi camino, a verme solo. César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban todos sin que él les haga nada; le daban duro con un palo y duro también con una soga; son testigos los días jueves y los huesos húmeros, la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos ... - César Vallejo (1937)• I’ll die in Paris in the rain on a day I already remember I’ll die in Paris I'm not running away on a Thursday perhaps like today in the autumn it has to be a Thursday because today Thursday as I’m writing this my arm bones’ve taken a beating and never before as I do today have I looked back down the road and found myself quite alone César Vallejo is dead everybody beat on him though he’d done nothing to them they beat him with a stick hard with a rope hard the witnesses are this Thursday and the bones in my arms loneliness the rain the road
- trans. JR (4-15/11/2026)
•
It's an almost unbearably poignant poem - now, one of the most famous in the Spanish language. As with almost everything he wrote, you feel that whatever emotions he expresses have been hard earned: whether poverty, imprisonment, unhappy love affairs, or fierce rage at the state of the world - none of it comes out of books or word-play but straight from lived experience.
It's not hard to see why even the silly "Visceral Realists" in Roberto Bolaño's novel can see that Vallejo is not someone to patronise and look down on. Like Blake and Whitman, he's on a level entirely beyond them. At least they have the grace to recognise that.
One of the more amusing aspects of Roberto Bolaño's bitchy attack on that monument of Mexican (and world) literature Octavio Paz is the way in which his breakdown of poets into those two major classes of maricón [faggot] and marica [queer] mirrors the more considered dichotomies in Paz's own classic work of sociological analysis El Laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude]:
... mientras los españoles se complacen en la blasfemia y la escatología, nosotros nos especializamos en la crueldad y el sadismo. El español es simple: insulta a Dios porque cree en él.This famous book, written in Paris while Paz was still in his mid-thirties, cemented his reputation as a deep thinker about the creative and political dilemmas of post-colonial societies:
[... while the Spaniards enjoy using blasphemy and scatology, we specialize in cruelty and sadism. The Spaniard is simple: he insults God because he believes in Him.]– Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude. 1950.
Trans. Lysander Kemp (1961)
La novedad de las nuevas naciones hispanoamericanas es engañosa; en verdad se trata de sociedades en decadencia o en forzada inmovilidad, supervivencias y fragmentos de un todo deshecho.But how can such deeply wounded and divided counties ever achieve wholeness? Liberalism, unfortunately:
[The newness of the new Spanish-American nations is deceptive: in reality they were decadent or static societies, fragments and survivals of a shattered whole.]
... afirma al hombre pero ignora una mitad del hombre: ésa que se expresa en los mitos, la comunión, el festín, el sueño, el erotismo
[... championed man but ignored a half of his nature: that which is expressed in communion, myths, festivals, dreams, eroticism.]
Already, by 1950, Octavio Paz had a pretty complex backstory. Born near Mexico City:
His family was a prominent liberal political family in Mexico, with Spanish and indigenous Mexican roots. His grandfather, Ireneo Paz, the family's patriarch ... [was] a staunch supporter of liberal war hero Porfirio Díaz up until just before the 1910 outbreak of the Mexican Revolution ... Ireneo's son, Octavio Paz Solórzano, supported Emiliano Zapata during the Revolution, and published an early biography of him and the Zapatista movement. Octavio was named after his father but spent much of his childhood with his grandfather Ireneo, as his ... father was active in the Mexican Revolution. His father later died violently. The family experienced financial ruin after the Mexican Revolution; they briefly relocated to Los Angeles, before returning to Mexico. Paz had blue eyes and was often mistaken for a foreigner by other children — [his biographer] n Enrique Krauze quotes Paz as saying, "I felt myself Mexican but they wouldn't let me be one."After this bumpy upbringing in the midst of the Mexican Revolution (c.1910-20), young Octavio clearly found it difficult to decide where exactly he fitted in:- Wikipedia: Octavio Paz
For a few years, Paz studied law and literature at National University of Mexico. During this time, he became familiar with leftist poets, such as Chilean Pablo Neruda. In 1936, Paz abandoned his law studies, and left Mexico City for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida. The school was set up for the sons of peasants and workers. There, he began working on the first of his long, ambitious poems, Entre la piedra y la flor [Between the Stone and the Flower] (1941); influenced by the work of T. S. Eliot, it explores the situation of the Mexican peasant under the domineering landlords of the day.All through this unsettled time he continued to write (and publish) poetry under the influence of whatever new movement he'd just run into. He collected the best of this early work in his 1949 book Libertad bajo palabra (subsequently expanded in a number of later editions):
In July 1937, he attended the Second International Writers' Congress — the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war in Spain — held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers, including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender, and Pablo Neruda. Paz showed his solidarity with the Republican side, and against the fascists ... While in Europe he also visited Paris, where he encountered the surrealist movement, which left a profound impact upon him.
Viento Cantan las hojas, bailan las peras en el peral; gira la rosa, rosa del viento, no del rosal. Nubes y nubes flotan dormidas, algas del aire; todo el espacio gira con ellas, fuerza de nadie. Todo es espacio; vibra la vara de la amapola y una desnuda vuela en el viento lomo de ola. Nada soy yo, cuerpo que flota, luz, oleaje; todo es del viento y el viento es aire siempre de viaje ... - Octavio Paz (1949)• the leaves sing pears dance on the tree the rose opens a compass rose not a thicket clouds upon clouds float somnolent air-seaweed space spins round them a force that’s nowhere touching everywhere the poppy’s stem vibrates a naked surfer catching the wind like the crest of a wave nothing am I a body afloat light a spring tide everything belongs to the wind the wind is always travelling on
- trans. JR (4-10/11/2026)
•
As you can see, there's a certain airiness, even a tentativeness, about this poem. Once he'd screened out the more obviously imitative aspects of his early work, it was hard to see just what was left over.
In particular, what was left to talk about - except expanded consciousness? It's only fair to say, though, that what might have sounded banal in the haut 1960s was not nearly such a cliché in the late 1940s.
His poetic breathrough came with the publication of Piedra de sol [Sunstone] in 1960:
Sunstone is a circular poem based on the circular Aztec calendar, and consists of a single cyclical sentence reflecting the synodic period of the planet Venus. The poem has 584 lines in hendecasyllables, corresponding to that 584-day period, and its ongoing thrust is emphasised by having no full stops, only commas, semi-colons and colons. The first six lines of the poem repeat themselves again at the end of the poem in a movement that "doubles back, and comes full circle,/ forever arriving".The poem was seen at once as a tour-de-force, joining for the first time Paz's diverse passions for Ancient Mexican culture, Eastern philosophy, surrealism, and modern European avant-garde such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's probably fair to say that it led, eventually, to his 1984 Nobel Prize in literature.
You can listen to Eliot Weinberger reading his complete translation of the poem here; the Spanish text can be accessed here.
It's unfair to dismiss Paz as a kind of vacuous stuffed shirt of literature, though (as the Visceral Realists apparently do). He resigned from the Mexican diplomatic service in 1968 as a protest against the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco, and while he parted company with other Latin American writers on such issues as support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it'd be hard to claim that subsequent events have proved him wrong on that and other questions.
However, it's certainly true that "Paz was 'very slippery for anyone thinking in rigid ideological categories'," [as] Yvon Grenier wrote in his book on Paz's political thought:
Paz was simultaneously a romantic who spurned materialism and reason, a liberal who championed freedom and democracy, a conservative who respected tradition, and a socialist who lamented the withering of fraternity and equality. An advocate of fundamental transformation in the way we see ourselves and modern society, Paz was also a promoter of incremental change, not revolution.In this respect, it's interesting to compare the love poem below with the not dissimilar one above ["Trilce XV"] by Vallejo:
Alba última Tendida en los confines Tus cabellos se pierden en el bosque, Tus pies tocan los míos. Dormida eres más grande que la noche Pero tu sueño cabe en este cuarto. ¡Cuanto somos qué poco somos tánto! Afuera pasa un taxi Con su carga de espectros. El río que se va Siempre Está de regreso. ¿Mañana será otro día? - Octavio Paz (1962)• Stretched out within these confines your hair is lost in the forest your feet touch mine asleep you are greater than night but your dreams fit in this room how many things to be so few a taxi passes with its cargo of ghosts the river which flows forever is coming back can tomorrow be another day?
- trans. JR (5/2010-10/11/2026)
•
It's not really that I don't believe in this love-story - but somehow the passing taxi "with its cargo of ghosts" seems rather more vivid than any of the rest of the scene. Vallejo's departed girlfriend is angry and intensely alive - Paz's seems to be already a dream girl even while she's still present.
As for the speaker, is he really there? Can it even be said to matter if "the river that flows / forever / is coming back"? Why not just catch it again on the rerun?
One of Paz's most substantive non-fictional works is this critical biography of the 17th century Mexican poet and polymath Sor Juana Inés de Asbaje (1648–1695). In Spanish the title is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, which translates as "Sister Juana or the Traps of Faith." Sor Juana is a titanic figure in Mexican literature: not only one of the finest writers and poets of her time, but possibly of all time.
Paz's interest in her is largely centred on the social forces that combined to force her to turn into a nun in order to be allowed to lead any kind of an intellectual life at all. This was the Faustian bargain which ended up robbing her of her liberty of expression at the same time as it facilitated her access to books and European learning. To him she's yet another example of the three nets ("nationality, language, religion") which James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus sees as flung out to hold his soul back from flight at the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
And yet, the complex picture Paz provides of the colonial society of New Spain at the time of her birth ends up supplying an answer to his question. Given the conditions of the time, it's hard to know how else she could have succeeded in producing such an impressive body of work and thought.
Sor Juana wrote her own version of a confessional autobiography, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, in which she refutes the claims of the Bishop of Puebla, who claimed that philosophy was not a subject suitable to be studied by any woman. It's now seen as a crucial document in the history of feminism. Unfortunately it also marked the end of her career as a writer and intellectual.
in 1694 she was forced to sell her collection of books and focus on charity towards the poor. She died the next year, having caught the plague while treating her sisters.Juana de Asbaje had the last laugh, though. Her works continue to be translated and read all around the world, while those of her male contemporaries have long since migrated to the obscurer back-annexes of copyright libraries.
Sor Juana: Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México (1689)[Fame and Pothumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico]
I guess it's fairly apparent why Paz identifies so strongly with this central figure of the Mexican Renaissance. Those triple nets of nationality, language, and religion apply to him, too - though in his case it comes down more to the restrictive nature of Latin American politics, where a writer is expected to make a stark choice between backing Leftist revolutionary violence or Right-wing State violence designed to preserve the oligarchic status quo.
And yet, there's also a strong tradition in Latin America as the writer as tribune of the people: hence the tendency of poets such as Neruda and Paz to occupy influential offices in the government - or even (as in Mario Vargas Llosa's case) - to run for President! It's a rather alien concept in the English-speaking world - even the Beat poets who used to scrawl "Ez for Pres" on the walls of Washington D.C. in the late 1950s were probably not seriously imagining him as a genuine candidate for office.
For Paz it was a trap - possibly only too attractive a trap. Certainly his culture power grew ever stronger as the years went by, but after 1968 his influence was expended more on maintaining state funding for literary journals and publishers. And it's surely to his credit that his poetry remains obsessed with evanescence, dispersal, the eternal repetition of things. You can denounce it as quietism, but at least it never falls into strident nationalism or hate-speech, unlike the work of many of his contemporaries.
Which is, I think, why it's just a bit too simplistic to paint him as a complacent marica rather than a more combative maricón. He was, I think, always more interested in emphasising the limits of human agency than exercising those powers of influence and prestige he undoubtedly possessed.
So, while it's easy to sympathise with Bolaño's characters' "unbearable" dilemma: "stuck between the empire of Octavio Paz and the empire of Pablo Neruda,” it's hard not to conclude that that particular problem was more acute for someone such as Roberto Bolaño himself, born in Chile [= the empire of Neruda], but forced to live and work for most of his life in exile in Mexico [= the empire of Octavio Paz] than it is for most other writers.
We all suffer from such dichotomies: Left or Right; activist or commentator; propagandist or quietist ... But, as the later sections of the Savage Detectives itself reveal, facile solutions to such only-too-real choices don't really do anybody too much good in the long run.
Here's a famous poem from Paz's late collection Árbol adentro [The Tree Inside] which makes the point rather better than I can.
Entre ir y quedarse Entre irse y quedarse duda el día, enamorado de su transparencia. La tarde circular es ya bahía: en su quieto vaivén se mece el mundo. Todo es visible y todo es elusivo, todo está cerca y todo es intocable. Los papeles, el libro, el vaso, el lápiz reposan a la sombra de sus nombres. Latir del tiempo que en mi sien repite la misma terca sílaba de sangre. La luz hace del muro indiferente un espectral teatro de reflejos. En el centro de un ojo me descubro; no me mira, me miro en su mirada. Se disipa el instante. Sin moverme, yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa. - Octavio Paz (1987)• The day wavers between coming and going in love with its own transparency the circular afternoon is now a bay worlds caught within its ebb and flow everything is clear but nothing is everything’s nearby but still untouchable paper book glass pencil rest in the shadow of their own names the pulse of time heard in my temple repeats the same tocsin of blood light transforms a blank wall into a ghostly mirror stage here I am at the centre of an eye not looking at me though I see myself The moment ends unmoving I come and go I’m just a pause
- trans. JR (4-10/11/2026)
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Luna silvestre (1933)
- ¡No pasarán! (1936)
- Raíz del hombre (1937)
- Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España (1937)
- Entre la piedra y la flor (1941)
- A la orilla del mundo, compilation (1942)
- Libertad bajo palabra (1949)
- Semillas para un himno (1954)
- Piedra de Sol (1957)
- La estación violenta (1958)
- Salamandra (1958–1961) (1962)
- Viento entero (1965)
- Blanco (1967)
- Discos visuales (1968)
- Ladera Este (1962–1968) (1969)
- La centena (1935–1968) (1969)
- Topoemas (1971)
- Configurations: Bilingual Edition. Trans. G. Aroul, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp. Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser et al. (1971)
- [with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti & Charles Tomlinson] Renga: A Chain of Poems (1972)
- [with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, & Charles Tomlinson] Renga: A Chain of Poems. Foreword by Claude Roy. Introduction by Octavio Paz. 1971. Ed. & trans. Charles Tomlinson. 1972. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- Early Poems 1935-1955: Bilingual Edition. Trans. Muriel Rukeyser (1973)
- Pasado en claro (1975)
- Vuelta (1976)
- [with Charles Tomlinson] Hijos del aire/Airborn (1979)
- Selected Poems. Ed. Charles Tomlinson (1979)
- Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. Charles Tomlinson. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- Poemas (1935–1975) (1979)
- Prueba del nueve (1985)
- Lectura y contemplación (essay on translation) (1985)
- Árbol adentro (1976–1987) (1987)
- Collected Poems 1957-1987. Trans. Eliot Weinberger (1987)
- The Collected Poems, 1957-1987. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. Trans. Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, & Eliot Weinberger. 1987. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1988.
- El fuego de cada día (1989)
- El laberinto de la soledad: Vida y pensamiento de México (1950)
- El laberinto de la soledad. 1950. Ed. Enrico Mario Santí. Letras Hispánicas. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, S. A., 1993.
- The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. 1950. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1961. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
- El arco y la lira (1956)
- Las peras del olmo (1957)
- Cuadrivio (1965)
- Los signos en rotación (1965)
- Puertas al campo (1966)
- Corriente alterna (1967)
- Claude Levi-Strauss o El nuevo festín de Esopo (1967)
- Marcel Duchamp o El castillo de la pureza (1968)
- Conjunciones y disyunciones (1969)
- Posdata, continuación de El laberinto de la soledad (1970)
- El signo y el garabato (1973)
- El mono gramático (1974)
- The Monkey Grammarian. 1974. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1981. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1989.
- Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia (1974)
- La búsqueda del comienzo. Escritos sobre el surrealismo (1974)
- Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y obra (1978)
- El ogro filantrópico (1979)
- In/Mediaciones (1979)
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982)
- Sor Juana: Her Life and Her World. 1982. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Faber, 1988.
- Tiempo nublado (1983)
- One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History. 1983. Trans. Helen R. Lane. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1985.
- Sombras de obras (1983)
- Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos (1984)
- Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. 1984. Trans. Helen Lane. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1987.
- Primeras letras (1931-1943) (1988)
- Pequeña crónica de grandes días (1990)
- La otra voz. Poesía y fin de siglo (1990)
- Convergencias (1991)
- Al paso (1992)
- La llama doble (1993)
- The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism. 1993. Trans. Helen Lane. 1995. London: The Harvill Press, 1996.
- Itinerario (1993)
- Un más allá erótico: Sade (1994)
- Vislumbres de la India (1995)
- In Light of India. 1995. Trans. Eliot Weinberger (1997)
- Estrella de tres puntas. André Bretón y el surrealismo (1996)
- Luis Buñuel. El doble arco de la belleza y de la rebeldía (2000)
- [with Eikichi Hayashiya] Matsuo Bashō: Sendas de Oku (1957)
- Fernando Pessoa: Antología (1962)
- Versiones y diversiones (1974)
- Anthologie de la poésie mexicaine. Trans. Guy Lévis-Mano (1952)
- An Anthology of Mexican Poetry. Trans. Samuel Beckett. Preface by C. M. Bowra. 1958. A Calderbook CB 220. London: Calder & Boyars, 1970.
- [with Alí Chumacero, Homero Aridjis & Jose Emilio Pacheco] Poesía en movimiento - México: 1915–1966 (1966)
- [with Ali Chumacero, Jose Emilio Pacheco, & Homero Aridjis] New Poetry of Mexico: Bilingual Edition. 1966. Ed. Mark Strand. 1970. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1972.
Prose:
Translations:
Edited:
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Los heraldos negros (1919)
- The Black Heralds. Trans. Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross (1990)
- The Black Heralds. Trans. Barry Fogden (1995)
- The Black Heralds. Trans. Rebecca Seiferle (2003)
- The Black Heralds and Other Early Poems. Trans. Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (2005)
- Trilce (1922)
- Trilce. Trans. Dave Smith (1973)
- Trilce. Trans. Rebecca Seiferle (1993)
- Trilce. Trans. Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (2005)
- Trilce: A Homophonic Translation. Trans. James Wagner (2006)
- Poemas humanos (1939)
- Poemas Humanos, Human Poems: A Bilingual Edition. Trans. Clayton Eshleman (1969)
- España, aparta de mí este cáliz (1939)
- Spain, Let This Cup Pass from Me. Trans. Álvaro Cardona-Hine (1972)
- Spain Take This Cup from Me. Trans. Mary Sarko (1992)
- Cesar Vallejo: An Anthology of His Poetry. Trans. James Higgins (1970)
- Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems. Trans. Robert Bly and James Wright (1971)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Gordon Brotherstone and Edward Dorn (1976)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Ed Dorn & Gordon Brotherston. Introduction by Gordon Brotherston. Penguin Latin American Poets. Ed. A. Alvarez. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
- The Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo (1978)
- The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman & José Rubia Barcia. 1978. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1980.
- Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo. Trans. H. R. Hays (1981)
- Songs of Home / Canciones de Hogar. Trans. Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf (1981)
- The Mayakovsky Case. Trans. Richard Schaaf (1982)
- Autopsy on Surrealism. Trans. Richard Schaaf (1986)
- I Am Going to Speak of Hope: An Anthology of Selected Poems. Trans. Peter Boyle (1999)
- The Complete Later Poems 1923–1938. Trans. Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (2007)
- The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. Trans. Clayton Eshleman (2008)
- The Complete Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman. Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa. Introduction by Efrain Kristal. Chronology by Stephen M. Hart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
- The Complete Poems. Trans. Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (2012)
- Malanga Chasing Vallejo: Selected Poems of César Vallejo with New Translations and Notes Trans. Gerard Malanga (2014)
- Escalas melografiadas (1923)
- Cuneiformes
- Muro Noroeste
- Muro Antártico
- Muro Este
- Muro dobleancho
- Alféizar
- Muro occidental
- Coro de vientos
- Más allá de la vida y la muerte
- Liberación
- Los caynas
- El unigénito
- Mirtho
- Cera
- Cuneiformes
- Fabla salvaje (1923)
- Hacia el reino de los Sciris (1928)
- El tungsteno (1931)
- Tungsten. Trans. Robert Mezey (1988)
- Paco Yunque (1931)
- El niño del carrizo (1935)
- Viaje alrededor del porvenir (1935)
- Los dos soras (1936)
- El vencedor (1936)
- Novelas y cuentos completos. Ed. Georgette Vallejo (1967)
- Narrativa completa (2022)
- Lock-out [in French] (1930)
- Entre las dos orillas corre el río [aka "Varona Polianova", "Moscú contra Moscú", "El juego del amor, del odio y de la muerte"] (c. 1930)
- Colacho Hermanos o presidentes de América (1934)
- La piedra cansada (1937)
- Teatro completo. Ed. Enrique Ballón Aguirre & Georgette Vallejo (1979)
- Rusia en 1931. Reflexiones al pie del Kremlin (1931)
- Rusia ante el segundo plan quinquenal (1932 / 1965)
- Contra el secreto profesional [Essays & Articles 1923-1929] (1973)
- El arte y la revolución [Essays & Articles 1929-1931] (1973)
- Desde Europa - Crónicas y artículos (1923–1938). Ed. Jorge Puccinelli (1987)
- General Mangin
- Henri Barbusse
- Marcel Aymé
- Obras completas. Introduction by Ricardo González Vigil (1992)
- Obras completas. 14 vols. Lima: PUCP, 1997-2003:
- Poesía completa. 4 vols. Introduced by Salomón Lerner Febres. Ed. Ricardo Silva-Santisteban & Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Rea (1997)
- Narrativa completa. Introduced by Salomón Lerner Febres. Ed. Ricardo Silva-Santisteban & Cecilia Moreano (1999)
- Teatro completo. 3 vols. Introduced by Salomón Lerner Febres. Ed. Ricardo Silva Santisteban y Cecilia Moreano (1999)
- Artículos y crónicas completos: Desde Lima - Desde Europa, 1918-1938. 2 vols. Introduced by Salomón Lerner Febres. Ed. Jorge Puccinelli (2002)
- Ensayos y reportajes. Ed. Manuel Miguel de Priego (2002)
- Correspondencia. Edición y prólogo de Jesús Cabel (2002)
- Traducciones. Ed. Rosario Valdivia Paz-Soldán (2003)
- Autógrafos olvidados. [52 facsimile manuscripts]. Introduced by Juan Fló. Ed. Stephen M. Hart (2003)
- Cartas de César Vallejo a Pablo Abril de Vivero. Ed. Andrés Echevarría (2013)
Poetry in Translation:
Stories:
Plays:
Prose:
Translations:
Works:
Letters:
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