Scales: Melographed by César Vallejo

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.

“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

“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

“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