Beau Hopkins translated Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s 1922 collection ‘Trilce’. Vallejo was held in prison for several months for his role in starting a riot, ‘Trilce’ is an anguished and playful meditation on suffering, guilt, and the torment of desire; an absurdist monodrama on the melancholy nonchalance with which we absorb these spiritual affronts into everyday experience.
Hopkins grew up in the Thames Valley in Oxfordshire, England. His poetry has appeared in PN Review, the Cambridge Literary Review, Blackbox Manifold, Lighthouse journal, and the Littérateur. His début pamphlet, ‘Figment Music’, was published by Gatehouse Press in 2018. His experimental translation of Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s 1922 collection ‘Trilce’ is forthcoming with Boiler House Press. He lives in Norfolk.
From the translator’s note, ‘Trilce’ is a pinnacle of Spanish-language modernism, and one of the finest verse sequences in Hispanic literature. Hopkins’ translations aim to incarnate the daring, dream-like spirit of Vallejo’s vision, blending his broken and elliptical syntax with colloquial speech to create a ruptured and eerie idiom, hobbling over neologisms, and haunted by its own stutter.