César Vallejo

César Abraham Vallejo was born in 1892, in the Andean village of Santiago de Chuco, Peru. He is internationally regarded as one of the great innovative poets of the 20th Century. He published two books during his life: Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Heralds) and Trilce, whose title has no translation. Two collections were published posthumously, under the titles España aparta de mi este cáliz (Spain, Split This Chalice off From Me), a sequence of poems in solidarity with the besieged Spanish Republic, and Poemas humanos (Human poems), in which a number of his famous prose poems are gathered. In 1923, fleeing charges of sedition, he sailed to Paris, and lived there, with exception of extended trips to Spain and the Soviet Union, until 1938, when he died of an unknown illness in dire poverty. Only a handful of people attended his burial in the proletarian cemetery of Montrouge. In 1931 he was interviewed by César González-Ruano for the newspaper Heraldo de Madrid.