Scales

“This first complete English translation of Vallejo’s inventive prose work gives readers the context necessary to appreciate Vallejo’s text in relation to its volatile and singular historical moment.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“…[T]he prose helps complicate the picture of a writer struggling with an unprecedented poetics.”—David S. Wallace, Los Angeles Review of Books

"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