Abstract: Recent critics of César Vallejo's Trilce urge greater attention to the historical avant-gardes that formed the context of the book's composition. Following this injunction, I propose a reading of Trilce XLIV in the vein of Rita Felski's "hermeneutics of restoration," to insist on both the legibility of metaphor in the poem and Vallejo's alignment with his contemporaries' theories of the device in avant-garde poetry. XLIV has stimulated many pages of critical commentary, but even Vallejo's most distinguished critics tend to curtail their efforts at parsing the poem's imagery with vague invocations of post-Symbolist ineffability or anachronistic suggestions of the poem's anticipation of Surrealism. In conversation with more recent scholarship on Trilce by Michelle Clayton, Carlos Fernández, Dominic Moran, and Enrique Foffani, this essay proposes a careful analysis of metaphor in XLIV and in Trilce generally with recourse to contemporary avant-garde theories of metaphor like Gerardo Diego's imagen múltiple .
Zachary Rockwell Ludington (2026) studied this question.