35 Sonnets. (The original is worth $27,000 by now!)


"Ricardo Reis arrives in Lisbon on a ship that began its voyage in Buenos Aires (p. 351), and throughout the novel is trying, in vain, to finish reading a book -- in English -- called The God of the Labyrinth, by the Irish writer Herbert Quain (p. 363), which he borrowed from the vessel's library and failed to return. Both book and writer are imaginary, but they have a previous existence in the pages of Borges..."


"He could have been to the gnosis what John of the Cross was to Catholicism, or Ibn Arabi to Sufism."


     "Trilce X.

   The pristine and last stone of groundless
fortune, has just died
with soul and all, October bedroom and pregnant.
Of three months of absent and ten of sweet.
How destiny,
mitered monodactyl, laughs.

   How at the rear conjunctions of contraries
destroy all hope. How under every avatar's lineage
the number always shows up.

   How whales cut doves to fit.
How these in turn leave their beak
cubed as a third wing.
How we saddleframe, facing monotonous croups.

   Ten months are towed toward the tenth,
toward another beyond.
Two at least are still in diapers.
And the three months of absence.
and the nine of gestation.

   There's not even any violence.
The patient raises up
and seated empeacocks tranquil nosegays."

--Eshleman's Vallejo


"I owe a debt of gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation, which made it possible for me to finish this work, and I cannot help thinking how strange it is to live in a world in which a great fortune made from Central and South American mines should then be devoted to fostering humane studies, some of which are bound to cast a harsh light on the making of such fortunes." --Robert Mezey, preface to his translation of Vallejo's Tungsten (1988)


Voting Democracy Off the Island.