Vallejo, Cesar: - In March 1892, César Vallejo was born in Santiago de Chuco, a small town in the Andean sierra of northern Peru. He died in Paris in April 1938.Increasingly, despite the difficulty of his poetry as compared, for example, with the popular accessibility of the work of the Chilean Nobel prize-winner, Pablo Neruda, this strange Peruvian is now being recognised as the major voice in 20th century Latin-American poetry. Vallejo's background was provincial middle-class, although this should not be taken to mean too much, granted the context of Peru at that time. Even though he did not know Quechua, the Andean world he grew up in is ever-present in his work, visible even in his European writings. His father, Francisco, earned a fairly decent living as a notary and local official. Nonetheless, with a large family to support, of whom César was the youngest, Francisco's earnings would not have gone too far, and money in the Vallejo household was often scarce. Hence, César's ambition to acquire a university degree was fulfilled only after a couple of failed attempts.It was during one of these financially induced failures (1911-1912), when he had to abandon his university studies and work, first as a tutor to the children of a hacendado on an estate near Huánuco, and later as an assistant cashier on a sugar plantation, that Vallejo witnessed, unforgettably, the exploitation and oppression of the mainly Indo-American workers.Another disillusionment in Vallejo's early life occurred in July 1920, on his return to his hometown of Santiago de Chuco for the annual fiesta of the town's patron saint. There he found himself embroiled in a local feud, in the course of which a store was burned and a deputy killed. Although, it seems, that he was innocent of any complicity in the events-indeed, Vallejo was helping the Sub-prefect to write up the legal documents-Vallejo was somehow implicated, arrested and charged, and subsequently spent 112 days in prison in Trujillo. This whole experience had a deeply disturbing and long-lasting effect on Vallejo.After a series of teaching jobs and work as a journalist, Vallejo left Peru for good in the middle of 1923. By that time, his deeply loved mother was dead and a passionate love affair had ended acrimoniously. Vallejo went to Paris. There, with little money, no contacts and no French, he somehow managed to eke out a living with journalism and some teaching. In time, of course, he made friends, and it was in Paris that he became politically radical. He studied Marxism and visited Russia three times in the 1930s to observe for himself the great Soviet experiment in social engineering. And he married a French girl, Georgette Philippart.When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Vallejo passionately committed his time and energy to the Republican cause, writing propaganda and acting as a political instructor. When in Spain in 1937, he attended the International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. What he saw in Spain during these visits made him fearful for the fate of the Republic, but his fervour for the Republican cause increased rather than diminished. It was during these feverish times that Vallejo wrote most of his magnificent final poems, including the sequence Spain, let this cup pass from me.In March 1938 Vallejo fell gravely ill, and died in a Paris hospital on the 15th of April. The doctors gave as the cause of his death intestinal infection. Vallejo's wife believed that it was the recurrence of the malaria that had struck him in his youth. On his death-bed, he dictated the following words to Georgette: 'Whatever may be the cause I have to defend before God, beyond death I have a defender: God.'

Gianuzzi, Valentino: - Valentino Gianuzzi is from Lima, where he was born in 1976. He graduated in Hispanic Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and has worked as a journalist, translator and assistant editor. He has edited the complete fiction of Peruvian writer José Diez-Canseco, and is currently translating selected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. For Shearsman Books he has co-translated the complete poetry of César Vallejo. He is co-editor of the project El Archivo Vallejo. He now teaches at the University of Manchester, after completing a PhD at the University of London.

Smith, Michael: - "Michael Smith (1942-2014) was a poet who gave a lifetime of service to the art of poetry both in English and Spanish. He has been described as a classical modernist, a poet of modern life. Born in Dublin, Michael was the founder of New Writers' Press in 1967 and was responsible for the publication of over 100 books and magazines. He was keen to promote the modernist tradition in Irish poetry, publishing the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Anthony Cronin and Michael Hartnett, among others. He was founder and editor of the influential literary magazine The Lace Curtain.He translated into English and published some of the most difficult and exhilarating poets in Spanish, including Lorca, Neruda, Miguel Hernández and the two great Spanish masters of the baroque, Quevedo and Góngora. He has also translated a Selected Poems of José Hierro and selections of the poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda, among others. For Shearsman he co-translated in three volumes the poetry of the great 20th century Peruvian poet, César Vallejo with the Peruvian scholar, Valentino Gianuzzi, thus bringing all of Vallejo's poetry into English - these volumes have since been republished by Shearsman in a single volume of almost 800 pages, now considered the definitive version in English. His translations (with Luis Ingelmo) of the Selected Poems of Rosalía de Castro and of the Collected Poems / Rimas of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer were also published by Shearsman. He also translated the Complete Poems of Claudio Rodríguez and (with Beatriz White) a Selected Poems of Juan Antonio Villacañas (Shearsman). His translation of Miguel Hernández's Cancionero y romancero de ausencia was punished in the United States in 2008 by Parlor Press. He has also co-translated a Selected Poems of Elsa Cross and Arcana by Verónica Volkow, among others.In 2001, He was the first Irish recipient of the European Academy Medal for distinguished work in the translation of poetry in Spanish, awarded by the European Academy of Poetry. He was the first Writer-in-Residence at University College Dublin. His last books were Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2009) and Prayers for the Dead and other poems (Shearsman, 2014).Michael Smith's own poetry has been translated into Spanish, Polish, French and German, and has appeared in numerous magazines, both in Ireland and abroad, as well as in many important anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry, including The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Derek Mahon and Peter Fallon, and Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Anthony Bradley (University of California Press, 1980, 1988). He also edited three issues of Poetry Ireland Review. For many years he was a regular literary reviewer and features writer for The Irish Times.Michael Smith died on 16 November 2014. He will be missed."