Yes, Juarroz is pretty good - I don't mind at all him calling all his books
by the same title. He gets his minimalist idiom round some wonderful
thoughts, for another instance:
Sometimes my hands wake me up.
They're making or taking apart something without me
while I'm asleep,
something terribly human,
concrete like the back or the pocket of a man.
(an extract taken, more or less at random, from the Merwin translation
that's been mentioned).
Here's two other Latino's for general consumption: Cesar Vallejo (Peruvian)
& Vicente Huidobro (Chilean).
For Vallejo (1892-1939), there's translations by Clayton Eshleman (Trilce,
published by Marsilio, 1992 isbn 0941419517 & - with Jose Rubia Barcia -
The Complete Posthumous Poetry, University of California, 1978, isbn
0520040996) .
The latter not being, unfortunately, the poems he wrote after he was dead -
towards the end of his life he had great difficulty publishing anything at
all, and devoted much of his time to political activism, in support of the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War & civil liberties in Peru. 'Trilce', in
particular, is a marvellous concatenation of non sequiturs and wordplay and
dazzling invention - and of a surprising tenderness. Both books have the
texts in the original alongside the translations, which is something I
always like to see. Here's a taste of 'Trilce':
And behold I am a doting fool, I am
a beautiful person, when
the williamthesecondary man
strains, drip-happy
with sweat, while putting a shine
on his little three year old's shoe.
Whiskers puffs himself up and rubs one side.
The girl meanwhile puts her forefinger
on her tongue which starts spelling
the tangles of the tangles of the tangles,
and dabs the other shoe, secretly,
with a bit of sylliva and dirt,
but just a bit,
no mor-
.e.
For Huidobro (1893-1948), there's a Selected, from New Directions, edited by
David M. Gauss and translated by various people, including W. S. Merwin,
Michael Palmer & Jerome Rothenberg. Altazor, his great long poem, was
published by Graywolf Press in a brilliant translation by Eliot Weinberger.
I believe that also there's a translation by Tom Raworth of Tres Immensas
Novelas (short novels he wrote in collaboration with Hans Arp) but I haven't
tracked it down. This is from Altazor:
Here's your parachute, Man, wonderful as vertigo.
Here's your parachute, Poet, wonderful as the charms of the chasm.
Here's your parachute, Magician, that one word of yours can
transform into a parashot, wonderful as the lightning-bolt that
wants to blind the creator.
What are you waiting for?
But here is the secret of the Gloom that forgot how to smile.
The parachute waits tied to the gate like the endlessly
runaway horse.
Dave
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