The final reading of Gloria Gervitz'  East Coast tour. A remarkable poet.




Friday, November 4 at 6:15 p.m., at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center 
of NYU, with Chilean poet Marjorie Agosín. Both poets will be introduced by 
Mark Schafer. Bilingual reading.

Reception to follow.

Photo ID required at door

King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South (between 
Thompson and Sullivan Streets). 212-998-3650; 
<http://www.nyu.edu/kjc>www.nyu.edu/kjc.

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Gloria Gervitz, one of the most important Mexican poets of the post-Paz 
generation, will present her book-length poem Migraciones in a bilingual 
reading with her translator, Mark Schafer. Migraciones, at times frankly 
and lushly erotic in the tradition of both the 17th-century mother of all 
post-conquest Mexican poetry in Spanish, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and of 
modern Mexican feminism, for which the erotic has become a way of 
reclaiming the body, is a complex interweaving of personal and family 
memory, Biblical reference, the mystical traditions of the Judaism of her 
family and the folk Catholicism of her paternal grandmother, who, like the 
other women of Gervitz' ancestry, rises to the surface of the poem like a 
ghost of the imagination. Written from within Mexico's displaced Eastern 
European Jewish community, it is, as Jerome Rothenberg has said, "an epic 
of the migratory self," an almost thirty-year journey of the nomadic 
spirit, and an ecstatic arrival. With its mixed parentage and its sense of 
displacement, the journey is at once profoundly Mexican, and profoundly 
American, the discovery of a new internal place where warring selves may be 
brought together.



Mark Schafer has given us a translation, itself the work of thirteen years, 
worthy of the original-a profound meditation on the text that stands as an 
extended lyric in its own right. His thoughtful conversation with Gervitz 
follows the poem.



Migraciones should be of interest to all those interested in poetry, Latin 
American literature, and the Jewish experience.



Gloria Gervitz is a lifelong resident of Mexico City, where she was born in 
1943. A recipient of fellowships in poetry from the Fondo Nacional para la 
Cultura y las Artes for 1993 and 1997 to 2002, she has been publishing her 
poetry since 1979, when "Shaharit," the first part of Migraciones, appeared 
as a separate volume. It has been followed by Fragmento de ventana (1986), 
Yiskor (1987), Pythia (1993),

Treno (2003), and Septiembre (2003), and, between 1991 and 2002, a series 
of editions of Migraciones, each incorporating the new sections. The 
present volume includes numerous revisions and is the definitive edition. 
She has published studies of the work of Clarice Lispector and Osip and 
Nadezhda Mandelstam and translations of poems by Samuel Beckett, Anna 
Akhmatova, Kenneth Rexroth, Susan Howe, Rita Dove, and, under a grant from 
the Fund for Culture Mexico-USA, Lorine Niedecker. Her own work has been 
translated into French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian. 
A German edition of Migraciones appeared in 2002.



Mark Schafer was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1962 and lives in 
Cambridge. He has published numerous translations of Latin American poetry 
and prose, including Virgilio Piñera, Cold Tales (1988) and René's Flesh 
(1989); Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, with Cedric Belfrage (1990); 
Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Mogador (1992); and Jesús Gardea, Stripping Away the 
Sorrows of This World (1998). He has been the recipient of an NEA 
Fellowship, a grant from the Fund for Culture Mexico-USA, and the Robert 
Fitzgerald Translation Prize.



Migrations / Migraciones may be ordered from Junction Press 
([log in to unmask]), Small Press Distribution ([log in to unmask]), Latin 
American Book Source ([log in to unmask]), and all of the 
larger book wholesalers.



"To say that this is a book of the immigrant experience-which in some sense 
it is-is to underrate the range of form and feeling that Gervitz brings to 
it, creating thereby an epic of the migratory self. Like Pound's Cantos or 
Zukofsky's A, hers is the work of a lifetime: a life's work including not 
only autobiography and familial memories as a kind of history but rife with 
religious and mystical imagery from Jewish kabbala to Mexican folk 
Catholicism and beyond. Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long 
and difficult poem which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a 
complex tribute to the complex world from which it comes."


Jerome Rothenberg



"Migraciones presents the unmistakable, majestic voice of Gloria Gervitz, 
one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporary Jewish Latin 
American literature, in all its fullness, and Mark Schafer's translation 
does it justice. Mystical, at times wrenching, it is a poem of ancestral as 
well as modern voices, a poem that should be read slowly as if reading a 
prayer.


Marjorie Agosín



Migraciones is an extraordinary and deeply moving poem. Gloria Gervitz 
looks out all the world's windows and Mark Schafer throws them open to 
gather in the most soaring and luminous of words. Migraciones is a journey 
to the depths, to the heights, and across the range of our most profound 
emotions. This is poetry that rains inside us, leading us back to 
primordial waters.


Elena Poniatowska



The sorrowful voice of Gloria Gervitz resounds within a terrifying 
vastness. Her words-prayer, oracle, litany-soar and plunge into the abyss, 
tempered by a breath that transcends meaning. They cross to the other side, 
to what precedes them, where submerged words breathe. Born of dark silence, 
her poetry rescues memory; it returns to the origin of its own pale dreams. 
Her poetry enthralls and overwhelms.


Saúl Yurkievich



A dramatic affirmation that wonderful poetry still comes out of Mexico.


Tony Fraser