John Palattella in The Nation Feb. 15th issue
“AND THERE IN THE DISTANCE,
nothing./A line of houses one can hardly
make out/through the white of snow and
sun.” These lines from “The Fog,” by the
Cuban poet Eugenio Florit, could double as
a sketch of the view from the north, and from
within Cuba itself, of recent Cuban literature.
The US embargo has corrupted our
view of the island, and Castro’s censors have
stifled the publication of writing that departs
from state-sanctioned optimismo. I found
“The Fog” in The Whole Island: Six Decades of
Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss (California;
paper $29.95). Not since the 1982 publication
of Paul Auster’s Random House Book
of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual
anthology so effectively broadened
the sense of poetic terrain outside the United
States and also created a superb collection
of foreign poems in English. There is
nothing else like it. Weiss presents generous
selections of work by fifty-five poets from
Cuba and its diaspora; though ostensibly an
anthology, The Whole Island is a gathering of
individual voices (among them those of the
twenty-two translators who contributed to
the project). In “On Three Photos of Mella,”
Francisco de Oraá offers a riposte to Julio
Mella, a founder of Cuba’s Communist Party
and a disapproving superego: “I only know
that, deep down, I would have wanted to be
let loose in the garden,/and that the garden
would grow and become the whole world.”
Seeing through the fog (what Damaris Calderón
calls this “sad business/this playing at
being perfect”), Weiss has located the whole
island’s many imaginary gardens.
Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban
Poetry (University of California Press).
http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
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