Juan Gelman

Obra poética

"English-only collection includes poems from the two volumes of Gelman's Interrupciones plus other material, covering work of last 30 years. Moving, consistently translated selection emphasizes poet's response to dictatorship, exile, and disappearance. Useful editor's preface; chronological and biographical appendices. Some notes and explanation of translator's approach to Gelman's work"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Selected Poems

Unthinkable Tenderness

"English-only collection includes poems from the two volumes of Gelman's Interrupciones plus other material, covering work of last 30 years. Moving, consistently translated selection emphasizes poet's response to dictatorship, exile, and disappearance. Us

Martin Caparros

Jose Feinmann

Buena Memoria

Marcelo Brodsky

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Katherine M. Hedeen

In To World, poems interrogate everything: nature, society, and thought itself, with no prejudice or even principle. In other words, they don't follow any rule, tradition, or discipline; they are decidedly critical. Thought is not reduced to philosophical, ethical, religious, political, or aesthetic interpretations. Rather, we are before thought in its totality, unwilling to recognize borders - although never in a pure state, not falling into speculation, into thinking just for thinking's sake. Thought is always related to experience, both personal and collective, and above all, emotion. It never once stops being thought through image, that is to say, lyrical. This poetry speaks of poetry; it takes it all on: the objective and subjective, the real and imagined, I and other. It ventures into virgin territory, on the outskirts of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. Always a model of rebelliousness and freedom, a lesson in devotion and rigor, Gelman's work places him among today's best poets.

To World

Juan Gelman (Buenos Aires, 1930), uno de los grandes poetas hispanoamericanos contemporáneos y Premio Cervantes 2007, ofreció en septiembre de 2004 la lectura de poemas que se reproduce en este volumen. Siguiendo la voz del propio Gelman, el lector podrá recorrer en este audiolibro gran parte de su amplia y variada obra, desde Anunciaciones hasta País que fue será, y atravesar los distintos registros emocionales de un poeta que, como él mismo confiesa en uno de los de los poemas aquí recogidos, escribe porque / la vida lo escribe. POESÍA EN LA RESIDENCIA ofrece, en un documento vivo, la voz de los grandes protagonistas de la poesía hispana contemporánea que han venido ofreciendo lecturas en la Residencia de Estudiantes desde que en 1988 Rafael Alberti inaugurara el ciclo del mismo nombre. Cada volumen incluye un disco compacto con la grabación de la lectura, junto a su transcripción y unas breves notas acerca de la vida y obra del poeta.

La voz de Juan Gelman

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford. Appearing in English translation for the first time, TODAY (HOY) by Juan Gelman (1930-2014) is the final book published during the life of one of Latin America''s most important and celebrated poets. Written as both a reckoning and a reflection following the 2011 sentencing of those responsible for disappearing Gelman''s son Marcelo in 1976 during Argentina''s Dirty War, TODAY''s 288 prose poems vacillate between the depths of anguish and celebrations of the day, as the poet wrestles with being, loss, and the central paradox of much of his late verse: the injustice inherent in knowing anything that exists can''t help being fully itself, while simultaneously mired in a process of becoming that has no attainable endpoint. Surprising, beautiful, and relentlessly questioning, Gelman''s poetry pushes language''s capacity for expression to its absolute limit. Readers will find the poems of TODAY a treasure trove--rich, moving, musical, and full of complex ideas, lingering imagery, and stunning turns of phrase. Feelingly Englished by award-winning translator Lisa Rose Bradford, these gemlike compositions hail the ear and inner eye, and reward rereading, as the more time we spend with Gelman''s poems allows light to catch new facets and reveal their brilliance. "Grief and crushing darkness are the inescapable companions of these poems, whose world appears to be as fractured as the grammar and form of Juan Gelman''s spare and concentrated verse. In this barbaric place where children are disappeared, where pain never ends and justice is ambivalent, the ''poem of harsh lineage'' and ''unsheltered words'' just may find, however, ''perfection in the loss.'' Lisa Rose Bradford translates this difficult news in clean and muscular phrases that push constantly and generatively against the terrible truths of TODAY."--Sidney Wade "The world of TODAY is the present, a dark forest, that which is here, within and surrounding each of us: the ''Today,'' a strange extreme, unlimited, insistent, inevitable, ungraspable. There are no words to fathom so much reality. Ungraspable, yet inescapable, the present clamours to be named; this is the adventure into which this book hurls itself headlong."--Daniel Freidemberg "Juan Gelman''s last book is a work that grieves, that savors grief, personal and collective. Or more aptly, as ars poetica, these poems find the impulse to grieve deep in poetry itself--as Gelman has written: ''I''ve never been the owner of my ashes, my poems.'' These elegant, chisel''s edge inscriptions read like epigrams, like the very first epigrams, which were epitaphs engraved on tombs...This is a translation that, in its turn, relishes what is lost. Lisa Rose Bradford is remarkably receptive, tuned to the subtlest nuances in Gelman''s language, intimate and estranging. This translation is a masterful rendering--and an homage to one of Argentina''s greatest poets."--Michelle Gil-Montero "I find it hard to read HOY/TODAY without crying, but it''s the kind of crying that''s good for you. Full of sadness and beauty, spelling out loss and redemption, and absences remembered, the running verses of Juan Gelman''s HOY speak of longing, singing with sentiment and love. And Lisa Rose Bradford''s version is every bit as compelling as the original reflected in this bilingual edition...Juan Gelman is an indispensable figure in human rights--and in the tireless and essential labor of love involved in singing through verse."--Sergio Waisman "This urgent, luminous text is doubly haunted: the poems by the murder of the poet''s son, the translations by the death in 2014 of the poet himself. It offers, as Lisa Rose Bradford notes in her fine introduction, ''insomniac inventories,'' flashes of ''conflictive beauty,'' and ''extreme condensation of thought and image,'' as if Gelman were ''dragging the canals of thought in order to leave a final testimony.'' The passion of Gelman''s testimony comes through beautifully in Bradford''s English."--Geoffrey Brock

Today

This translation offers to English readers for the first time the splendid verse of imaginary American author Sidney West, created by Juan Gelman, one of the greatest living poets of the Hispanic world. These laments question Western assumptions surrounding death, erase boundaries between poetry and narrative, privilege the magical as a vital aspect of reality and seek the transformation of the lyric persona.

The Poems of Sidney West

Salarios del impio (1993) es la mascara de un libro de epigramas, siempre incompleto, siempre horadado por la imposibilidad de aferrar al misterio, que transita el misticismo de Santa Teresa y San Juan con el tono coloquial y la respiracion portena de Gelman, que ni los largos exilios le han borrado. Si Kafka lanzo con desesperacion su Carta al padre, Gelman se inscribe en el genero epistolar para revisar el sospechoso genero de la intimidad en Carta a mi madre (1989): arduo monologo que dispara preguntas al lenguaje, a la identidad judia, a la frontera vida muerte, a la simbiosis con lo materno y al idioma como matriz que alimenta y exilia.

Carta a mi madre

Salarios del impío

Translation of Juan Gelman's Carta abierta with an essay on the translation and an interview with Juan Gelman.

Juan Gelman's Public Letter

Between Words

A Tribute to Juan Gelman

Dark Times

Juan Gelman is Argentina's leading poet, but his work has been almost unknown in the United States until now. In 2000, he received the Juan Rulfo Award, one most important literary awards in the Spanish-speaking world, and in 2007, he received the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary prize. With this selection, chosen and superbly translated by Joan Lindgren, Gelman's lush and visceral poetry comes alive for an English-speaking readership. Gelman is a stark witness to the brutality of power, and his poems reflect his suffering at the hands of the Argentine military government (his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild were "disappeared"). While political idealism infuses his writing, he is not a servant of ideology. Themes of family, exile, the tango, Argentina, and Gelman's Jewish heritage resonate throughout his poems, works that celebrate life while confronting heartache and loss. "remembering their little bones when it rains/ the compañerosstomp on darkness/set forth from death/wander the tender night/I hear their voices like living faces"—from Remembering Their Little Bones

Traces the evolution of a gifted lyrical poet's encounter with the political. When the poet's on in law and daughter 'disappear', kidnapped by the Argentinian government, the poet must write from both a lyrical and physical exile. In this posthumously published labor of love by translator Hardie St Nartin, Gelman's staggering biography and the poetics he developed to articulate and survive it are unforgettably translated into beautiful and accessible poems that when taken together weave a fragile but healing transformation.

The Selected Work of Juan Gelman

Dark Times Filled with Light

México, 2001-2004

País que fue será

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford. Bilingual Edition. "why beneath the glory of this sun / do i sorrow like an ox?" A bull awakes one day to the realization that he''s a castrated, browbeaten ox but is then briefly abstracted from this sorrow as the morning sun gently warms his hide and lifts heady aromas from the grass; while a man, graced with human cogitation, but burdened with the general suffering that surrounds him, delights in gorgeous women walking through flowery plats, who fleetingly offer distraction: this ambivalent oxen attitude pervades Juan Gelman''s OXEN RAGE. Rife with speculation and uncertainty, this is a book of ruminations, written in language at times unorthodox and full of quirky coinages, often playful and paradoxical, always musical and richly imaginative. "OXEN RAGE is a ''midpoint 20th century'' masterwork by a poet ''wretched and proud,'' ''obscure in all his emberglow.'' An exile, as Dante & so many ''word-concertistas'' before him, Juan Gelman ''disorders the chaos / with demented exactitude.'' To have this core book of his oeuvre become available now, accurately and beautifully englished, is a major event—and a superb & most useful guide through this, our own, demented century."—Pierre Joris "With her precise and imaginative translations, Lisa Rose Bradford makes it possible for the English-language reader to finally know one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Latin American poetry, Juan Gelman''s OXEN RAGE. The work is a major crossroads in the leading thoroughfares traversed by this author, a model of rebellion and freedom, of devotion and rigor, in his exploration of reality through poetry. Each one of the ''the remains of nine books'' that makes up OXEN RAGE has its own character and in their sequence achieves the total integration of the political and aesthetic avant-garde. Gelman takes on poetry as a widening of the understanding of the world, as the possibility of universal dialogue, as a radically transformative act."—Víctor Rodríguez Núñez "Juan Gelman''s groundbreaking OXEN RAGE—one of the key works of Spanish-language poetry published in the second half of the twentieth century—engages the question of translation in unexpected and fascinating ways. Fortunately for English-speaking readers, Lisa Rose Bradford has produced an astonishing version in English of this masterpiece by the 2007 Cervantes Prize winner, published here in a wonderfully edited bilingual volume. Word by word, poem by poem, and book by book, Bradford carefully reproduces the playful logic of translation that pervades Gelman''s original with exceptional ease and grace. If, as the Argentine poet suggests, the poems of Cólera buey constitute a ''herd of pieces that aspire to breathe,'' Bradford manages to reproduce in OXEN RAGE that same vital aspiration by subtly recreating the many different dictions, tones, and voices that articulate Gelman''s experimental conceptualization of poetic creation as a process of translation. As Bradford''s version powerfully shows us, it is precisely here, in the crucial space where translation and creative writing ambiguously blur lines-an essential tradition of modern poetics gradually established by writers of the stature of Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Spicer, or Mary Jo Bang—where Gelman''s OXEN RAGE undoubtedly deserves a distinguished place."—Ignacio Infante, Washington University in St. Louis "His writing is like a gust of wind, like a pounding wave where the sands delight in his verbal marvels, broken sentences, absence of punctuation, fractured rhythms that link, superimpose, interrupt and chop, leaving the poem in a question mark, which is a mark of life, the frozen sign of doubt. OXEN RAGE is a key book in twentieth- century Argentine literature, and with its publication, Gelman became an indispensable figure in the world of literature."—Marcelo Pichon Rivière, writer & filmmaker

Oxen Rage

Desde su publicación en 1962, Gotán fue un libro especialmente elogiado por numerosas voces de la cultura, que coincidían en reconocerlo como el hallazgo de una voz original, literariamente sólida y madura, que ingresaba por derecho propio a la biblioteca más apreciada de la nueva poesía hispanoamericana. Luego vendría más de una veintena de otros títulos que hacen de Juan Gelman uno de los poetas contemporáneos en lengua castellana con mayor reconocimiento internacional. Por esa labor poética copiosa y crecientemente elogiada, recibió numerosos premios, entre los que se destacan el Juan Rulfo, el Reina Sofía y el Premio Cervantes. La historiografía literaria especializada lo cuenta entre los poetas argentinos más importantes de las últimas cinco décadas.

Juan Gelman

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