Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. V�ctor Rodr�guez N��ez's TASKS [TAREAS] is an award—winning poetry collection, the recipient of Spain's Rinc�n de la Victoria Prize in 2010 and published there by the prestigious press Renacimiento in 2011. With striking images and memorable verses, TASKS creates a testament to the poet's unique migratory experience. While seemingly the chronicle of an immigrant who returns to his native country, the poem really asks how to return if you've never actually left. Using rigorous formal aspects to create a sense of pushing beyond known limits, this innovative long poem has at its core a rethinking of the experience of otherness, in which identification—both with memory and quotidian experience and with place tangled in subjectivity—prevails over any kind of differentiation. This leads not only to a profound questioning of nationalism but also of cultural identity itself. The result, which Katherine M. Hedeen renders for Anglophone readers, is a fluid poetic subject who disrespects borders and privileges movement over fixedness. "'…I'm / a phantom in this barbershop / mirrors eaten away by shadow' V�ctor Rodr�guez N��ez tells us in Katherine Hedeen's magnificent translation. And later: 'I linger in the snow a royal palm on my shoulder,' and still later: 'identity lurks / like a forgotten ring in a public bathroom.' These poems are intimate and historic, woven of memory, inhabiting a space that invites the reader in. This is the voice of a mature poet, a Cuban straddling the century in which his country rose about him, lifting him on shoulders of discovery, loss and everything in between. Rodr�guez N��ez is one of his generation's most powerful poets, TASKS among his most satisfying books, and Hedeen's English renderings nothing short of magical." —Margaret Randall "The imagination of this Cuban, this true poet...stains the darkness of these times with a red squirrel guided by the light...V�ctor Rodr�guez N��ez doesn't wait for the arrival of anyone because he was baptized by poetry at birth." —Juan Gelman "V�ctor Rodr�guez N��ez is a poet after my own heart, a nomad witness who after the long reasoned zigzag d�rive through senses & cities, tropics & topics, stands by de Greiff's sense that 'all journeys, all my journeys, are return journeys.'...The poet is indeed a master of the craft of otherness." —Pierre Joris "A Cuban poet who has spent much of his adult life outside Cuba, Rodr�guez N��ez takes to all he sees and feels in poetry a consciousness of Cuba as place, as communities, and as a country isolated from his adopted home in America, as a form of restraint and dynamism...I cannot speak highly enough of this poet." —John Kinsella Translator's Bio: Katherine M. Hedeen is a specialist in Latin American poetry and has both extensively written on and translated contemporary authors from the region. Her book–length translations include published collections by Rodolfo Alonso, Juan Ba�uelos, Juan Calzadilla, Marco Antonio Campos, Luis Garc�a Montero, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jam�s, Hugo Mujica, Jos� Emilio Pacheco, V�ctor Rodr�guez N��ez, and Ida Vitale. She is an associate editor of Earthwork's Latin American Poetry in Translation Series for Salt Publishing, an acquisitions editor for Arc Publications, and Translation Editor for The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of a 2009 and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Project Grant. She resides in Ohio where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.

Tasks

Juan Gelman

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

Thaw is a book length sequence of short (all 10 lines long) poems. Like haiku, at first glance these seem simple meditations on nature, that, when given time, open out into a larger reflections on human experience, emotions and how the three interact. A rich and peculiar sequence that is both shadowy and illuminating, tender and insistent, broad and deeply personal.

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

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