Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems

by Juan Gelman, Eduardo Galeano (Foreword), Joan Lindgren (Editor)

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

Genres: Poetry, Latin American

212 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 1997

About the author

Juan Gelman is one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. He has published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956 and has been translated into fourteen languages. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. Among his most recent awards are the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (the most important award given to a Hispanic writer, Spain, 2007).

Long biographical note

Juan Gelman is the most significant, contemporary Argentine intellectual figure and one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. Son of a family of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, he grew up like any other porteño, among soccer and tango, in the populous neighborhood of Villa Crespo. At 11, he published his first poem in the magazine Rojo y negro, and in the 1950s formed part of the group of rebel writers, El Pan Duro. He was discovered by Raúl González Túñón, among the most relevant voices of the southern country’s poetic avant-garde, who saw in the young man’s verses “a rich and vivacious lyricism and a principally social content […] that does not elude the richness of fantasy.”

Gelman has published, from his initial Violín y otras cuestiones (1956) to his most recent Mundar (2008), more than twenty books of poetry. These works, as Mario Benedetti asserted early on, constitute “the most coherent, and also the most daring, participatory repertoire (in spite of its inevitable wells of solitude), and ultimately the one most suited to its environment, that Argentine poetry has today”, and Hispanic poetry in general, as the profusion of re-editions of his books and numerous anthologies proves. Gelman’s poetry has achieved international recognition, with translations into fourteen languages, including English. Among his awards are the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (Spain, 2007), the most important award in Hispanic Letters. No one should be surprised to see him the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature one day.

It would be relevant to note that Juan Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, he was forced into an exile of thirteen years because of the military dictatorship that ravaged his country from 1976 to 1983, and the weak governments that followed. In 1976 the ultra-right kidnapped his children, Nora Eva, 19, and Marcelo Ariel, 20, along with his son’s wife, María Claudia Iruretagoyena, 19, who was 7 months pregnant. Nora Eva would later return, unlike his son and daughter-in-law, who were killed; their child born in a concentration camp. The vehement search for the truth about the fate of these family members, which culminated in finding his granddaughter in Uruguay in 2000, has made the poet a symbol of the struggle for respect for human rights.

Like other poets from his time and space, Juan Gelman creates his work starting from a critique of the so-called post-avante-garde poetry, which surges in the Hispanic world in the 1940s and breaks with the powerful avante-garde. He is a poet who denies the labors of the Mexican Octavio Paz, the Cuban José Lezama Lima, the Argentine Alberto Girri, among others, to reaffirm it in his own way. It is a poetry that goes against the current, transgresses the established social and cultural order, challenges the individualism intrinsic to modernity and the neo-colonial condition. A poetry that renounc

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to feel ashamed of my sadness, my nostalgias.
I miss the little street where they killed my dog, where I wept
over his death, and I am still stuck to the bloody cobblestones
where my dog died, from that I exist, of that I exist, I am that,
and I'll ask nobody's permission to be nostalgic about that.
Perhaps I am something else? Military dictatorships came,
civil governments and new military dictatorships, they took
my books from me, my bread, my son, they wore down my
mother, threw me out of the country, assassinated my little
brothers, tortured my compañeros, undid them, broke them.
Nobody pulled me out of the street where I am weeping beside
my dog. What military dictatorship could do that? And what
military motherfucker can take away my great love for those
May twilights, when the bird of being hovers in the falling night?

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

like so many of the world's finest non-english writers, argentine poet juan gelman isn't so well known outside of his home continent. gelman, however, already a cervantes prize winner, is regularly mentioned as an annual nobel contender. early admirers and champions of his work included mario benedetti, eduardo galeano, ariel dorfman, and julio cortázar. gelman fled his native land in the mid 1970s following the onset of argentina's dirty war (which cost the lives of both his son and his pregnant daughter-in-law, as well as those of some ten to thirty thousand fellow argentinians).

gelman's poetry, thus, is informed deeply by his political exile, the fractured history of argentina, the rich culture and vibrancy of the tango, and his lost family, friends, and compatriots (and all of the desaparecidos). the poems in unthinkable tenderness span about a decade and a half of the now octogenarian's work. gelman sometimes employed the use of heteronyms in his writing, though nowhere near to the extent or depth as did fernando pessoa. his poems are often sorrowful, entangled as they are in the political crimes of the past. courage, disbelief, redemption, duality, and identity are themes present throughout his work, shaped as they the are by his experiences in the dirty war and in exile.

joan lindgren's translations, at times, read rather rigidly or academically. the liveliness, humanity, and deep emotion of gelman's work seem dampened or somewhat constrained in this translation (as compared to dark times filled with light, rendered from the spanish by hardie st. martin). juan gelman is a major spanish-language poet and unthinkable tenderness offers a glimpse (however small) into the scope and nature of his unforgettably compelling and resonant work.

unthinkable tenderness features forewords by both galeano and cortázar, the former's being a short, yet lyrical introduction to the argentine poet: "juan has committed the crime of marrying justice to beauty. from such a dangerous and fertile embrace, a general uneasiness must issue. to read juan gelman with impunity is impossible. keeping his distance from success, an enemy, in fact, of notoriety, this outlaw poet can only be uncomfortable in these times of forced neutrality, when amnesia and contrition are applauded and the world confuses talent with public relations. i believe that this voice, voice of voices, at once so delicate and so powerful, sounds louder than any other in the present-day poetry of the spanish language."

on poetry

a couple of things have to be said /
that nobody reads it much /
that those nobodies are few and far between /
that everyone's caught up in the world crisis / and

with the business of putting food on the table /
and that's no small problem / i remember
when my uncle juan died of hunger / he used to say
no problem since he'd forgotten how to eat anyway /

but the problems came later / when
there was no cash for the coffin /
and when finally the official truck came from the city
to take him away uncle juan turned into a bird /

the guys from the city looked at him with contempt / complaining
they were always being given a hard time / that
they were men and men was what they buried / and not
birds like uncle juan / especially

since unc was singing cheep-cheep all the way to the municipal crematorium /
which to them seemed like a disrespect they didn't like one bit /
and when they slapped him to shut him up /
the cheep-cheep was heard in the cab of the truck and even their ears rang with cheep-cheep /

that's how uncle juan was / always singing /
and he didn't see that death was any reason to stop singing /
he even went into the oven singing cheep-cheep / and some chirping rose up from his ashes for a while /
and the city guys stared at their gray shoes in shame / but

to get back to poetry /
poets are having a rough time of it these days /
nobody reads poetry much / only a few nobodies /
the profession has lost its prestige / it's getting harder every day for a poet /

to get a girl to fall in love with him /
to run for president / to get credit at the grocery store /
to get some warrior to perform heroics to be sung / or
some king to pay three pieces of gold per verse /

and no one knows if this is because we're running out of girls / grocers / warriors / kings /
or just poets /
or the two things at once and there's no use
racking your brains over the question /

the beautiful thing is knowing you can sing cheep-cheep
in the strangest of circumstances /
uncle juan after he died / and now me
so that you'll love me /

[Marisela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Juan Gelman fled Argentina in 1975 to escape the dirty war. Many of his friends and even his own son and pregnant daughter-in-law became victims of the government's exterminations.

His poetry is meditation of loss. Very powerful and moving.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, arranged thematically, the poems are lovely. Short contextual, historical information filled out the story of a man, his country and times, ordinary life and extraordinary loss in war and political upheaval.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gelman's poetry is intense and thought-provoking. I am amazed that he is not more well-known. I highly recommend this collection.