Volcan: Poems from Central America (Spanish Edition)

by Alejandro Murguía

A contact bomb, a volcano ready to erupt" describes not only Central America in the 1980s but—in the conception of its editors—this anthology of contraband poetry. The poems themselves were often copied by hand and smuggled onto Mexico, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In all those countries, except Nicaragua, this poetry is banned. The thirty-nine poets represented here give potent voice to the struggles of their peoples under the crushing oppression of life "under the volcano" in these war-stunned lands. Many of these women and men have been jailed, exiled, killed, or otherwise made to disappear. Still they survive in these faithful and sensitive translations by a new literary underground in North America.

Genres: Poetry

Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1983

About the author

Alejandro Murguía was born in California, but raised in Mexico City. His experiences as an international volunteer in the Nicaraguan Insurrection of 1979 are recounted in his second collection of short stories Southern Front (American Book Award, 1991). He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Latin American literature at San Francisco State University.

Reviews

[ronny · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent anthology of poems from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. in hindsight, the overly optimistic and sentimental revolutionary poems falter: none as achingly as the final poem by José Coronel Urtecho, who suggests that, after Nicaragua's successful Sandinista revolution, the country would never return to its tormented past. (and yet, Nicaragua's government today has become yet another tyranny in the style of Somoza.) even so, poets in this collection also regularly rise to greater, more demanding heights, reflecting everyday humanity and life through clear language.