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Dark Times Filled with Light
As Juan Gelman’s name begins appearing with regularity on lists predicting Nobel-Laureate-deserving poets, his work has also begun to appear in English. But only now are the most stunning translations of Gelman’s poetry being published, and in one substantial volume. Dark Times Filled with Light traces the evolution of a gifted lyrical poet’s encounter with the political, when the poet’s son and daughter-in-law become “disappeared” by the Argentinian government, and the poet must write from both a literal and metaphysical exile.
In this posthumously realized labor of love by the legendary translator Hardie St. Martin, Gelman’s staggering biography, and the poetics he developed to articulate and survive it, are unforgettably translated into beautiful and accessible poems that, taken together, weave a fragile but healing transformation. “There are losses,” says Gelman in a moving understatement. “The important thing is how returning to them transforms them into something new.”
"Perhaps the most admirable element of Gelman's poetry is the unthinkable tenderness he show . . . calling upon so many shadows for one voice to lull and comfort, a permanent caress of words on unknown tombs."
-Julio Cortázar
"Gelman's poetry is epic in its scope - no corner of life geos unnoticed in this work . . . Rendered in a breathless style, this is the diary of a human heart in a rough world where artistry is the first salvation."
-Oscar Hijuelos
In this posthumously realized labor of love by the legendary translator Hardie St. Martin, Gelman’s staggering biography, and the poetics he developed to articulate and survive it, are unforgettably translated into beautiful and accessible poems that, taken together, weave a fragile but healing transformation. “There are losses,” says Gelman in a moving understatement. “The important thing is how returning to them transforms them into something new.”
"Perhaps the most admirable element of Gelman's poetry is the unthinkable tenderness he show . . . calling upon so many shadows for one voice to lull and comfort, a permanent caress of words on unknown tombs."
-Julio Cortázar
"Gelman's poetry is epic in its scope - no corner of life geos unnoticed in this work . . . Rendered in a breathless style, this is the diary of a human heart in a rough world where artistry is the first salvation."
-Oscar Hijuelos
208 pages, Paperback
First published November 20, 2012
3 people are currently reading
426 people want to read
About the author
Juan Gelman
142 books92 followersJuan 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
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
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June 19, 2023
'Memory is our graveyard /
in it we bury our closest comrades’
A good poet captures the whole of life in a few slim lines, but it takes a great poet to entrench themselves in the darkest of truths to bleed beauty into their words. Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, recipient of the Cervantes Prize—the preeminent Spanish literary award given for a lifetime acheivement, is a great poet. Exiled from his home after Argentinian Coup in 1976, Gelman’s work embodies the human spirit in times of strife and gives voice to the voiceless; his poetry is the eternal speech of the dead and ‘disappeared’. There were around 30,000 desaparecidos during the military junta, two of them being Gelman’s own son and pregnant daughter-in-law who were kidnapped from their homes¹, and each of them finds a resting place in the cradle of his verse. ‘You’re so much a part of me,’ writes Gelman of the voices he keeps alive, ‘so much alive in me that if I died, my death would kill you.’ Until his death own death in 2014, Gelman kept the spirit alive and well through brilliant prose across his twenty volumes of poetry, selected here in Dark Times Filled With Light as translated by Hardie St. Martin, alongside Gelman’s own translations of poets he did not wish to see fade into oblivion. With a sharp prose that elegantly cuts right to the soul, Gelman’s work is overflowing with a love for humanity, a love for his fellow man, that truly finds the light and beauty in the darkest of moments.
Things They Don’t Know
dark times / filled with light / the sun
spreads sunlight over the city split
by sudden sirens / the police hunt goes on / night falls and we’ll
make love under this roof / our eight
in one month / they know almost everything about us / except
this plaster ceiling we make love
under / and they also know nothing about
the rundown pine furniture under the last ceiling / or
about the window the night pounded on while you shone like the
sun / or
about the beds or the floor where
we made love this month / with faces around us like the sun
spreading sunlight over the city
Gelman probes the depths of the heart, finding the tenderness of life despite the hardships all around us. ‘What really hurts me is our defeat / Exiles are the tenants of solitude.’ As well as speak for the dead and lost, Gelman speaks for those left without a country. However, it is the people who make up a country, not the boundaries and policies, and Gelman shows how we march on despite the changing regimes, despite the distance, despite all.
Commentary II (saint theresa)
with my love running over and spilling /
all around me the miniscule animals
grow fat feeding on your absence /
or is it your presence
makes me childish like feet crushing
sadnesses on the edge of what is about to sing/
like a magnificent victory where
my souls are reflections of you?
It is impossible to speak of Gelman without discussing translation for a moment. Included in this volume are the luminous translations by Hardie St. Martin. He translated Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra among others, but considered Gelman to be the crowning achievement of his career, which he was engaged in at the time of his death. Gelman, too, provides several translations within this volume and speaks at length on the art of translation
‘I’ve never been the owner of my ashes, my poems
obscure faces write my verses like bullets firing at death.’
Gelman champions the human spirit, even in times of darkness and delivers sadness so dressed in beauty that it can only warm the heart with its love of humanity. All the universe seems contained in his lines. If he were alive still, I’d steal the Nobel Prize for Literature and deliver it upon his doorstep in some pre-dawn as if it were an orphaned baby crying out in need or rescue and care. ‘The universe writes from the depth and breadth of time,’ wrote Gelman, ‘miserable and poor is the human being who never gets to read that writing.’ Luckily we have Gelman’s poetry to help us with that.
5/5
Crestfallen my Burning Soul
crestfallen my burning soul
dips a finger in your name / scrawls
your name on the night’s walls /
it’s no use / it bleeds dangerously
soul to soul it looks at you / becomes a child /
opens its breast to take you in /
protect you / reunite you /undie you /
your little shoe stepping on the
world’s suffering softening it /
trampled brightness / undone water
this way you speak / crackle / burn / and love /
you give me your nevers just like a child
¹ Macarena Gelman, Gelman’s granddaughter given up for adoption following her birth, was found in 2000 after an investigation ordered by Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle. Macarena is a Human Rights Activist. Gelman entered into a lawsuit against Hugo Campos Hermida, who headed the police force that ‘disappeared’ Gelman’s son as well as many others during the Coup. Uruguay has provided amnesty for police officials who took part in the human rights violations during the Coup, and American-trained police officer Hugo Campos Hermida died in Uruguay in 2001 without answering for his crimes despite frequent request for extradition from the Argentine government.
in it we bury our closest comrades’
A good poet captures the whole of life in a few slim lines, but it takes a great poet to entrench themselves in the darkest of truths to bleed beauty into their words. Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, recipient of the Cervantes Prize—the preeminent Spanish literary award given for a lifetime acheivement, is a great poet. Exiled from his home after Argentinian Coup in 1976, Gelman’s work embodies the human spirit in times of strife and gives voice to the voiceless; his poetry is the eternal speech of the dead and ‘disappeared’. There were around 30,000 desaparecidos during the military junta, two of them being Gelman’s own son and pregnant daughter-in-law who were kidnapped from their homes¹, and each of them finds a resting place in the cradle of his verse. ‘You’re so much a part of me,’ writes Gelman of the voices he keeps alive, ‘so much alive in me that if I died, my death would kill you.’ Until his death own death in 2014, Gelman kept the spirit alive and well through brilliant prose across his twenty volumes of poetry, selected here in Dark Times Filled With Light as translated by Hardie St. Martin, alongside Gelman’s own translations of poets he did not wish to see fade into oblivion. With a sharp prose that elegantly cuts right to the soul, Gelman’s work is overflowing with a love for humanity, a love for his fellow man, that truly finds the light and beauty in the darkest of moments.
Things They Don’t Know
dark times / filled with light / the sun
spreads sunlight over the city split
by sudden sirens / the police hunt goes on / night falls and we’ll
make love under this roof / our eight
in one month / they know almost everything about us / except
this plaster ceiling we make love
under / and they also know nothing about
the rundown pine furniture under the last ceiling / or
about the window the night pounded on while you shone like the
sun / or
about the beds or the floor where
we made love this month / with faces around us like the sun
spreading sunlight over the city
Gelman probes the depths of the heart, finding the tenderness of life despite the hardships all around us. ‘What really hurts me is our defeat / Exiles are the tenants of solitude.’ As well as speak for the dead and lost, Gelman speaks for those left without a country. However, it is the people who make up a country, not the boundaries and policies, and Gelman shows how we march on despite the changing regimes, despite the distance, despite all.
you’re alone / my country / withoutIt is the moments of solitude, alienation, loss and grief that make the richest soils for his poetry to grow, transforming a bitter memory into a garden of beauty and honor. Of particular notes are his line breaks, which break with natural order and cadence but often employ the break ‘/’ within the lines, similarily to the ways in which life may impose a certain break upon us that doesn’t fit with our intended flow.
the comrades you lock up and destroy…
Commentary II (saint theresa)
with my love running over and spilling /
all around me the miniscule animals
grow fat feeding on your absence /
or is it your presence
makes me childish like feet crushing
sadnesses on the edge of what is about to sing/
like a magnificent victory where
my souls are reflections of you?
It is impossible to speak of Gelman without discussing translation for a moment. Included in this volume are the luminous translations by Hardie St. Martin. He translated Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra among others, but considered Gelman to be the crowning achievement of his career, which he was engaged in at the time of his death. Gelman, too, provides several translations within this volume and speaks at length on the art of translation
Translation is something inhuman: no language or face lets itself be translated. You have to leave one beauty intact and supply another to go with it: their lost unity lies ahead.He speaks of how poetry allows others to speak to him ‘from the dust of their bones and the radiance of their words,’ something miraculous that his own poetry does for us.
‘I’ve never been the owner of my ashes, my poems
obscure faces write my verses like bullets firing at death.’
Gelman champions the human spirit, even in times of darkness and delivers sadness so dressed in beauty that it can only warm the heart with its love of humanity. All the universe seems contained in his lines. If he were alive still, I’d steal the Nobel Prize for Literature and deliver it upon his doorstep in some pre-dawn as if it were an orphaned baby crying out in need or rescue and care. ‘The universe writes from the depth and breadth of time,’ wrote Gelman, ‘miserable and poor is the human being who never gets to read that writing.’ Luckily we have Gelman’s poetry to help us with that.
5/5
Crestfallen my Burning Soul
crestfallen my burning soul
dips a finger in your name / scrawls
your name on the night’s walls /
it’s no use / it bleeds dangerously
soul to soul it looks at you / becomes a child /
opens its breast to take you in /
protect you / reunite you /undie you /
your little shoe stepping on the
world’s suffering softening it /
trampled brightness / undone water
this way you speak / crackle / burn / and love /
you give me your nevers just like a child
¹ Macarena Gelman, Gelman’s granddaughter given up for adoption following her birth, was found in 2000 after an investigation ordered by Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle. Macarena is a Human Rights Activist. Gelman entered into a lawsuit against Hugo Campos Hermida, who headed the police force that ‘disappeared’ Gelman’s son as well as many others during the Coup. Uruguay has provided amnesty for police officials who took part in the human rights violations during the Coup, and American-trained police officer Hugo Campos Hermida died in Uruguay in 2001 without answering for his crimes despite frequent request for extradition from the Argentine government.
April 1, 2013
spanning nearly four decades, dark times filled with light assembles poems from more than two dozen collections of juan gelman's work. the exiled argentine poet is a luminary of latin american letters - now nearing his mid 80s. his experiences fleeing argentina amidst the dirty war and the disappearances shaped much of his post-mid 1970s poetry. earlier poems contrast starkly, informed more by a wonder and marvel of life than the horrors of state violence that were to follow. there is a marked progression of theme, if not style, to be found within gelman's writing over the decades. dark times filled with light is an often mournful, impassioned collection, reading almost as an autobiography in poems - one touched by love, loss, inhumanity, and healing.
dark times filled with light was translated from the spanish by the late hardie st. martin (neruda, dalton, donoso, parra, lihn, et al). paul pines' introduction offers the intriguing story of the translation's provenance, as well as brief insight into both gelman and st. martin. while very little of gelman's work is available in english translation, dark times filled with light seems to have the more fluid, rhythmic, natural translation as compared to the selected poems in joan lindgren's unthinkable tenderness.
dark times filled with light was translated from the spanish by the late hardie st. martin (neruda, dalton, donoso, parra, lihn, et al). paul pines' introduction offers the intriguing story of the translation's provenance, as well as brief insight into both gelman and st. martin. while very little of gelman's work is available in english translation, dark times filled with light seems to have the more fluid, rhythmic, natural translation as compared to the selected poems in joan lindgren's unthinkable tenderness.
watching people walk along
watching people walk along, put on a suit,
a hat, an expression and a smile,
watching them bent over their plates eating patiently,
word hard, run, suffer, cringe in pain,
all just for a little peace and happiness,
watching people, i say it's hardly fair
to punish their bones and their hopes
or distort their songs or darken their day,
yes, watching
people weep in the most hidden corners
of the soul and still be able
to laugh and walk with dignity,
watching people, well, watching them
have children and hope and always
believe things will get better
and seeing them fight to stay alive,
i tell them,
it's beautiful to walk along with you
to discover the source of new things,
to get at the root of happiness,
to bring the future in on our backs, to address
time on familiar terms and know
we'll end up finding lasting happiness,
i tell them, it's beautiful, what a great mystery
to live treated like dirt
yet sing and laugh,
how strange!
~
from under foreign rain (footnotes to a defeat)
i (excerpt)
all men are human and what finds room in me should find it in others. and vice versa, because all men are human. let's find room in one another, humans. let the strange world around me with its justifiable egotisms, its parking meter-like decency, its consumer honesty, its refined brutal individualism, its pathetic love, and the filth from its hygiene all find room in me. i can merely offer it the rays that light up the fight for happiness, the generosities of death, in other words, of life, the explosions of happiness, this temporary defeat.
November 15, 2018
From (Ones’s Man Wake)
He goes around concerned more than usual
about time, life, other minor things like being,
dying without having found himself.
He was single-minded about this and on rainy days
he would go out and start asking if they had seen him
aboard some woman's eyes or somewhere along
the Brazilian coast in love with its pounding surf
or most likely at the funeral of his innocence.
He always had words or pale and miserable pieces
of love and of violent winds in reserve,
he had been about to enter death thirteen times
but came back from force of habit, he said.
Among other things he wanted
someone else to understand the world,
and this terrified loneliness itself.
Now they're holding this scary wake here
inside these walls on which his curses still come rolling off,
the rustle of his beard, still full of life, falls from his face
and no one who can smell him
will ever guess how much he wanted to enjoy the mystery of innocent love
and give water to his children.
As he returns his borrowed skin and bones to neglect,
he makes out his own figure in the distance and runs after himself,
so there's no doubt now
that it will soon begin to rain.
***
(Faithless)
She left me / went to heaven /
she of the lovely throat wrapped in a necklace /
has the sweetest lips /
but she is bitter /
swords flashed in her eyes /
lances she sharpens to kill unfortunate men /
her eyes send out signals /
she is high-strung / like a thirsty deer /
her eyebrow / or bow / or rainbow /
recalls Noah's covenant / the sign that the flood was over /
if you're thirsty /
she tells her clouds to flood your heart with broken glass /
***
(Other Writings)
Night strikes your face like God's feet /
what is this light rising from your dead? / do you see anything by the light of this light? / what do
you see? / little bones holding up autumn? / someone
scratching the world's walls with his bones? / anything else? /
are they scratching the soul's walls? / writing
"long live the struggle"? / are they scratching
the night's walls? / or writing "long live the soul"? /
scratching the fire where i burned and we died / all of us compañeros? / are they
writing? /
in the fire? / in the light? / in the light of that light? /
now our comrades are walking past with their tongues locked /
they go past with the other feet and their roads /
they are going past stitched on to the light /
they're scratching the silence with a bone /
writing down the word "struggle" /
the bone has turned into a bone that writes /
He goes around concerned more than usual
about time, life, other minor things like being,
dying without having found himself.
He was single-minded about this and on rainy days
he would go out and start asking if they had seen him
aboard some woman's eyes or somewhere along
the Brazilian coast in love with its pounding surf
or most likely at the funeral of his innocence.
He always had words or pale and miserable pieces
of love and of violent winds in reserve,
he had been about to enter death thirteen times
but came back from force of habit, he said.
Among other things he wanted
someone else to understand the world,
and this terrified loneliness itself.
Now they're holding this scary wake here
inside these walls on which his curses still come rolling off,
the rustle of his beard, still full of life, falls from his face
and no one who can smell him
will ever guess how much he wanted to enjoy the mystery of innocent love
and give water to his children.
As he returns his borrowed skin and bones to neglect,
he makes out his own figure in the distance and runs after himself,
so there's no doubt now
that it will soon begin to rain.
***
(Faithless)
She left me / went to heaven /
she of the lovely throat wrapped in a necklace /
has the sweetest lips /
but she is bitter /
swords flashed in her eyes /
lances she sharpens to kill unfortunate men /
her eyes send out signals /
she is high-strung / like a thirsty deer /
her eyebrow / or bow / or rainbow /
recalls Noah's covenant / the sign that the flood was over /
if you're thirsty /
she tells her clouds to flood your heart with broken glass /
***
(Other Writings)
Night strikes your face like God's feet /
what is this light rising from your dead? / do you see anything by the light of this light? / what do
you see? / little bones holding up autumn? / someone
scratching the world's walls with his bones? / anything else? /
are they scratching the soul's walls? / writing
"long live the struggle"? / are they scratching
the night's walls? / or writing "long live the soul"? /
scratching the fire where i burned and we died / all of us compañeros? / are they
writing? /
in the fire? / in the light? / in the light of that light? /
now our comrades are walking past with their tongues locked /
they go past with the other feet and their roads /
they are going past stitched on to the light /
they're scratching the silence with a bone /
writing down the word "struggle" /
the bone has turned into a bone that writes /
February 11, 2013
Saying that I enjoyed this book is true but also must be expanded upon. Juan Gelman, of Argentina, has been writing poetry for decades and, according to the introduction and back jacket is regularly "on the short list of Nobel Prize candidates" (xi).
His early poems were the ones I liked the most and they are small commentaries on life, love, the act of poetry, and the typical mundane aspects of life. His middle and later poems are more focused on the Argentine reign of terror and the "disappeared" and his decades of exile in Europe. These are powerful poems that address a heinous period in Argentina's and its people's history that needs to be known more widely. His poems of exile are especially powerful. I marked all four included poems from Under Foreign Rain (footnotes to a defeat) (1980) as ones that spoke to me in an utterly heartrending manner.
The poems come from 26 different books and, I assume, give a good idea of his writing across time. Some of the books only had one poem in here and sometimes I found myself wishing for more if what was included particularly resonated with me.
Thank you Open Letter and the University of Rochester for these wonderful poems in translation!
If you have any interest in reading (and supporting) literature in translation--all kinds of lit from all over the world--then do yourself the favor of looking into Open Letter. I have a subscription to them and have enjoyed the couple I have managed to read so far, with the added bonus of having several other translated works sitting at my fingertips when I am ready to dive in. http://www.openletterbooks.org/
One of the many poems that particularly spoke to me:
I Sit Here Like An Invalid (from The Name of the Game (1956-1958)
I sit here like an invalid in the desert of my desire for you.
I've grown used to sipping the night slowly, knowing
you're in it somewhere filling it with dreams.
The night wind whips the stars flickering in my hands,
broken-hearted widows of your hair, still unreconciled.
The birds you planted in my heart are stirring and
sometimes with a knife's cold blade
I'd offer them the freedom they demand to go back to you.
And yet I can't. You're so much a part of me, so much alive in me
that if I died, my death would kill you.
His early poems were the ones I liked the most and they are small commentaries on life, love, the act of poetry, and the typical mundane aspects of life. His middle and later poems are more focused on the Argentine reign of terror and the "disappeared" and his decades of exile in Europe. These are powerful poems that address a heinous period in Argentina's and its people's history that needs to be known more widely. His poems of exile are especially powerful. I marked all four included poems from Under Foreign Rain (footnotes to a defeat) (1980) as ones that spoke to me in an utterly heartrending manner.
The poems come from 26 different books and, I assume, give a good idea of his writing across time. Some of the books only had one poem in here and sometimes I found myself wishing for more if what was included particularly resonated with me.
Thank you Open Letter and the University of Rochester for these wonderful poems in translation!
If you have any interest in reading (and supporting) literature in translation--all kinds of lit from all over the world--then do yourself the favor of looking into Open Letter. I have a subscription to them and have enjoyed the couple I have managed to read so far, with the added bonus of having several other translated works sitting at my fingertips when I am ready to dive in. http://www.openletterbooks.org/
One of the many poems that particularly spoke to me:
I Sit Here Like An Invalid (from The Name of the Game (1956-1958)
I sit here like an invalid in the desert of my desire for you.
I've grown used to sipping the night slowly, knowing
you're in it somewhere filling it with dreams.
The night wind whips the stars flickering in my hands,
broken-hearted widows of your hair, still unreconciled.
The birds you planted in my heart are stirring and
sometimes with a knife's cold blade
I'd offer them the freedom they demand to go back to you.
And yet I can't. You're so much a part of me, so much alive in me
that if I died, my death would kill you.
Read
December 27, 2015It's difficult to reconstruct what happened, the truth in one's memory fights the memory of the truth'
from Under Foreign Rain
Argentinian poet Juan Gelman's work is inextricably intertwined with the politics of the homeland he spent so much of his life in exile from.
When the military seized power in 1976, Gelman's son and pregnant daughter-in-law were 'disappeared', that too elegant synonym for murdered while hands bound.
The son's remains were only discovered in a concrete drum in 1990; his daughter-in-law's have yet to be. We do know that she was kept alive long enough to give birth and that the child was given to a pro-junta family to raise.
The bare-bones horror of this would break most of us and Gelman stopped writing for years, returning in calm anger and rageful sorrow in 1980s.
The plainsong of Gelman's poetry casts a clear light on its subjects, be they grief, state violence, lost friendships or the tango.
Even though the translation here by Hardie St. Martin reads as a little too safe, Gelman's unstinting belief in the salvation of work is steadfast and, finally, uplifting.
from Under Foreign Rain
Argentinian poet Juan Gelman's work is inextricably intertwined with the politics of the homeland he spent so much of his life in exile from.
When the military seized power in 1976, Gelman's son and pregnant daughter-in-law were 'disappeared', that too elegant synonym for murdered while hands bound.
The son's remains were only discovered in a concrete drum in 1990; his daughter-in-law's have yet to be. We do know that she was kept alive long enough to give birth and that the child was given to a pro-junta family to raise.
The bare-bones horror of this would break most of us and Gelman stopped writing for years, returning in calm anger and rageful sorrow in 1980s.
The plainsong of Gelman's poetry casts a clear light on its subjects, be they grief, state violence, lost friendships or the tango.
Even though the translation here by Hardie St. Martin reads as a little too safe, Gelman's unstinting belief in the salvation of work is steadfast and, finally, uplifting.
Want to read
April 22, 2013[I won this in a Goodreads Giveaway]
I had no previous knowledge of Juan Gelman before I got this book. The poems are beautiful. Sad and hopeful, evocative and spare They aren't bogged down with flowery, fake language. Gelman (at least via this translation) uses real, every day language to express honest, and true feelings. They're exactly the kind of poems I enjoy reading. Hopefully, I can find more.
I had no previous knowledge of Juan Gelman before I got this book. The poems are beautiful. Sad and hopeful, evocative and spare They aren't bogged down with flowery, fake language. Gelman (at least via this translation) uses real, every day language to express honest, and true feelings. They're exactly the kind of poems I enjoy reading. Hopefully, I can find more.
July 20, 2015
DISCLAIMER: I am the publisher of the book and thus spent approximately two years reading and editing and working on it. So take my review with a grain of salt, or the understanding that I am deeply invested in this text and know it quite well. Also, I would really appreciate it if you would purchase this book, since it would benefit Open Letter directly.
December 21, 2018
Leer poesía siempre me obliga a romper estructuras mentales, pero leer a Gelman es adicionar a eso la sacudida de una realidad traspasada a la letras de una forma tan mordaz como exquisita. Si más gente pudiera sentir sus letras comprendiendo la lucha que transcribe, existiría en este mundo más rebeldía constructiva y más arte realista.
October 10, 2023
Incredible poetry!!!
June 16, 2024
算是纵览诗人Juan Gelman一生的一本选集，从青年时代有点浪漫的诗到六七十年代充满政治气息的诗，再到流亡和失去亲人战友。能看出风格有很明显的变化。这本书可能是当年他去世之后我买来读的，但是说句实话没留下太深的印象。
February 3, 2013
I received a free copy from the Goodreads First Reads Program. I enjoyed the poems.
July 12, 2013
lol. why do i keep reading poetry IT IS ALL BULLSHIT do you hear me mom *bullshit*
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