While the Wolf is Around

by Eduardo Chirinos, G.J. Racz (Translator)

While the Wolf Is Around [Mientras el lobo está], which won the 2009 Generation of ’27 Poetry Prize, is the sixteenth book of poetry by Eduardo Chirinos, one of Peru’s most important contemporary authors. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, Chirinos has been widely anthologized in the Spanish-speaking world. While the Wolf Is Around treats many of the subjects and themes found throughout Chirinos’s oeuvre: the return to childhood, the vagaries of memory, the alternative reality of dream, a fascination with animals, the utility of seeing and hearing, the writer’s place in poetic tradition, the ongoing commentary on art and film, and the never-ending search for originality through innovative expression. Chirinos’s poetics wage a constant battle against linguistic exhaustion, frequently staving off cliché through a wry tone and simple eloquence. This book is his fourth in English translation, joining Reasons for Writing Poetry, Written in Missoula, and The Smoke of Distant Fires.

Praise for While the Wolf Is Around

Eduardo Chirinos is one the leading voices of contemporary Latin American poetry, one of the most accomplished, prolific, and adverturesome in the entire lyric repertoire in Spanish.
Octavio Pineda

Chirinos is one of the most outstanding poets to appear within the last thirty years. His words create a recognizable but original world, at one and the same time natural and accessible, like something out of our own experience.
José Miguel Oviedo

Within his historical context, that of Peruvian poetry in the 1980s, Eduardo Chirinos represents that rare case of a poet who aspires to be nothing more than a poet.
Martín Rodríguez Gaona

Chirinos is simultaneously lyrical and narrative, mythic and historical. His poetic visions are circular voyages in which the subject is just a point of reference within a language that constantly confounds him.
Víctor Vich

The formal beauty of Eduardo Chirinos’s poetry is certainly one of its bastions, written as it is under the torrential sweep of words the poet both restrains and measures out, scanning them into what will end up being a poem.
Juan Carlos Abril

Let’s just say that, in Chirinos’s work, the force of his words lies in dignifying the ordinary precisely for its ordinariness: scenes so common as to pass by unperceived, moments that make up our days but not the lists of “This Day in Hisotry.”
Rafael Espejo

The challenge in Chirinos is to hurl meaning toward epiphany, which he overwhelmingly succeeds in doing.
Samuel Jaramillo

Eduardo Chirinos invites the reader into his circle game of chance observation and poignant discovery, and his accounts of the daily routine, memory, poetry and paintings find a fortunate home in G. J. Racz’s translation. Grounded in moving rhythms and brilliant word choice, these versions manage to elevate the commonplace as well as the precious to a level of subtle musicality and delight.
Lisa Rose Bradford

Eduardo Chirinos is lucky to have G. J. Racz as his translator. Racz brings to the task a great knowledge of Spanish and great skill with American English. He knows how to transform spoken language into poetry, as Chirinos does. A lesser translator would fall into prose. Racz’s translations are accurate equivalents of Chirinos’s poems, and a great pleasure to read.
Jonathan Cohen, editor/compiler of William Carlos Williams’s By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959

In these intensely personal yet erudite poems, Eduardo Chirinos draws from his childhood in his native Peru as well as from the classics and myriad other sources. The speakers here address writers, painters, and philosophers, even Poetry itself, in meditations that juxtapose the quotidian and the sublime. Bravo to the poet, and to translator G. J. Racz for delivering another collection of Chirinos’s verse so naturally into English.
Daniel Shapiro
Editor, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
Americas Society

In While the Wolf Is Around, G.J. Racz masterfully renders the playful, ironic tone of the original into English, yet he refuses to sacrifice the uniqueness that makes Eduardo Chirinos one of the most notable voices in contemporary Spanish American poetry.

Katherine Hedeen

While the Wolf Is Around confirms that Eduardo Chirinos is one the most relevant poets in Spanish-language poetry today. In this highly engaging book, written with lucidity and passion from its structure down to the details, memory shakes hands with daily life, chronicle with invention, friendship with literary admiration, one’s own l...

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

Reviews

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

FYI: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review on here.

This collection of fairly brief, accessible, conversational poems by a contemporary Peruvian(-American immigrant) poet made me wish i knew Spanish. The book is printed with each poem in the original on the left page and the English translation on the right. I know enough rudimentary Spanish and can puzzle out cognates well enough to see that sometimes the translator had made some changes in structure and phrasing, and those interstices of translation fascinate me. So, the upshot being, if you know or are learning Spanish, this book has another level on which you may appreciate it.

I, however, only understood the English half of the book, which I enjoyed reading. Chirinos writes with a casual tone to address of the reader, as if he were composing a diary entry or having a desultory conversation in a coffee shop. The subjects of the poems range from childhood recollections to musings on the writings of other poets, to even the occasional ekphrastic work inspired by art the reader probably knows (Wyeth, Titian, etc).

I like the plainspokenness of these poems, how forthright they are. I also appreciated the prologue, a substantial interview with the author conducted by the translator.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chirinos writes in the Latin American tradition, but informed by broad reading in other literatures. The enjambment of his lines is particularly interesting, part of a larger pattern of unexpected turns. Chirinos includes the quotidian in a way that is informed at least as much by the juxtapositions of Auden (from whom an epigraph is included at the beginning of the collection) as by Peruvian or other Latin American poets. The forceful closure at the ends of the poems is more reminiscent of Northern, protestant writers, the Shakespearean rather than Petrarchan mode. Overall, the work is exciting, inspired by the sorts of moments and revelations that one might find in much of contemporary poetry- a statue in a cemetery, children playing a game with sinister implications, miniature portraits of characters- but rendered with clarity and insight, each subject a sort of lens through which Chirinos reveals the world distorted or brought into clearer focus. The poems have the immediacy of life experienced in the moment, the craftsmanship of a seasoned and deliberate artist.
While I generally find discussions of translation off-putting, preferring to deal with the poem as it appears rather than some comparison to translations that might have been, this dual language text all but demands a consideration of the versions on each facing page and the relationship between them. The poems in their original Spanish feel almost terse, with an economy of language that is very different from most Latin American poetry, and even more economical than most spoken Spanish. The English translations are economical, but to me seem to lose some of the tension of the original in order to maintain the vernacular feel of the work. Such choices are inevitable in translation and are largely a matter of taste and aesthetic.