Confetti-Ash: Selected Poems of Salvador Novo

by Anthony Seidman (Translator), David Shook (Translator), Paul B. Roth (Editor)

I feel that poetry, Salvador Novo confesses in a poem from Espejo (1933), appropriately titled Poetry, hasn t come forth from me. That will prove to be a recurring theme in the intense and brief work of this sui generis poet, a member of that distinguished group lacking a group, as the Contemporáneos ; playfully referred to themselves. Among that constellation of solitary souls there belonged some of the best Mexican poets and Spanish speaking poets of the 20th José Gorostiza, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Carlos Pellicer, to mention the more widely known among them. The Contemporáneos was the first generation of truly modern writers in Mexico, and in their eponymous journal they published the first Spanish translations of T.S. Eliot, just to give a quick example of their cosmopolitanism. Moreover, they also published D.H. Lawrence, Saint-John Perse, Langston Hughes, Jules Supervielle and Paul Valéry. All of those influences can be spotted in the youthful poetry of Novo. Moreover, as in the brief quote which opens this paragraph, there appears another distinct trait in his confession. For the young Novo, passionately avant-garde, poetry was not only everything that tradition seemed to bypass, such as the unsacred, the free association of ideas, the prosaic, the unedited spaces of Spanish from the vast cities, fragmentation, irony, the uninhibited along with an acrid sense of humor, but also a poetry not detached from his lifestyle, which captured with an opulence in language, as well as a frankness, making one think of Oscar Wilde (one with whom Novo shares not only an emotive and aesthetic quality, but also a sexual orientation which he openly practiced in a society that was vehemently scandalized). The translations which Anthony Seidman and David Shook have done taken from two fundamental books by Novo, XX Poemas (1925) and Espejo (1933) offer an excellent way in which to appreciate the work of this radically unorthodox poet. Alberto Blanco

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Perfect Paperback

Published November 7, 2015

About the author

Anthony Seidman is the author of On Carbon-Dating Hunger and Where Thirsts Intersect. A selection of his work was included in international anthologies Corresponding Voices in 2005, and Barco a vapor transatlntico. He has also published translations of contemporary American poetry in La Jornada, Mexico Citys major newspaper, and Revista Solar, among others. Some of Seidmans more recent poems have been published in The Bitter Oleander, The Bloomsbury Review; Beyond Baroque, Parteaguas (Aguascalientes, Mexico), La Prensa (Managua, Nicaragua),and La Reforma (Mexico), among others. He has a new book forthcoming in 2012 entitled Cosmic Weather.
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Reviews

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the May/Aug 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...