Seven Trees Against the Dying Light: A Bilingual Edition

Avant-Garde & Modernism Collection

by Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Steven F. White (Translation), Greg Simon (Translation)

Standing against the visible landscape—the mountainous volcanoes, the jungles and savannahs—the seven trees conjured in these narrative poems by one of Latin America's masters also evoke another, more mysterious terrain.  It is this other landscape, as invisible as poetry before it is written down but etched by history and animated by the collective memory of a people, that speaks through Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Seven Trees against the Dying Light .            

Storing experience as they exist, these tree-poems conserve local soil and memory in the place they inhabit. They are figures of life, stained by seawater and gun powder, by the bright red, bittersweet juice of the many life-giving plums that flourish in Nicaragua, and blood that has been spilled there.  And they offer a way of remembering who we are, where we come from, and, above all, where we are bound if we cannot learn to root language in the earth that sustains us.            

Printed here in Spanish with facing English translations, the edition includes an introduction with ecocritical focus, as well as complete notes on botanical, historical, mythological, and socio-political references.

118 pages, Paperback

Published October 23, 2007

About the author

Pablo Antonio Cuadra (November 4, 1912 – January 2, 2002) was a Nicaraguan essayist, art and literary critic, playwright, graphic artist and one of the most famous poets of Nicaragua.

Reviews

[Daniel Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encantan los poemas de este chiquito libro - Cuadra hace raras pero muy lindas conexiones entre el pasado y el presente, la mitología oral y la historia textual, la naturelza científica y la relación humana. También hay una introducción que ofrece claro contexto y explicacción suficiente para apreciar mejor las destrezas del poeta. Propuso los significativos de los arboles, las influencias literarias para Cuadra, y también el contexto y el ambiente en que el poeta escribió cada poema.

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magical Poetry, and a passionate and fantastic portrait of Nicaraguas cultural and ecological roots. Translations don't always capture the full weight or elegance of the Spanish text, but are well-researched and well-founded.