Elías Nandino: Selected Poems, in Spanish and English

by Elías Nandino, Don Cellin (Translator)

Though Latin America has a strong tradition of poetry, many of its best poets remain untranslated in the United States. Elkas Nandino (1900-1993) was a Mexican poet who made his living as a surgeon and physician. He published twenty volumes of poetry in his lifetime, work often focused on solitude, eroticism, and love. In recognition of his dedication to teaching and assisting young writers, the National Young Poets Prize in Mexico is named in his honor. This is the first book-length English translation of Nandino's poetry.

Genres: Poetry

184 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2010

About the author

Elías Nandino (April 19, 1900 – October 3, 1993) was a Mexican poet.
Nandino was born in Cocula, Jalisco. As a boy, he was brought up in the Catholic religion and served as an altar boy. He also attended Catholic school. Nandino's first homosexual encounters were apparently initiated by Catholic priests he knew. Nandino was friends with boys who were able to express their homosexual desires secretly and discreetly at the schools.

Nandino studied medicine in Cocula and Guadalajara and finally at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City where he "graduated as a surgeon in 1930." From 1928 to 1934, he lived in Los Angeles, where he completed his medical internship.

Nandino was influenced to start writing poetry when he was seventeen, by Manuel M. Flores and writer, Manuel Acuña. His was first published at age nineteen in Bohemia, in Guadalajara. At UNAM, he created the journal, Allis Vivere, where students could publish their own poems and short writing. Allis Vivere led to Nandino meeting Los Contemporáneos ("The Contemporaries" in Spanish), a Mexican modernist group of poets.He was influenced early on by Xavier Villaurrutia and José Gorostiza.

Nandino worked as a surgeon at different hospitals during most of his life, during which he also wrote poetry. He was also open about his homosexuality, but this did not affect his career as a surgeon. His early poetry was rather sombre, focusing on topics like death, nighttime and dreams. From the 1950s his poetry became more personal, whereas his later poems combined eroticism and metaphysics.

In 1982, he met and had a strong influence on the Chicano poet, Francisco X. Alarcón who was impressed with Nandino's bravery in living his life as an openly gay man in Mexico City. Nandino wished to support younger gay writers. He became Alarcon's "role model and soul mate."

He was editor of several publications and promoter of writing workshops. In the last years of his life he received numerous awards both for his career as a poet and for his support to literature in Mexico, such as the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize (1979) and the National Prize for Literature (1982). He died in Guadalajara, Jalisco at the age of 93.

Nandino's poetry uses both "romanticism and symbolism" and he is very much a provocative dissident who wanted to "erode the mystique around sexuality." His poetry often deals with contradictions in both how he felt about religion, homosexuality and eroticism. His collection, Erotismo al rojo blanco/Eroticism at a Burning White, was given Mexico's highest literary prize in 1983.

He often uses the sonnet form.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

And in the blue that hides the proof
I discover your unforgettable face,
and suffer the presence of your absence.
*
I travel so far from myself
when I am on the shore of your eyes,
that my racing mind
forgets everything…
*
You and I are no longer what we were together.
[…]
Indifference erased what we dreamed of
and the knot of our souls has become
an anguish that buries us both.
*
And I must live in your longings,
*
I am living two lives
in each instant that passes:
the extinguished one that burns me
with the memories I ignite
and the one I destroy
by living it to make
more memories
to fuel the first.
From one life I create another
and the two form my being.
*
If I only have words and more words
to express my anguish, my eternal thirst,
and the words are desolate mirrors,
waters that cannot reflect an image.

[Tatyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You give me a breeze from deep inside.
I can’t get drunk on my despair
because you melt me with your flame,
you scorch me with the fire of your life."

"I invented you with the alchemy of my dreams.
I dressed you with the impossible.
In your eyes I began a poem
and I enthroned your image on high."

"I remember that I used to talk only
with you about the loving siege
that death wages against our life,
and the two of us would talk, guessing,
making conjectures
composing questions, inventing answers,
only to end up
completely defeated,
dying in life from thinking about death."

"If I only have words and more words
to express my anguish, my eternal thirst,
and the words are desolate mirrors,
waters that cannot reflect an image."

"To search without seeing you
to bleed without a wound
to call you without hearing myself"

"You and I are no longer what we were together.
We are someone else on this hidden cross—
trembling, lifeless, weeping.
Indifference erased what we dreamed of
and the knot of our souls has become
an anguish that buries us both."

[Myhte]

Without any rain,
the earth is parched
and the dust is flying:
(Someday we will fly
like this blind dust.)