Description Poetry.
Latinx Studies.
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford.
Appearing in English translation for the first time, TODAY (HOY) by Juan Gelman (1930-2014) is the final book published during the life of one of Latin America's most important and celebrated poets.
Written as both a reckoning and a reflection following the 2011 sentencing of those responsible for disappearing Gelman's son Marcelo in 1976 during Argentina's Dirty War, TODAY's 288 prose poems vacillate between the depths of anguish and celebrations of the day, as the poet wrestles with being, loss, and the central paradox of much of his late verse: the injustice inherent in knowing anything that exists can't help being fully itself, while simultaneously mired in a process of becoming that has no attainable endpoint.
Surprising, beautiful, and relentlessly questioning, Gelman's poetry pushes language's capacity for expression to its absolute limit.
Readers will find the poems of TODAY a treasure trove--rich, moving, musical, and full of complex ideas, lingering imagery, and stunning turns of phrase.
Feelingly Englished by award-winning translator Lisa Rose Bradford, these gemlike compositions hail the ear and inner eye, and reward rereading, as the more time we spend with Gelman's poems allows light to catch new facets and reveal their brilliance.
Grief and crushing darkness are the inescapable companions of these poems, whose world appears to be as fractured as the grammar and form of Juan Gelman's spare and concentrated verse.
In this barbaric place where children are disappeared, where pain never ends and justice is ambivalent, the 'poem of harsh lineage' and 'unsheltered words' just may find, however, 'perfection in the loss.
' Lisa Rose Bradford translates this difficult news in clean and muscular phrases that push constantly and generatively against the terrible truths of TODAY.
--Sidney Wade The world of TODAY is the present, a dark forest, that which is here, within and surr.
| Verse | The injustice inherent in knowing anything that exists cant help being fully itself while simultaneously mired in a process of becoming that has no attainable endpoint |
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Co-im-press Today, paperback/juan gelman
