In Waiting for Perec every poem begins with “I saw…,” and the objects of that vision range from Death and God to John Lennon and Sinatra, from the Marquis de Sade and Madame Bovary to Cortázar and John Wayne, among many others. What is less clear is who saw: the poet or poetic persona, Heraclitus, God, Christ…
In Mario Meléndez’s remarkable poems, rendered beautifully in Jeremy Paden’s masterful translation, Perec never appears, just as Godot failed to do so 70 years earlier. And that’s the point. Life occurs, is seen, while waiting, in the interim. That space, the intersection of living and seeing, of waiting and doing, is the space of poetry.
Anthony L. Geist
Translator of The School of Solitude by Luis Hernández (shortlisted for PEN Poetry in Translation)
Professor of Spanish, University of Washington
Knight, rank of Cruz de Oficial in the Order of Isabel la Católica
Waiting for Perec is a tightly woven book of visions. In this account, there are truly only three characters: God (obsessed with toys, due to his lack of childhood) and Death orbit one another as lovers, performing the Kama Sutra. A passive Christ shows up only as a narrator, as blood, a body, a stuffie the Pope clutches for comfort, as an absence God searches for.
Then there are the cameos, a brilliant and bewildering crowd of artists, poets, actors, characters, and creatures who step in and out of the dance of these three characters, doing imitations of God or tracking him, holding Christ’s bone in his mouth, running ahead of Death on a wooden tricycle, and generally making shenanigans with corpses, being corpses, or digging graves.
The book itself is full of marvels, but for its translation into English, we have Jeremy Paden to thank. What Paden has accomplished is simply this nearly impossible thing: the delivery of a world that feels as real and timeless in English as stones: “I saw God kissing Death/ in a Parisian café/ His beard was centuries-long.” This translation is a work of art as surely as is its creation.
Death has never seemed so lively; like Blake’s hell, the realm of Waiting for Perec is thriving. Like Christ reading Cortázar, I find myself wanting to read Mario Meléndez, in his own words “so as not to cry/ he makes my loneliness disappear/ as if by magic.”
Katie Farris
Standing the Forest of Being AliveAs
Considerado uno de los libros más importantes de 2022 por el New York Times, y finalista del Griffin Poetry Prize, De las que duelen (The Hurting Kind en su título original) es el último libro de poemas de Ada Limón, y su sexta colección de poesía. En él, la Poeta Laureada de la Biblioteca del Congreso de los EEUU, explora el poder mágico de la poesía y trata de encontrar las conexiones íntimas entre lo aparentemente dispar en lo cotidiano: los seres humanos y el mundo natural, los vivos y los muertos, lo intelectual y lo espiritual. Organizado en cuatro partes en torno a las estaciones, en la "Primavera" celebra canciones de inocencia; en el "Verano", sus poemas se oscurecen en la madurez (serpientes, maltrato); en el "Otoño", la autora evidencia el daño y el cinismo; y en el "Invierno" ajusta cuentas con la pérdida y la muerte. Es una poesía que invita al lector de participar en el acto recíproco de ver y ser visto.
JEREMY PADEN
“Una obra maestra”.
HARVARD REVIEW
“A la vez suaves y tiernos, enormes y rotundos, sus gestos poéticos transfiguran”
RICHARD BLANCO,
POETA INAUGURAL DE BARACK OBAMA
Octavio José Oliverio Girondo (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1891 / Buenos Aires, 1967), known as Oliverio Girondo, born in the same decade as Alfonsina Storni and Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the most noteworthy Argentine poets of the 20th Century. He was a key figure in the twentieth century Bonaerense avant-garde, specifically he was part of the Grupo Florida that worked together on the literary journal Martín Fierro. He was a poet of modernity, big cities, travel, technology, and modern alienation who always strove to renew poetry and find new modes of expression. He experimented with form and language itself and sought ways to sing about the mundane modern world in lyrical language. Huidobro, Vallejo, and Girondo push language to its very limits, its disintegration. His collections of poems are: Twenty Poems to Be Read on a Streetcar (1922), Decals (1925), Scarecrow (Within Everyone’s Reach) (1932), Persuasion of Days (1942), Our Countryside (1946), and In the Moremarrow (1952).
Author: Oliverio Girondo
Translator: Jeremy Paden
Skillfully handling all the challenges of a poet open to sharing the suffering of humanity, Javier Gutiérrez Lozano has reworked politically and ethically engaged poetry to turn it into a furious song that demands justice. This book, whose first edition came out in the United States and England, make this Mexican poet the most international of his generation.
The reader will find in these poems the depravity of a decadent world consumed by violence. All poetry can do is get up and defend the existence of moral goodness, a virtue that daily suffers disparagement.
Gutiérrez Lozano's daring not only shows his courage, but also the kind of taking on of the suffering of others that only great writers are capable of doing.
Fernando Valverde
Author: Javier Gutiérrez Lozano
Translator: Jeremy Paden
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Tomás Bravo Hepp’s newest book Family Tree: Nano Diagrams uses the logic of the genealogist to build a family story and a self-portrait of lyrical fragments collected from the past. While the psychological drama of the book is that of the domestic sphere, of parents and children across generations, the poems take the arboreal metaphor of a family tree quite literally. The book is something of a wunderkammer that collects references to a variety of austral trees and windswept, rain-soaked landscapes. Near the middle of the book, in a rare two line poem, Bravo Hepp writes, “We will all be / Seafloor.” This verse reminds us that even as trees grow upward, things fall down, fall apart, and settle to the bottom. This sedimentary process, however, slowly builds the world and makes new stone. Reading is also iterative and accretive. These Nano diagrams play with the logic of reading. They are built up through a layering of fragments. Poems unfold over multiple pages as new stanzas are added from page to page. Connective arrows show the relationship between the stanzas. At the end of the poem, after multiple readings of early stanzas, we arrive at the end, a completed diagram, a gestalt where the title finally comes as a moment of insight. Bravo Hepp, at once, exploits the backward glance of the genealogist and the psychoanalyst even as he makes patent through the layout of the poems the relationship between reading and understanding. Namely, that understanding, like a tree, grows overtime.
Author: Tomás Bravo Hepp
Translator: Jeremy Paden
Elí Urbina, one of the most relevant Peruvian poets of the newer generations, both for his poetry and for his work in cultural management, offers with Exŏdus a second installment of his poetics of a decidedly anthropological nature. Now he does not look into the specular abyss of man, but speaks to us of and from his port of Chimbote, for which his literary avatar imagines himself as an Odysseus from a renewed South-American Ithaca. Urbina is perhaps the one who best reminds us, for the future, of those metaverses of Vallejo that have penetrated more deeply into the human.
Luis Correa-Díaz
University of Georgia-USA
Academia Chilena de la Lengua
Real Academia de Ciencias, Letras y Artes
de Córdoba, España
Author: Elí Urbina
Translator: Jeremy Paden
The Correspondences is a collection of urban poems set in Istanbul and Florence, New York City and Buenos Aires, the outskirts of Bogotá and Sarajevo. These poems are palimpsests that layer personal and historical memory over each other. They weave together contemporary Mexican vernacular with literary Spanish of the Barroco and Modernismo, the Spanish of the conquistadors with modern sensationalist journalism. They are poems of love and death, that reference Dante, Petrarch and Ibn al-Ahnaf, and also text messages, ultrasounds, social media, billboard advertisements and graffiti. This is a series of letter send by a poet by a journey into language as he seeks to bring together, the private world Confessionalist poetry with the public world of the poetry of witness.
Author: Alí Calderón
Translator: Jeremy Paden
