Song for His Disappeared Love, Raúl Rivero, tr. Daniel Borzutsky (Action Books) $16
Raúl Rivero is a poet of epic dimensions; his poems are inscribed by plane on the skies over New York City or bulldozed into the Atacama Desert that features prominently in his Purgatory trilogy. Borzutsky’s translation of Song for His Disappeared Love is a great success: lyrical and political, brave and terrified, even incorporating a pair of drawings reminiscent of Kenneth Koch’s posthumously published comics. Originally published in 1985, at the height of the Pinochet’s disappearances, Action Books has finally published an overdue translation into English with great power and in beautiful form.
suite prelude a/h1n1, José Eugenio Sánchez, tr. Anna Rosen Guercio (Toad Press) $5
As far as translations go, it doesn’t get much more current than suite prelude a/h1n1, by Monterrey-based poet José Eugenio Sánchez, which playfully explores the Swine Flu Epidemic and those it affected, “festooned with facemasks to go out.” Self-described “underclown” Sánchez’ account of the epidemic rings tonally true in its English translation, rendered by emerging translator Anna Rosen Guercio.
The History of Violets, Marosa di Giorgio, tr. Jeannine Marie Pitas (Ugly Duckling Presse) $15
Farid Matuk’s blurb for The History of Violets is uncharacteristically insightful, and deserves repeating here: “There’s a lot at stake here, namely the opportunity for a new generation of American poets to take di Giorgio as a model for wresting the ‘poetry of witness’ away from humanism’s easy faith in testimony and remembering that the imagination is the organ of compassion.” The Uruguayan poet does employ a fiercely intimate imagination in this series of mostly prose lyrics, as in “VII”:
I don’t know, but I see the lobster, red, chestnut, so delicate on its silver plate, and under its ribs made of rice, love and champagne live, and future weddings, strange crimes, water. Everything lives under its big bag of little red buds.
Translator Jeannine Marie Pitas full-length debut is characteristically Ugly Duckling: as well designed as it is translated, balanced in content and form.
Vertical Poetry: Last Poems, Roberto Juarroz, tr. Mary Crow (White Pine Press) $16
Roberto Juarroz was a master of aesthetic groupings, ordering his poetry not chronologically but by whatever aesthetic themes appealed to him at the moment. Translator Mary Crow describes his typical poem as “aphoristic, cast as a riddle of syllogism, mixing abstraction with concrete image,” and devoid of “anecdotes of personal experience or autobiographical references or any critique of contemporary manners and politics.” In this sense he more closely resembles his Uruguayan contemporary di Giorgio than the Chilean Zurita or Mexican Sánchez. His last poems are among the best of his very unified work, like this spare, untitled lyric:
If we could draw thoughts
as a branch is drawn against the sky,
perhaps something would come to rest
on our thoughts like a bird on a branch.We drag along an error of essence:
we should have been more solid matter
in the palpable net that encloses us.And to bear our deficiency
we draw these wandering images
like branches against the sky.
