Trusting On The Wide Air Poems Of Uruguay

Poetry. Anthology. Latinx Studies. TRUSTING ON THE WIDE AIR: POEMS OF URUGUAY gathers together the best of contemporary and historical Uruguayan poetry. The anthology's title comes from the Jules Supervielle's poem "Montevideo" where "The scent of eucalyptus / Trusted itself to the wide air" and in these poems we smell the eucalyptus and jacaranda, taste the mate and sweet alfajores, hear the candombe drums, and feel what it means to be in Uruguay. "Surprising and illuminating, TRUSTING ON THE WIDE AIR: POEMS OF URUGUAY invites the reader to visit this small South American country through its poetry--to listen to its poets, generation on generation, in conversation with one another. A book for poets, poetry lovers, and readers who want to hear the rhythms of carnival, to walk along sand beaches and drink in lonely cafes, to travel to far towns and cities in an instant. A delight!"--Ron Wallace "For several years now, through the poets they have translated and the anthologies they each have edited, Jesse Lee Kercheval and Laura Chalar have been doing readers in the US an enormous service by bringing us an astonishing range of poetry from Uruguay. TRUSTING ON THE WIDE AIR: POEMS OF URUGUAY serves up another welcome helping from this small nation with outsized poetic resources."--Geoffrey Brock "For readers who've never visited the smallest country in South America, this anthology offers rich insight into a new destination; for those well-versed with the country, the book offers a study of Uruguay renewed. Moving from description to declaration, meditation to assertion, TRUSTING ON THE WIDE AIR: POEMS OF URUGUAY's greatest gift, perhaps, is that its poetry transcends the record of landscape and memory."--Shara Lessley "More than one hundred years of extraordinary poets fill these pages... From the long-established resident to the nostalgic emigrant and the enamored visitor, these authors paint with verse their impressions of the music of candombe and the rituals of daily life, the architecture and history of Montevideo with its Parisian splendor and urban squalor, the sea of a river that forms its port and bay, and the flora and fauna that grace its countryside."--Lisa Rose Bradford

"The editor of this anthology addresses this literary omission by identifying seventeen Uruguayans deserving of recognition: Jorge Arbeleche, Nancy Bacelo, Washington Benavides, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, Luis Bravo, Selva Casal, Rafael Courtoisie, Marosa Di Giorgio, Enrique Fierro, Alfredo Fressia, Saul Ibargoyen, Circe Maia, Jorge Meretta, Eduardo Milan, Alvaro Miranda, and Salvador Puig. The selection of these poets is based on extensive research and personal taste, but also because they have a recognized, sustained record of published books of poetry, especially during the 1990s; they have been favorably acknowledged for their work by peers and critics--through reviews and interviews in local news media; they have received recognition through national or international literary awards; and, for the most part, they are still active as poets in the new millennium. Furthermore, they comprise a representative cross section of diverse generations, perspectives, themes, and poetics extant in today's poetry in Uruguay." "Each of the poets is represented by a selection of original poems in Spanish to demonstrate the diversity of their expression and English translations to render them meaningful for both English and Spanish reading publics. The extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary sources of each poet is unprecedented; hopefully it will serve as a guide to encourage research on this neglected area of Spanish American literature. There is currently no canon of contemporary Uruguayan poets, but this project is intended to provide a meaningful step toward opening a discussion of such a canon."--BOOK JACKET.

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval. NIGHT IN THE NORTH is an autobiographical long poem that chronicles the author's experience growing up in Artigas, Uruguay, a linguistic and cultural borderland nestled between Brazil and Argentina. In a series of stark scenes, Severo revisits moments from his childhood--sketching a rare map of the subtle, yet violent, mechanisms that marginalize culturally specific communities. A luminous meditation on poverty and imaginative possibility. "The speaker of Fabián Severo's remarkable book narrates the struggles of a life lived in a provincial town in Uruguay, but it is not the hardships that a reader will remember, but the hopes, the tender interiority, the intimate knowledge of a place this remarkable poet de-scribes. Rendered in precise and elegant English by Eglin and Kercheval, this book will be a revelation to American readers as it introduces a voice on uncommon clarity and sensitivity, both retrospective and pinned to a hopeful future, from a poet of great expressive gifts."--Mark Wunderlich "'Life is like that / the less you have / the more you dream, ' Fabián Severo's whimsical yet somber, realistic, and tireless narrator states. Written from a place called Artigas, border terrain not possessed by the people who inhabit it, in a language that 'flies loose and free through the sky, ' these poems, so adeptly translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, address troubles of poverty, displacement, and abuse in surprisingly simple yet forceful, elegant language. I too wonder 'if God exists / and we are all his children / how can there be a place you're not allowed in?'"--Curtis Bauer "'María always tells the same story, / and her face becomes so happy / that one is filled with sadness.' Such are the many-layered emotional resonances in Fabián Severo's astonishing collection NIGHT IN THE NORTH, which follows the narrator as he records memories of daily life in a small border town in Uruguay. I am in awe of the tender intimacy Severo captures between people living through and into poverty and hardship, in the small tokens that illuminate both sorrow and richness. In sharp and precise language, Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval bring a much-needed voice into American literature."--Lauren Shapiro

This graceful translation and bilingual edition, now in paperback, is the first to bring English readers a representative sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published before her untimely death on July 6, 1914 at the age of twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan Alejandro Cáceres and including work from each of Agustini's four published books, Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros is a response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems but in the passionate and daring woman behind them and the social and political world she inhabited. Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 24, 1886 to wealthy parents of German and Italian descent. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-one and followed with two more in the next six years: the fourth volume was a posthumous publication. Her life was cut short in 1914, when Enrique Job Reyes, her ex-husband, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself. Carefully selected for this bilingual, en face edition, the poems collected here track and highlight Agustini's development and strengths as an artist—including her methods of experimentation, first relying on modernista forms and later abandoning them—and her focus on the figure of the male, which she portrays as the crux of devotion and attention but deems ultimately unreachable. Cáceres's introduction presents biographical information and situates Agustini's work and life in a larger political, historical, and literary context, particularly the modernismo movement, whose followers broke linguistic and political ties with the pathos and excesses of romanticism.

América invertida introduces twenty-two Uruguayan poets under the age of forty to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Kercheval paired poets and translators to produce a rich volume based on a multicultural dialogue about poetry and the written word. América invertida presents Spanish poems and their English translations side by side to give readers an introduction to Uruguay’s vibrant literary scene.

Bilingual French-English collections of The Uruguayan-born twentieth-century French poet, Jules Supervielle (1884-1960). This anthology contains ten tales and two chapters from the memoir "Uruguay", along with seventeen poems (some seemingly longer than his shortest tales). All poems appear bilingually, in French and English; prose appears only in English. His tales and poems are exhilarating, spun out as they are in his distinctive voice: transparent, forthright, tender, funny, poignant, sometimes bitingly satiric, by turns lyrical and abrupt

Garden of Silica is the first poetry anthology of the Uruguayan Ida Vitale to appear in English, spanning eight books published from 1960 to the present. Vitale is one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature, and her work also encompasses essays, short stories, journalism, and translation. She belongs to Uruguay's Critical Generation of the 1940s, whose mission was the construction of a participative intellectual subject. Vitale's poetry illustrates the incompatibility of the construction of that intellectual subject and realism. It is not the case of an idealist aesthetic that denies the existence of objective reality or offers only a testimony of individuality. Rather, these texts seek a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, and accordingly the private and the public. In addition, with a revealing gesture of feminist undertones, intellectual capacity is privileged above that of sentimentality. As a result, Vitale's message is implicit, requiring an active reader, one involved in the very process of creation. Placing the intellectual subject at the forefront, and thus relegating the national and the feminine to a second plane, Ida Vitale's poetry offers one of the most profound and provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.