Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. PREPOEMS IN POSTSPANISH AND OTHER POEMS marks the first full-length collection to appear in English by the groundbreaking Ecuadorian poet Jorgenrique Adoum (1926-2009), hailed by Nobel-prize winner Pablo Neruda as the best Latin American poet of his generation. Adoum's poetry is at once radically experimental, fiercely lyrical, and passionately committed to social change. This timely volume showcases Adoum at his most formally innovative, gathering together three books published between 1973 and 1993: Curriculum Mortis, PREPOEMS IN POSTSPANISH, and Love Disinterred. Translators Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez's inventive and expert renderings bring Adoum's experimentation to the fore.
"The best Latin American poet of his generation."—Pablo Neruda
"For the rest of my life, I will be grateful to these translators! Jorgenrique Adoum has an extraordinary landscape for us to meet, explore 'in the subsoul or the dislife' and to know poets, poetry, as new all over again. The strength of poetry has never been more evident!"—CA Conrad
"These electric poems burn and mourn, seduce and jeer. They bend language and lore; they strain against state repression. They painstakingly document the 'cottony calm' and the turtle's 'historical sadness,' in a translation that attends expertly to the poems' ecstatic coinages and revolutionary energy. It's an awesome book."—Natalie Shapero
Author Bio
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Jorgenrique Adoum, widely-recognized as the most important Ecuadorian intellectual of the twentieth century, was an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. During his lifetime, he published 14 books of poetry. Of Lebanese descent, he was born in the Andean town of Ambato in 1926. As a young man, he studied in Chile, where he became Pablo Neruda's personal secretary. He began publishing poetry in 1949. In 1960, he won the first ever Casa de las Américas prize in Cuba, soon to become the most prestigious literary prize in Latin America. He belonged to a pioneering and yet often overlooked group of Spanish American poets, which includes writers like Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), Roque Dalton (El Salvador), and Juan Gelman (Argentina). Known as "conversacionalistas," they emphasize the orality of language, as well as make use of the language of the social sciences and mass media. They innovate by challenging poetic limits, moving closer to popular culture, and requiring an active reader, one considered a co-author. Adoum spent much of the sixties, seventies, and eighties in exile, mainly in Paris, returning to Ecuador in 1987, where he continued to write. He died in Quito in 2009 and is buried at the Chapel of Man, the museum and cultural center created by his friend, the outstanding visual artist, Oswaldo Guayasamín.
Author City: QUITO ECU
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana) is one of Cuba's most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over fifty collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. He has been a riveting presence at the most important international literary festivals, having read in more than forty countries. In the last decade, his work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published seven book-length translations. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.
Author City: GAMBIER, OH USA