Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman. "In CADAVERS, his long poem on the desaparecidos—the disappeared victims of Argentina's military dictatorship—Perlongher does not seek to return their presence or whereabouts to those unnamed, absent corpses, but to restore their corporeity to them. He does so by means of a poetic language that can be as coarse and funny as it is ornate, bringing together such disparate elements as Góngora's Baroque and the neighborhood hair salon, Rubén Darío's Modernismo and Argentine public elementary schools.
"Legend has it that Perlongher wrote his poem on the interminable bus trip from Buenos Aires to São Paulo that would take him into exile from a regime that had paradoxically criminalized him not for his fierce political activism, but for his militant homosexuality. This gorgeous translation by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman retraces Perlongher's journey, and finally brings his great poem to an English-speaking audience."—Ezequiel Zaidenwerg
Author Bio
Néstor Perlongher was an Argentine poet and gay rights activist. Born in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires Province, on Christmas night in 1949, he was a founder and key member of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front), one of the first LGBT organizations in the world. From 1982, he lived in São Paulo, where he earned a master's degree in Social Anthropology, and taught as a professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He received the Boris Vian prize in 1987 for his book Alambres, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. His poetic work comprises six books, beginning with Austria-Hungría in 1980. He was a frequent contributor to various Argentine magazines, and in 1991 compiled the bilingual Spanish- Portuguese anthology Caribe transplatino, poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense. One of his best-known essays is La prostitución masculina (Male Prostitution). He died in São Paulo in 1992.
Author City: Buenos Aires ARG