Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Simultaneously prophetic and blasphemous, VISION OF THE CHILDREN OF EVIL by Miguel Ángel Bustos presents a mystical rejoinder to the inequities of the Americas, a revision of history through the motif of divine descent, as relevant and revolutionary today as when the poems first debuted in the 1960s. In Bustos's poetry, language is both a tool of subjugation and a device to conjure a strange world that transcends the one we only think we know. And like a postcolonial Rimbaud, he repurposes symbols to develop his own: universal, synesthetic, and above all, musical. Polyvocal, intertextual, and hybrid in form, these books span aphoristic fragments, prose poems, lyrical prose chapters, and linguistically experimental free verse, voicing Spanish colonizers and invented indigenous characters alike. In this bilingual dual edition featuring both Fantastical Fragments (1965) and Vision of the Children of Evil (1967), anglophone readers have their first opportunity to experience Bustos's poetry, as the poet fell victim to a double silencing in Argentina—he was disappeared at the beginning of the 1976 military dictatorship and, subsequently, his work was suppressed and his name absented from the literary record. Lucina Schell's translations are nothing short of extraordinary—urgent, adept, and possessing the necessary temerity to match wits with a poetic voice as strident as Bustos's. A poète maudit whose untimely death was ironically brought on by his leftist politics, Miguel Ángel Bustos reinvents the origin myth of Argentina—and the Americas—laying bare all its promise, all its pain.
"This essential voice of a 'disappeared' poet from the brutal period of Argentina's Dirty War is electrifying. Miguel Ángel Bustos's poetry shakes me with its aching sense of existential abandonment—just as 'a land that trembles like the lung of a boy.' His work is populated with demons, vampires, fantastical cabinets, hallucinations, llamas, condors, tigers, a word-womb of prophecy, the Legion of the Children of Evil, and 'the rust on the nail that eats at you.' His dark visions exhilarate, infect, inflame. Like César Vallejo or Alejandra Pizarnik, he is a poet who eats radiance even as night falls in his poems (to paraphrase him). A poet, journalist, and anthropologist, he diagnoses society's diseases and trumpets the damage they do to the human soul. Writing at a time when Argentina was plunging into horrifying repression in a series of violent coups, Bustos fuses the eerie visions of Baudelaire, Nerval, and Poe with the prophetic tones of Milton and Blake. Bustos's prediction held true: 'When I die, the prophet in me will rise like a child without morals or motherland.' I'm grateful for Lucina Schell's artful rendering that recreates the visceral yet oneiric impetus and the adroit wordplay of Bustos's poems. The appearance of this translation is an event to celebrate."—Rachel Galvin
"Like the tormented Peruvian César Vallejo or the Spanish madman-savant Leopoldo Panero, Argentina's Miguel Ángel Bustos ransacks the unconscious for its darkest revelations of the inexpressible. Like García Lorca forty years before in Spain, Bustos was murdered for his politics in 1976 by his country's military dictatorship. To render his hallucinated language and his dream-nightmare visions in credible English, Lucina Schell reaches for the edges of expression and introduces us to a strangely gifted, wildly imaginative, prematurely silenced twentieth-century voice."—Stephen Kessler
"The radiant, devastating poetry of Miguel Ángel Bustos reads as a glorious act of resistance to Argentina's dictadura, and to all brutal takeovers of language and reality that attempt to deaden us with cliché and denial. We can be certain: 'the world had changed with his howl. With his strange howl.' And 'were a monument to a howl possible,' it would no doubt be Lucina Schell's dazzling, courageous translation, which never for a moment flinches from difficulty as she delivers this piercing, perturbing message from history. This book has moved me unspeakably. What a masterpiece, and what a spectacular translation!"—Michelle Gil-Montero
"Miguel Ángel Ramón Bustos von Joecker, un poeta desaparecido, a victim of Argentina's Dirty War, reappears, is made visible to the anglophone reader, in this splendid translation of his book of poems, Visión de los hijos del mal. The translator, Lucina Schell, presents us these beautiful remains of the murdered poet, the words that survived him like the exhumed dead calcium of his very body: 'When I die / beneath the inhumane song of my / brothers / I'll be a relic urine smell. / I'll remain in my bones for all / eternity. Amen.'"—Arturo Mantecón
Author Bio
Lucina Schell works in international rights for the University of Chicago Press and is founding editor of Reading in Translation. She is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective, and translates poetry from the Spanish. Recent translations include Daiana Henderson's SO THAT SOMETHING REMAINS LIT (Cardboard House Press DRONE Chapbook Series, 2018).
Author City: USA
Miguel Ángel Bustos (1932-1976) was a major poet of the Argentine Generation of 1960, an illustrator, and a literary critic. During his lifetime, he published Cuatro Murales (1957), Corazón de piel afuera (1959), Fragmentos fantásticos (1965), Visión de los hijos del mal (1967), winner of the second Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Poetry, and El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros (1970). Bustos's last book was published with the support of a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts. His poetry was included in many contemporaneous anthologies of the Generation of 1960, and in 1998 Alberto Szpunberg published the anthology of his poetry Despedida de los ángeles. Bustos studied painting with Juan Battle Planas in the 1960s and had a solo exhibition of his artworks in 1970, with a catalog written by Aldo Pellegrini. In 2014, Miguel Ángel Bustos and Emiliano Bustos had a joint exhibition of their paintings and drawings at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires. During the 1970s, Bustos worked primarily as a literary critic for Siete Días, Panorama, La Opinión, and El Cronista Comercial, and his collected prose was published in 2007. His collected poetry was published in 2008, the first time it had appeared in print in more than thirty years. On May 30, 1976, Bustos was arrested by military police and for decades remained "disappeared," his work censored. In 2014, Bustos's remains were identified by forensic anthropologists. It is now known that he was executed by firing squad on June 20, 1976.
Author City: BUENOS AIRES ARG