Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford. Appearing in English translation for the first time, TODAY (HOY) by Juan Gelman (1930-2014) is the final book published during the life of one of Latin America's most important and celebrated poets. Written as both a reckoning and a reflection following the 2011 sentencing of those responsible for disappearing Gelman's son Marcelo in 1976 during Argentina's Dirty War, TODAY's 288 prose poems vacillate between the depths of anguish and celebrations of the day, as the poet wrestles with being, loss, and the central paradox of much of his late verse: the injustice inherent in knowing anything that exists can't help being fully itself, while simultaneously mired in a process of becoming that has no attainable endpoint. Surprising, beautiful, and relentlessly questioning, Gelman's poetry pushes language's capacity for expression to its absolute limit. Readers will find the poems of TODAY a treasure trove--rich, moving, musical, and full of complex ideas, lingering imagery, and stunning turns of phrase. Feelingly Englished by award-winning translator Lisa Rose Bradford, these gemlike compositions hail the ear and inner eye, and reward rereading, as the more time we spend with Gelman's poems allows light to catch new facets and reveal their brilliance.
Grief and crushing darkness are the inescapable companions of these poems, whose world appears to be as fractured as the grammar and form of Juan Gelman's spare and concentrated verse. In this barbaric place where children are disappeared, where pain never ends and justice is ambivalent, the 'poem of harsh lineage' and 'unsheltered words' just may find, however, 'perfection in the loss.' Lisa Rose Bradford translates this difficult news in clean and muscular phrases that push constantly and generatively against the terrible truths of TODAY.--Sidney Wade
The world of TODAY is the present, a dark forest, that which is here, within and surrounding each of us: the 'Today, ' a strange extreme, unlimited, insistent, inevitable, ungraspable. There are no words to fathom so much reality. Ungraspable, yet inescapable, the present clamours to be named; this is the adventure into which this book hurls itself headlong.--Daniel Freidemberg
Juan Gelman's last book is a work that grieves, that savors grief, personal and collective. Or more aptly, as ars poetica, these poems find the impulse to grieve deep in poetry itself--as Gelman has written: 'I've never been the owner of my ashes, my poems.' These elegant, chisel's edge inscriptions read like epigrams, like the very first epigrams, which were epitaphs engraved on tombs...This is a translation that, in its turn, relishes what is lost. Lisa Rose Bradford is remarkably receptive, tuned to the subtlest nuances in Gelman's language, intimate and estranging. This translation is a masterful rendering--and an homage to one of Argentina's greatest poets.--Michelle Gil-Montero
I find it hard to read HOY/TODAY without crying, but it's the kind of crying that's good for you. Full of sadness and beauty, spelling out loss and redemption, and absences remembered, the running verses of Juan Gelman's HOY speak of longing, singing with sentiment and love. And Lisa Rose Bradford's version is every bit as compelling as the original reflected in this bilingual edition...Juan Gelman is an indispensable figure in human rights--and in the tireless and essential labor of love involved in singing through verse.--Sergio Waisman
This urgent, luminous text is doubly haunted: the poems by the murder of the poet's son, the translations by the death in 2014 of the poet himself. It offers, as Lisa Rose Bradford notes in her fine introduction, 'insomniac inventories, ' flashes of 'conflictive beauty, ' and 'extreme condensation of thought and image, ' as if Gelman were 'dragging the canals of thought in order to leave a final testimony.' The passion of Gelman's testimony comes through beautifully in Bradford's English.--Geoffrey Brock
Author Biography:
Juan Gelman (1930-2014) was born of Jewish Ukrainian parents in Buenos Aires and grew up amid a myriad of languages, acquiring a fascination for words early on in life. A strange blending of social engagement and wordplay expressed in a colloquial language steeped in paradox and poignancy characterizes his poetic oeuvre, which includes more than twenty-five titles. Having actively participated in the leftist movements that brought back Perón in 1973, he was sent to Europe in 1975 to work in public relations as a journalist. After the military coup of 1976, he lived in exile in Italy, France, Spain, and Mexico, working as a translator and journalist and denouncing human rights abuses, which also involved the personal loss as his son, Marcelo, and his pregnant daughter-in-law, who were disappeared during the dictatorship. Gelman, considered to be one of Latin America's foremost poets, received numerous accolades during his lifetime, including the Argentine National Poetry Prize, the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature, the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry, the Lateo Prize, and, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award, the Cervantes Prize. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Lisa Rose Bradford teaches Comparative Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata and raises horses and cattle in Madariaga, Argentina. Her doctoral work was completed at the University of California at Berkeley, and, since then, she has edited various compendiums on translation and cultural studies and three anthologies of US poetry translated into Spanish. Her poems and translations have appeared in various magazines and journals, and she has published five bilingual volumes of Juan Gelman's verse, one of which received the National Translation Award.
