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Dark Times Filled with Light

by Juan Gelman, Hardie St. Martin (Translator)

3.4 of 5 stars 3.40 · rating details · 15 ratings · 5 reviews

As Juan Gelman’s name begins appearing with regularity on lists predicting Nobel-Laureate-deserving poets, his work has also begun to appear in English. But only now are the most stunning translations of Gelman’s poetry being published, and in one substantial volume. Dark Times Filled with Light traces the evolution of a gifted lyrical poet’s encounter with the political,...more

Paperback, 208 pages

Published November 20th 2012 by Open Letter

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Mar 31, 2013 jeremy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, translation

spanning nearly four decades, dark times filled with light assembles poems from more than two dozen collections of juan gelman's work. the exiled argentine poet is a luminary of latin american letters - now nearing his mid 80s. his experiences fleeing argentina amidst the dirty war and the disappearances shaped much of his post-mid 1970s poetry. earlier poems contrast starkly, informed more by a wonder and marvel of life than the horrors of state violence that were to follow. there is a marked p...more spanning nearly four decades, dark times filled with light assembles poems from more than two dozen collections of juan gelman's work. the exiled argentine poet is a luminary of latin american letters - now nearing his mid 80s. his experiences fleeing argentina amidst the dirty war and the disappearances shaped much of his post-mid 1970s poetry. earlier poems contrast starkly, informed more by a wonder and marvel of life than the horrors of state violence that were to follow. there is a marked progression of theme, if not style, to be found within gelman's writing over the decades. dark times filled with light is an often mournful, impassioned collection, reading almost as an autobiography in poems - one touched by love, loss, inhumanity, and healing.

dark times filled with light was translated from the spanish by the late hardie st. martin (neruda, dalton, donoso, parra, lihn, et al). paul pines' introduction offers the intriguing story of the translation's provenance, as well as brief insight into both gelman and st. martin. while very little of gelman's work is available in english translation, dark times filled with light seems to have the more fluid, rhythmic, natural translation as compared to the selected poems in joan lindgren's unthinkable tenderness.

watching people walk along

watching people walk along, put on a suit,
a hat, an expression and a smile,
watching them bent over their plates eating patiently,
word hard, run, suffer, cringe in pain,
all just for a little peace and happiness,
watching people, i say it's hardly fair
to punish their bones and their hopes
or distort their songs or darken their day,
yes, watching
people weep in the most hidden corners
of the soul and still be able
to laugh and walk with dignity,
watching people, well, watching them
have children and hope and always
believe things will get better
and seeing them fight to stay alive,
i tell them,
it's beautiful to walk along with you
to discover the source of new things,
to get at the root of happiness,
to bring the future in on our backs, to address
time on familiar terms and know
we'll end up finding lasting happiness,
i tell them, it's beautiful, what a great mystery
to live treated like dirt
yet sing and laugh,
how strange!

~

from under foreign rain (footnotes to a defeat)
i (excerpt)

all men are human and what finds room in me should find it in others. and vice versa, because all men are human. let's find room in one another, humans. let the strange world around me with its justifiable egotisms, its parking meter-like decency, its consumer honesty, its refined brutal individualism, its pathetic love, and the filth from its hygiene all find room in me. i can merely offer it the rays that light up the fight for happiness, the generosities of death, in other words, of life, the explosions of happiness, this temporary defeat.

(less)

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Feb 11, 2013 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Mark by: Open Letter

Shelves: poems-poetry, translations

Saying that I enjoyed this book is true but also must be expanded upon. Juan Gelman, of Argentina, has been writing poetry for decades and, according to the introduction and back jacket is regularly "on the short list of Nobel Prize candidates" (xi).

His early poems were the ones I liked the most and they are small commentaries on life, love, the act of poetry, and the typical mundane aspects of life. His middle and later poems are more focused on the Argentine reign of terror and the "disappeare...more

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Feb 03, 2013 Joanna rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: giveaways

I received a free copy from the Goodreads First Reads Program. I enjoyed the poems.

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Apr 21, 2013 Blake marked it as to-read

Shelves: poetry, giveaways, reviewed

[I won this in a Goodreads Giveaway]

I had no previous knowledge of Juan Gelman before I got this book. The poems are beautiful. Sad and hopeful, evocative and spare They aren't bogged down with flowery, fake language. Gelman (at least via this translation) uses real, every day language to express honest, and true feelings. They're exactly the kind of poems I enjoy reading. Hopefully, I can find more.

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Shelves: 2013, poesie, open-letter-translation

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About Juan Gelman

Juan Gelman is one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. He has published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956 and has been translated into fourteen languages. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. Among his most recent awards are the National...more Juan Gelman is one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. He has published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956 and has been translated into fourteen languages. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. Among his most recent awards are the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (the most important award given to a Hispanic writer, Spain, 2007).

Long biographical note

Juan Gelman is the most significant, contemporary Argentine intellectual figure and one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. Son of a family of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, he grew up like any other porteño, among soccer and tango, in the populous neighborhood of Villa Crespo. At 11, he published his first poem in the magazine Rojo y negro, and in the 1950s formed part of the group of rebel writers, El Pan Duro. He was discovered by Raúl González Túñón, among the most relevant voices of the southern country’s poetic avant-garde, who saw in the young man’s verses “a rich and vivacious lyricism and a principally social content […] that does not elude the richness of fantasy.”

Gelman has published, from his initial Violín y otras cuestiones (1956) to his most recent Mundar (2008), more than twenty books of poetry. These works, as Mario Benedetti asserted early on, constitute “the most coherent, and also the most daring, participatory repertoire (in spite of its inevitable wells of solitude), and ultimately the one most suited to its environment, that Argentine poetry has today”, and Hispanic poetry in general, as the profusion of re-editions of his books and numerous anthologies proves. Gelman’s poetry has achieved international recognition, with translations into fourteen languages, including English. Among his awards are the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (Spain, 2007), the most important award in Hispanic Letters. No one should be surprised to see him the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature one day.

It would be relevant to note that Juan Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, he was forced into an exile of thirteen years because of the military dictatorship that ravaged his country from 1976 to 1983, and the weak governments that followed. In 1976 the ultra-right kidnapped his children, Nora Eva, 19, and Marcelo Ariel, 20, along with his son’s wife, María Claudia Iruretagoyena, 19, who was 7 months pregnant. Nora Eva would later return, unlike his son and daughter-in-law, who were killed; their child born in a concentration camp. The vehement search for the truth about the fate of these family members, which culminated in finding his granddaughter in Uruguay in 2000, has made the poet a symbol of the struggle for respect for human rights.

Like other poets from his time and space, Juan Gelman creates his work starting from a critique of the so-called post-avante-garde poetry, which surges in the Hispanic world in the 1940s and breaks with the powerful avante-garde. He is a poet who denies the labors of the Mexican Octavio Paz, the Cuban José Lezama Lima, the Argentine Alberto Girri, among others, to reaffirm it in his own way. It is a poetry that goes against the current, transgresses the established social and cultural order, challenges the individualism intrinsic to modernity and the neo-colonial condition. A poetry that renounc(less)

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