Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry

by Margaret Randall (Translator)

Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry. 

 

Genres: Poetry

528 pages, Paperback

Published October 17, 2016

About the author

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.

Margaret was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Her four children—Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana—have given her ten grandchildren: Lia, Martin, Daniel, Richi, Sebastian, Juan, Luis Rodrigo, Mariana, Eli, and Tolo. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for almost a quarter century.

Reviews

[Joseph Spuckler]

Only the Road/Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry edited by Margaret Randall is a collection of Cuban poetry that takes a different angle on social change. Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. Randall lost her citizenship while married to a Mexican citizen. Upon returning to the US in 1984 she was ordered to be deported under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. The INS called her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” and that “her writings go beyond mere dissent.”

Randall gives a detailed introduction to the poetry and each of the fifty-six poets receive a small biography before their poems are presented. What makes this collection unique is inclusion. Nearly half the poets presented are women and the LGBT community is also heard from. Women poets should not be much of a surprise in a society that voiced equality for all. The LGBT community is a surprise as that was actively suppressed by the religious tradition of the island and also the government.

What I was hoping to find was poetry about the revolution and possibly dissent of the Castro regime. There are only a few and one of my favorites from the collection did concern the revolution. Support or hate the Castro regime, there is something about a poet's idealistic view of revolution. It is the use of other methods outside of a gun or violence to inspire change. For the most part, however, I felt a Cuban identity was missing. Granted Randall does present the Spanish as well as her English translation, there seems to be a gray commonality in the poems. Nothing cries out with the color and flair one imagines of Cuba. With Randall's openly leftist views and her previous published (and reviewed) book Che on My Mind, I was expecting I was expecting a much more revolutionary tone to the collection.

This was a collection I looked forward to reading. The poetry is well selected as an anthology. The poems reflect a broad range of human feelings and emotions and could represent almost any society. There is a broad cross-section of poets and their views. The poems selected are varied in length and style. Randall’s translations are explained in the introduction as well as her attempts to keep both the words and the message intact in the translation. A very difficult task for any poetry translation. Although it was not what I anticipated the work is extremely well done and opens Cuba, literarily, to the American public. Perhaps my mistake, as well as many others, was in thinking Cubans would be so different than many of us.

[Hansel5 · Rating 5 out of 5]

While checking out the Poetry Foundation building on Superior Street (a very good building), I researched Cuban poets, and this anthology surfaced. Got the book through an inter-library loan at CPL primarily to read the introduction. Randall does a very good job at presenting the panorama of modern Cuban poetry before and after the Revolution, and even includes the work of Cuban poets in the Diaspora, which is significant.
Randall lived in Havana for many years. If she was a supporter of the regime, one is never aware she is still one currently. But her love for the country, its artists, and its people is evident. I detected a tinge of sadness (nostalgia?) in her introduction.
I also liked reading all the poets' biographies which accompany each section.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only the Road/Solo el camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry is a timely book. Now that Cuba is open to American tourism and visitors, it is appropriate that a comprehensive collection of Cuban poetry be made available in translation. After all, the best way to travel is with the poetry of the place you are going to read ahead and to read when you are there. There is an uncanny magic reading a poem in situ.

Margaret Randall collected the poems for this volume and did all the translation. As someone who knows the challenges of translation from Spanish to English, I think she has done a masterful job of keeping the spirit and the poetry intact. I am grateful that she provided both the Spanish and the English versions because even the best translations sometimes lack the urgency of the original.

Solo el camino begins with Tengo, a poem by Nicolás Guillén that captured the simple exultance of victory, the satisfaction from going without to having and of having not just material things, but having dignity. It is anthemic. Then there is the beautifully romantic tragedy of Emilio Ballads writing of the impossibility of gay love in mid 20th century Cuba in De toro modo. “Can you fathom the deaf grayness of that stone: never?” It is a poem that goes from romantic joy to broken despair in just a few words.

There are short, brilliantly witty poems from Samuel Feijó such as Poética which celebrates the concerts of birds that fill the forests, with not one getting credit for the score. Poems full of warmth and humor, though few words. Then there are the apocalyptic prophetic poems of María Elena Hernández. The poetry comes in all forms, long, short, angry and joyful, political, and romantic. It is representative of humanity, and of course, of Cuba. This anthology is also an exemplar in how to be mindful of diversity of voices. There are many women poets, a rarity in anthologies unless specifically anthologies of women writers. The introduction by Randall has a lot to teach anthologists about how to be mindful and how to do real outreach.

At times, some of the magic is lost in translation, not so much on the page, but aloud. Spanish has a fluency, a facility for poetry that English will never achieve. Randall effectively captures the meaning, the imagery and the heart of the poems, but cannot always produce the flow, the assonance, the aural magic of Spanish poetry. That magic comes in part from the construction of the language, the way verbs are conjugated, the fact there are not five ways to pronounce “a” and other innate qualities that we just don’t have in English.

I recommend Only the Road/Solo el camino highly. It’s a beautiful collection of poetry, some that has not been published in English translation and will be new to readers. It is also a corrective to the biased view of Cuban literature as repressed or propaganda depending on how widely published it is. We are opening up to Cuba finally, so it is incumbent on us to understand it better and how better than through its poetry.

Only the Road/Solo el Camino will be published on October 14, 2016.

I received a temporary e-galley of Only the Road/Solo el camino from the publisher via NetGalley.

http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpres...

[Donna Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Margaret Randall is an old-school feminist and socialist, and I recognized her name when this volume of Cuban poetry became available. Thank you to the author, Duke University, and Net Galley for permitting me to access the DRC, which I received free in exchange for this honest review.

Many people don’t know much about Cuba, the tiny island nation a mere 90 miles from the coast of Florida. The American media has distorted the Cuban Revolution for as long as I can remember. Before the revolution, which took place in 1959, Havana was like Bangkok, a place where little girls prostitute themselves so they won’t starve to death, where wealthy visitors can experience every pleasure, innocent or corrupt, known to humanity but where most citizens have little chance of even having their basic human needs met. Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union (USSR) helped the Cuban people defend themselves from US efforts to overthrow the revolutionary government, but the alliance also led to a period of Stalinist repression that darkened artists’ worlds for a period of time. Randall discusses all of this in her introduction. Following the period Cubans call the Rectification Period (reference mine), Stalinist practices were peeled away, and more freedom of expression created a more hospitable environment for artists, in addition to strengthening the revolution itself. In Cuba art is not privately sold as a general rule, and artists receive a salary for what they do, paid by the Cuban people.

Randall’s collection of poetry is encyclopedic, including a vast stylistic range representative of a range of generations, some little-known voices as well as a number of LGBTQ writers. Randall translates each poem and gives a comprehensive biographical note for each poet. If anything, I might have preferred a slightly more stripped down version, but what Randall has done is very scholarly she documents well.

Since this reviewer does not speak Spanish, I cannot evaluate the translations personally, but given that Randall’s background I would be astonished if it were not rock solid.

That said, I also found myself lamenting my lack of Spanish, because I know that the flow of sound is an important part of poetry, and even the best translator can’t rectify this. Those that speak Spanish will likely get more from the collection; both Spanish and English versions are included.

Those that love poetry and are interested in seeing the work of Cubans, and especially those that also speak Spanish, should get this excellent collection. It becomes available to the public October 14, 2016.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so glad this has been done. The side by side of the poetry allows you enjoy the original language and admire Randall's skillful translation. This is a great collection with excellent selections illustrating the variety and beauty of Cuban poetry not widely available.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the Sept/Oct 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...