Juan Gelman: Antología personal (Desde la gente)

by Juan Gelman

Spanish

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

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

Reviews

[Rosa Ramôa]

"hoje chove muito, muito,
dir-se-ia que estão a lavar o mundo.
o meu vizinho do lado vê a chuva
e pensa em escrever uma carta de amor
uma carta à mulher com quem vive
e lhe faz a comida e lava a roupa e faz amor com ele
e se parece com a sua sombra
o meu vizinho nunca diz palavras de amor à mulher
entra em casa pela janela e não pela porta
por uma porta entra-se em muitos sítios
no trabalho, no quartel, na prisão,
em todos os edifícios do mundo
mas não no mundo
nem numa mulher
nem na alma
quer dizer
nessa caixa ou nave ou chuva que chamamos assim
como hoje
que chove muito
e me custa escrever a palavra amor
porque o amor é uma coisa e a palavra amor é outra coisa
e só a alma sabe onde as duas se encontram
e quando
e como
mas que pode a alma explicar
por isso o meu vizinho tem tempestades na boca
palavras que naufragam
palavras que não sabem que há sol porque nascem e morrem na mesma noite em que ele amou
e deixam cartas no pensamento que ele nunca escreverá
como o silêncio que existe entre duas rosas
ou como eu
que escrevo palavras para regressar
ao meu vizinho que vê a chuva
e à chuva
ao meu coração desterrado"

[lari]

¡mueran los versos objetivos!
inventen una lengua donde quepa
todo el furor que falta

[María Victoria]

segundo libro del polígono. lo bueno de escribir reseñas es saber que no siempre hay que tener algo para decir.
entre la nostalgia, el verano y el límite de la palabra.

[Santiago Ortiz Méndez]

Leí otra antología suya llamada "Cómo Tirar Contra La Muerte". No está aquí.

Y pues, sin haberle conocido antes, ahora sé que no leerle fue vivir sin conocer un sexto sentido. Abrió en mí un mundo nuevo que no sabía que estaba ahí paralelo al nuestro.