English, Spanish
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Text: English, Spanish
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Seller: Rural Hours, La Grande, OR, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very good. First edition. An excellent association copy, inscribed to poet-translator Robert Fitzgerald on the front free endpaper with lines from one of the book's untitled poems in Spanish that W.S. Merwin translates as: "women on the sea shore are waiting / for dawn to come down from the air / but already the light / has ripened on all the roads / like a fruit born of no tree" (pg. 59). The inscription finishes "con admiracion y afecto, Homero Aridjis." Fitzgerald was a prominent poet, translator of the Greek classics, and a professor at Harvard; he was appointed as the US Poet Laureate in 1984-85, but didn't serve due to illness. An iconic Mexican figure, Aridjis is not only a poet of rare and lasting caliber, but was also ambassador to Sweden and the Netherlands, the president of PEN International for six years, and a longtime environmental activist. He has led a particularly international life and is often in the conversation for the Nobel Prize for literature (20th in the betting odds in 2023, at 29/1). Says Octavio Paz: "In the poetry of Homero Aridjis there is the gaze, the pulse of the poet, the discontinuous time of practical and rational life and the continuity of desire and death: there is the poet's primal truth." The Blue Spaces is his first selected collection in English and includes translations by W.S. Merwin, Eliot Weinberger, Betty Ferber, Nathaniel Tarn and Jerome Rothenberg, which speaks to Ardijis's prominence even in his thirties. Edited and with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth. A very good book with a modest cock to spine and some faint foxing to the cloth on spine and upper face of the text block. In a very good jacket with some fraying to spine ends and a chip to the front upper corner. A nice association copy, in particular in light of Fitzgerald's dedication to translation, and some rare holograph verse from Aridjis. Seller Inventory # 1414