Figures of Speech - Softcover

Linh, Enrique

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0924047178 ISBN 13: 9780924047176

Publisher: Host Publications, 2006

Synopsis

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Dave Oliphant. Enrique Lihn's writings, both creative and critical, are considered in Chile some of the most significant in the country's distinguished literary history. This bilingual volume is the most complete collection of Lihn's work in English. As well as some of Lihn's familiar poems, this volume includes representative poems from a number of his later books, previously uncollected pieces, and selections from his final moving sequence, Diary of Death.

About this title

About the Author

Enrique Fierro was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1942. He studied Literature at the University of Montevideo. After graduating he taught Literary Theory there and published numerous books in the fields of poetry, literary criticism and translation. His translations include works by William Shakespeare, Jean Genet, Paul Eluard and Ezra Pound. During the Uruguayan military dictatorship (1973-1984) he lived in exile in Mexico for political reasons. Later he continued to be drawn to the country, where he had close associations and detailed knowledge of domestic literary life. In 1985, during the first phase of Uruguay's democracy, he returned to Montevideo and was director of the national library until 1989. Since then he has been living in Austin, Texas, and teaches Contemporary Hispanoamerican Literature at the University of Texas. He has received many awards for his work, including the Uruguayan Poetry Prize, the Montevideo Poetry Prize and the Uruguayan Theatre Critics' Translation Prize. He was on the editing panel of the Uruguayan magazines 'Maldoror' and 'Po‚tica' and the Mexican cultural and literary journal 'Vuelta'. He now works for the following magazines: 'R¡o de la Plata'(Paris), 'Cuadernos Americanos' and 'Par‚ntesis' (both Mexico City) and 'El pez y la serpiente'(Managua).

From Publishers Weekly

The appearance of a posthumous selected poems often provides the illusion of completenessAto a life and career; but a close reading of Lihn's work demonstrates how a struggle with a sense of wholeness occupied most of his attentions, making this books all the more poignant. Lihn (1929-1988) is one of Chile's foremost poets, yet, despite a collection published by New Directions in 1978 (The Dark Room and Other Poems) and an earlier translated volume from 1969, he has not acquired the reputation in the States of his countryman Pablo Neruda. This careful, liberal selectionAfrom the poet's first pamphlet to his deathbed poems, but explicitly not including his political poems and long poems such as "Written in Cuba"Aby Lihn's friend and translator Oliphant, goes far to redress this situation. Showing his modernist heritage, Lihn's expressionist self-portrait opens the collection, and describes the young hero as social-neurotic, though in decidedly un-Prufrockian tones. Of the eight sections here, the Lorca-esque "Brooklyn Monster" series, written during travels in New York, Texas, Canada and Spain, sounds the most contemporary, and foregrounds the poet's dealings with the contradictory value systems of the Northern hemisphere. The "Art and Life" section considers artists such as Turner and Kandinsky, but also contains Lihn's most humble, and most affirmative credo on art and society, one that imagines a totality in which art object and viewer can be seen, for a brief moment, as one. The several poems from Lihn's deathbed are (as the translator notes), among the most moving written in the last century, but they lack the vigorous descriptions and satiric tableaux of the early poems, and do not carry over as well. One hopes that comparative literature departments will take note of this important collection. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Host Publications
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0924047178
• ISBN 13: 9780924047176
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 187