Meanwhile Take My Hand - Softcover

Uribe, Kirmen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974589 ISBN 13: 9781555974589

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2007

Synopsis

The American debut of Basque writer Kirmen Uribe's "simple, devastating poems" (Bob Holman)

Whenever we're saddened everything looks dark,
When we're heartened, again, the world crumbles.
Every one of us keeps forever someone else's hidden side,
If it's a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture.
―from "May"

Kirmen Uribe has become one of the best-known Basque-language writers―an important contemporary voice from a vital but largely unknown language. Meanwhile Take My Hand presents Uribe's poetry to American readers in both the original and in the poet Elizabeth Macklin's skillful and award-winning translations.

In these poems are the drug addicts of Spanish fishing towns, the paved-over rivers of urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with a companionable silence. The Basque phrase Bitartean heldu eskutik, which became the book's title―Meanwhile Take My Hand―Uribe has said is "what you say when there's nothing at all you can say."

About this title

About the Author

Kirmen Uribe was born in Ondarroa, Spain, in 1970. His debut poetry collection won Spain's 2001 Premio de la Critica.

Elizabeth Macklin's translations of Uribe have appeared in The New Yorker, and in 2005 she won a PEN Translation Fund grant.

From Publishers Weekly

Uribe is a big fish in a small pond: the serious and energetic young poet stands among the leading contemporary writers in Basque (Euskara), the language spoken and written in Uribe's ethnically distinct region of Spain. Though published verse in Basque began in the Renaissance, Uribe's own work looks decidedly contemporary, a sometimes laconic, sometimes effusive free verse open to emotional extremes: in "Cardiogram" a heart resembles "a frozen lake," where "the face of the child that he once was/ is erasing itself in there." A superb love poem recalls "that epoch when we slept holding each other,/ scared tiger cubs in our vigil"; one of several poems set in the harsh coastal landscape of Uribe's youth advises us that "the moment/ you start to worry, life escapes you." Quoting accessible English-language influences from Anne Sexton to Dylan Thomas, Uribe takes on topics local and universal, from sexual delight to drug addiction to the fate of minority languages: born in 1970, he manages to bring into his lines both the hip internationalism of his European generation and the commitment to particular villages, folkways and words that his language and his region own. Sensitively colloquial facing-page versions by Macklin (You've Just Been Told), a New Yorker who has lived in Bilbao, make this vivid collection the first book of verse ever translated directly (rather than via Spanish) from Basque to English.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1555974589
• ISBN 13: 9781555974589
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200