Otrarse

One of Latin America's most distinguished and influential contemporary poets, Juan Gelman (1930-2014 is the author of more than two dozen collections of poetry and an assortment of essay volumes. A vocal, transformative human-rights activist, he is the recipient of Argentina's National Literature Prize and Spain's Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious award in the Spanish language. Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the cofounder and publisher of Restless Books, and the academic director of the Great Books Summer Program. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, his work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted into film, theater, television, and radio.

“Ilan Stavans’s Gelman is extraordinary. . . . We are in the presence of something marvelous: one of our best critical minds here introduces one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating poets, whose own journey was a conversation with poetics across the boundaries of time and space. . . . Stavans gently but with much nuance transforms our North American perspective on the Jewish presence in Spanish-language literature.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic “Ilan Stavans has produced a major work of translation and commentary, bringing to the English language the incomparable poetry of Juan Gelman, whose life of exile and loss gave him the intimate knowledge to write about Sephardic memory as no other modern poet has done.”—Ruth Behar, author of Across So Many Seas “Juan Gelman was a fierce, dogged, and imaginative Latin American poet in search of justice and reparation, a poet at war with Argentina’s junta, who remembered the disappeared and lodged poems that will not be forgotten. Ilan Stavans has done us a tremendous service by recreating these Ladino poems, demonstrating that Gelman was also a deeply Jewish poet of exile, a spiritual writer in conversation with the Hebrew Bible, with the great medieval Jewish poets and Christian mystics. These marvelous translations show that Gelman’s poems are righteous, but they also burn with a mystic fever.”—Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry “Juan Gelman’s Ladino poems, made accessible here in Ilan Stavans’s apt translation, represent a fresh voice in literary modernism. I was especially struck by Gelman’s renderings of poems by some of the great Hebrew poets of medieval Spain. Even though he himself was working from translations, he managed to convey much of the arresting poetic force of the originals.”—Robert Alter, award-winning translator of The Hebrew Bible “With Otrarse, Ilan Stavans grows the pile of books containing Juan Gelman’s work available to the reader of English. This bilingual anthology, infused with multiple languages, not only honors Gelman, but it also shares how the translator-scholar embraces and transforms the possibilities of language.”—Regina Galasso, author of Translating New York: The City’s Languages in Iberian Literatures “Stavans does not produce poetry in English to be heard through a loudspeaker. On the contrary, the volume invites us to share in the subtlety of Ladino as it echoes through carefully crafted English. One cannot but feel the invitation to think of translation here as something other than an archaeological reconstruction. The overall effect is that through translation, Ladino becomes audible, gets a present and a future.”—Alicia Borinsky, author of One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile