"A delightful and informative anthology, an indispensable entry into the brilliant neo-baroque universe of the great Cuban poet."--Suzanne Jill Levine, author of "Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions"Jose Lezama Lima is a rare writer, both a great novelist and a great poet. He is highly regarded as a true father to the current Renaissance in Latin American poetry. Good translations of Lezama Lima's work are of the highest importance and any post-Joycean reader should welcome them with gratitude."--Jose Kozer, author of "Anima and Una Huella Destartalada"Lezama Lima is legendary. Among 20th century imaginations his is the most enthusiastically centrifugal. He adored the complexity of poetry, its baroque, overwhelming inclusiveness. His work is the wild, silent whoop of intuition leaping the synaptic canyon that separates the rational and familiar from the improbable and exquisite. His poetry was influential but widely considered untranslatable, and for half a century English versions of his poems were scarce as snake fat. Now, at last, he comes racing across the borders of English, testing and expanding its limits."--Forrest Gander, author of "Torn Awake Recognized as one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century, Jose Lezama Lima, born in Cuba in 1910, is associated with the Latin American neo-baroque and has influenced several generations of writers in and out of Cuba, including such prominent poets as Severo Sarduy and Nestor Perlongher. Lezama Lima's vision of America in a continental sense stands at the fertile confluence of indigenous, African, and European influences. A crucial experimental writer, he has been known in English chiefly for his novel "Paradiso, "while little of his poetry has been translated. This anthology is a comprehensive introduction to Lezama Lima's poetry. It presents for the first time in English a generous selection of his poems, as well as an interview, essays, and critical work on his poetics. Ernesto Livon-Grosman has selected elegant and precise translations by James Irby, G.J. Racz, Nathaniel Tarn, and Roberto Tejada. His insightful introduction places the poet in the wider context of Cuban and Latin American cultural history.
Nadie Parecía se publicó entre los años 1942 y 1944, y en ella aparecieron las firmas de los poetas españoles Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén y Manuel Altolaguirre.
Es la tercera de las revistas di
Muerte de Narciso presenta una de las aventuras más singulares de la lengua española en el siglo XX: la escritura imaginativa de Lezama Lima, uno de los maestros más intensos de la fabulación verbal en nuestro tiempo. Los principios del sistema poetico lezamiano quedan claramente legibles a lo largo de sus versos, de sus narraciones y ensayos.
Este volumen recoge los cinco relatos de Lezama Lima conocidos como tales: Fugados, El patio morado, Juego de las decapitaciones, Para un final presto y Cangrejos y golondrinas, publicados en las revistas Grafos, Espuela de Plata, Literatura y Origenes, entre 1936 y 1946. Los cinco son plenamente representativos de la imagineria lezamiana. Segun señala Reynaldo Gonzalez en el prologo, es dudoso que el genial escritor cubano planteara alguna vez conceptualmente la diferenciacion del cuento como genero. La unidad de su proyecto literario hace dificil trazar fronteras internas dentro de ese universo creativo. Una recopilacion de relatos de Lezama Lima tambien puede recabar materiales de otros ambitos. Una fragmentacion de sus obras Oppiano Licario y Paradiso permitiria aislar muchos relatos breves, con sus principios y sus finales entramados dentro de ambas novelas. Sus libros de poesia tambien incluyen prosas narrativas que constituyen cuentos con tanta autenticidad y autonomia como los cinco de este volumen. Por esta razon incluye este libro tambien textos de Aventuras sigilosas (El guardian inicia el combate circular) y La fijeza (Pifanos, epifanias, cabritos, Peso del sabor, Tangencias, Cuento del tonel e Invocacion para desorejarse).
