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Queridos amigos, colegas, lectores

les presento no uno, ni dos, sino tres libros:

Lunes 11 de NOVIEMBRE de 2013 - 19 horas

British Arts Centre - Suipacha 1333

Ciudad de Buenos Aires

POETRY OF THE 1990s

Twenty Poets

from Argentina

Translated by Andrew Graham-Yooll *
Buenos Aires, 2003 / Redbeck Press, Bradford, England

This collection of poetry from Argentina is intended as a first volume in a series of South American poets in English translation. As with many personal ventures, this initial work owes its start more to chance than to serious planning.
The discussion as to why there was none did not last long but it prompted me to plan such an anthology.  After many years of friendship and occasional work with an acknowledged master of translation, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who put into English a still unsurpassed version of the prose and poetry of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-86), I felt confident that I could translate the poetry of a varied group of poets:

Fabián Casas (Buenos Aires, 1965); Walter Cassara (Buenos Aires, 1971); Carolina Cazes (Buenos Aires, 1970); Washington Cucurto (Quilmes, 1973); Edgardo Dobry  (Rosario, 1962); Verónica Viola Fisher (Buenos Aires, 1974); Rodrigo Eduardo Galarza (Corrientes, 1972); Martín Gambarotta (Buenos Aires, 1968); Daniel García Helder (Rosario, 1961); Silvio Mattoni (Córdoba, 1969); Roxana Paez  (La Plata, 1962); Martín Prieto  (Rosario, 1961); Sergio Raimondi  (Bahía Blanca, 1968); Patricia Rodón  (Mendoza, 1961); Alejandro Rubio (Buenos Aires, 1967); Guillermo Saavedra  (Buenos Aires, 1960); Gabriela Saccone  (Rosario, 1961); Carlos Schilling  (Santa Fe/Córdoba, 1965);  Beatriz Vignoli  (Rosario, 1965); Laura Wittner  (Buenos Aires, 1967)  

One problem in the compilation and translation of a group of young(ish) poets is the risk that as they grow older they may lose their talent, abandon the genre, or be rejected or forgotten by readers. Obviously, I feel that the present selection is safe in that the twenty poets included here have a strong writing background, are still writing and publishing, and would appear to be determined to continue to do so. When the selection was started, it was decided that those to be translated would be aged forty or under (in the year 2000). But because the volume has taken three years to prepare, some of the poets are now well over that age.

There was not always full agreement between Samoilovich and me on whom to include. The guiding idea was to bring to notice in English the writing of a generation that came after Argentina’s last dictatorship. Apart from the arbitrary setting of an age limit, the poets to be included had to have at least one book published, and, by a whim of mine, had to be living in Argentina. Since then, at least three poets in the group have left Argentina to live abroad. Another aim, from the start, was to try to break out of Buenos Aires, and find good poets in the provinces, not always a simple task in a country where nearly fifty percent of the population lives in Greater Buenos Aires.  As it is, we have eight poets from the capital, followed by five from Rosario, Argentina’s third largest city.

There were people and styles that Daniel Samoilovich preferred and I disagreed with and by the same token he disliked some of my choices. But the end product reflects our agreements, and for his enthusiasm, as well as his wise reticence, I am also grateful. We have left out some good and promising poets in such a brief selection. This is inevitable when limits are set by printing costs and available funding. But we hope to return to them, and others, in editions planned for the future.

In the end, the reader will have to decide whether or not the choice is a good one and, if from it, a small window is opened on new writing in Argentina.

Andrew Graham-Yooll

Barracas, Buenos Aires, 2003.

* selected with Daniel Samoilovich, poeta y director de Diario de Poesía.

Poetry has the power of mass communication

Buenos Aires Herald, 13 May 2012                                                       On Sunday


Afro-Scottish poet Jackie Kay

by Andrew Graham-Yooll                                                                                        
for the Herald

       One of the great moments of the annual Buenos Aires Book Fair is when it closed, last Monday.  The fuss was over, the crowds gone, and the end offered the chance to look back on what can be retained.  It happened that way with the Scottish poet, Jackie Kay, 51, whom the British Council brought to BA for the seventh International Festival of Poetry. The event gathered nearly forty poets from here and elsewhere.

“I grew up fighting against poverty in Glasgow tenements, looking into my own city but also looking out at the world. In that way of looking poetry is a way of seeing. It’s a powerful medium because it is one of mass communication. People find it difficult to think of poetry that way.”  Her voice has a high pitch, rolled by her Glaswegian accent. Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, and was adopted at birth by a Scottish couple.  She teaches literature at Newcastle University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published five books of poetry, five books for children and three novels.

She probably has something in that bit about mass coms, because at the Book Fair, after she had read the title poem of her latest selection, Darling (2007) a piece, “about a friend of mine who died.” It ends with a line that says, “The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones./ The dead are still here holding our hands.” And wherever she reads that poem people come up, some in tears, and say “thank you for that poem, and they tell me about a person that they have lost.”  At the Progreso Market, in Primera Junta, the Spanish translation read by actress Malena Solda, Kay started reading and did a little skip and a jump and morning shoppers and stall keepers  crowded around her to listen. Somebody at the back shouted, “Muy bueno”, amid the applause. She has something of an actress in her, very much in the style of the Scottish national bard, Robert Burns. “I could collect a whole book of stories. It may be that in a very short and intense way you can say something that is powerful and it reaches across to people.”

Robert Pinsky, the former US poet laureate, experimented with this a decade ago, when he called on people to express their feelings through poetry after the September 11 bombing.  He was overwhelmed by the result which confirmed to him that poetry kept a clear role as a literary channel. “For me, poetry does so many different things at once,” Kay said. “It interacts with the world in so many ways. There is poetry in music, in maths, in science, in the land… Poetry helps us to understand the world we live in, to get to know ourselves. I write to get to know myself and to understand others better. Walt Whitman has an oft-quoted line that says:’ I’m large, I contain multitudes’.”

Poetry contains multitudes and it is one of the ways to a clear mind.  It is a powerful way of bearing witness to things that we are not happy with or feel strongly about.  It is also about emotions, “recollected in tranquility”, as William Wordsworth said in his Lyrical Ballads (1800), where we marry experience, the intellect, with the abstract.  “We shouldn’t be thinking which of my poems should work here, in this country… One’s poems should automatically work in Buenos Aires wherever they came from.   I held a workshop with 160 senior students crammed into the one classroom with a capacity for fifty.  Poetry is multilingual if it can communicate in images and pictures.”

With the talk concentrated on her poetry and her Scottishness, it was time to ask Kay how African she felt?

“I feel a mixture.  For a long time in my life I felt I had to choose, African or Scottish.  Now that I have reached the ripe age of fifty I feel that I can comfortably and happily be both.” By now she hasn’t much family left in Nigeria.  “My family is the country. You do not have to be accepted by your father or your mother to have a sense of belonging.  I belong to Nigeria though my father disowned me. I realized I did not need  him. I describe my arrival at his house in my poem, “Burying my African father”, in the collection, Fiere (2011).  I did find my brother, he was wonderful to me. So I have a family connection through him and my friends.  At one reading in Nigeria there were four hundred people on their feet and cheering, that kind of thing is quite moving.  I am quite naïve, sometimes. I once had to pelt down the corridor to my hotel room, followed by two Nigerian men, one shouting at the other, ‘Get your hands off her, she’s mine.’  It was too much for the honest lesbian.”

I told her I felt very Anglo-Argentine: it is a privilege to belong to two cultures.

“Writing poetry makes you ask, not answer questions, but ask.  Poems open doors.  My aim as a poet is to be good on the page and on stage. I like performing. Some experiences come into my poetry and become part of my performance.  For example, during my reading at the Book Fair I told the story that when my son was a little boy he asked me, ‘Mum, why are you always going to Poetry’. He thought Poetry was a place and I got on a bus or a plane and went to a place called Poetry.  Buenos Aires could be poetry.  Hence it can belong in more than one culture.  Poetry is an authentic place and should be seen as such. I don’t like the whiff of the workshop. There is something inherently democratic about poetry, and it should not be rarefied. Real poetry comes from real concerns.”

Walter Owen

mayo 2012 - volumen LV - number 1    

The Bulletin Argentine Britih Community Council

Poet, anonymity to acclaim and back
by Andrew Graham-Yooll

            Argentina’s gaucho epic, the Martín Fierro, was published in China in 1984. It was translated into Mandarin by Zhao Zhenjiang, of the University of Beijing, and presented to then president Raúl Alfonsín when he visited China.  Zhao Zhenjiang visited Buenos Aires on November 6, 2011, and Clarín (15 November 2011, pag. 31.) made quite a fuss of him.  That’s justified, of course, but it felt just a little irksome that Walter Owen (1884-1953), poet, mystic and merchant, a Scot, may not be forgotten, but almost. He deserves more. He was, after all, the first translator of the Martín Fierro into English, published in London and New York in 1935, though he should also be remembered for his own classical poetry and novels. We all have something worth remembering.

You can Google Owen and reach A Guide to Supernatural Fiction. But there’s not much more. The best and relatively recent writing to be found on Owen is an article by the Scottish academic, John Walker, in the Buenos Aires Herald (6 August 1977) and, more extensive, there is an essay also by Walker, in one of those learned journals that nobody reads, the Latin American Literary Review (Vol. III Nº 5, 1974). It is about Owen and the art of translation of poetry, an excellent portrait of the man, his work and his literary theories. The biography written by the late Baroness Charlotte de Hartingh, Servitor on an Outer Plane, published by the Instituto Cultural Walter Owen in Buenos Aires in 1966, is hard to find.

            Walter Hubbard Owen was born July 14, 1884, in Glasgow, of a Scottish mother and a father of Welsh ancestry. Owen as a teenager trained in shipping in Glasgow, and in Buenos Aires business circles would be best known as a customs clearance expert.  Owen lived in Buenos Aires and latterly Martínez for most of his life, his most distant forays, apart from three visits to England and France, were to Tigre, where he rowed in the company of a faithful band of friends. His published literary works include four volumes of poetry (under the nom de plume of Gauthier de St Ouen, a “Frenchification” of Owen):  Amor Viri (1912), 50 sonnets; Aurora (1913), which included The Cosmic Song (1910), one poem dedicated to ill-fated air pioneer, Jorge Newbery, who was one of his good friends; Sonnets to Soldiers and Other Verses (1918); The Sonnets of G.S.O., published in the thirties.  But his greatest work, for which he is remembered, if at all, were the eight book-length translations of epic poems and history from Spanish classics. These he called his “transvernacularisations” (he refused to call them translations), published in a limited edition by Blackwell’s in Britain in 1935, and immediately after, in a full-commercial printing in the US: the Martín Fierro by José Hernández (1834-1886), is his best known and celebrated publication. This he followed with El Fausto (1886) by Estanislao del Campo (1834-1880) in 1943, which is described as weak by comparison with Fierro. Then came Don Juan Tenorio (1844) by Spaniard José Zorrilla y Moral (1817-1893); the Chilean epic La Araucana by Spaniard Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1594) and the Uruguayan national poem  Tabaré, also in 1934,  by Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855-1931), published by Unesco, in 1956; the historical poem by Martín del Barco Centenera (1535-1602), “La Argentina” and the Conquest of the River Plate (1602), published post mortem in 1965 by the Instituto Cultural Walter Owen, edited by Patrick Dudgeon;  next came the Chilean classic Arauco Domado  by Pedro de Oña (1570-1643), which he completed in his hospital bed five weeks before his death; and Narrative of the Expedition of Sir Francis Drake by Juan de Castellanos (1522-1607), published for the first time in Spanish in 1921. (Apologies for the accumulation of dates but they do give an idea of the remarkable volume of the man’s work.)

            The last three “transvernacularisations” were produced from his bed at the British Hospital, which he entered on 13 December 1949, never to leave until his death. The last two books were not published.  But all his work referred back to his first, Martín Fierro.  Of this work, he wrote, “A translation, especially of verse, in order to have any value as literature, should read like an original work. Clarity and ease are essential and they are worth purchasing at the price of a certain degree of verbal accuracy... A false note, a too unfamiliar image, a forced simile, the translation of a dead metaphor into a live one... a reference that is plain and immediately comprehensible in the original (but) is too obscure in the translation for the reader to grasp, any or all of these may be the result of a too faithful adherence to the text”. (John Walker, Latin American Literary Review)

For his “transvernacularisation” of the Martín Fierro, Owen developed a certain ceremony.  For a time he took rooms in the hotel off Plaza de Mayo where José Hernández was said to have written part of his epic (and he also took rooms at Bolivar 609, where the author of Tabaré had resided for a time).  The Martín Fierro required a degree of ceremony which would remain with Owen for years.  He built a rustic wooden desk and chair at which to work, he put aside his daytime office garb and donned a monk’s robe, and wrote by candle light with a quill pen, watched over by his cat, Dusky, who was ever-present on the work table and  in the writing, with shopping reminders in the margins such as, “liver for Dusky, Players 2pkts (cigarettes), Pinot white”, etc. There are quite a few references to the Players and the Pinot. Dusky died on May 20, 1933, the day after the translation was completed, an incident which had Owen searching for its mystical meaning. The poet’s hard slog is recorded in a “laborómetro” that details the daily progress of translation.  His notes describe his style in translation, some of his lines should be guidelines for present-day translators.  “…I have tried to present to English readers a version of (en epic) that reads like an original English poem, flavoured with the idiom and diction of the times, and free from the stilted style and un-English air that often makes translations of foreign poems irksome to minds appreciative of the beauties of our mother tongue.  It is obvious that if this object is to be attained, textual fidelity must be subordinated to ease, clarity, rhythm, harmony, tone, and the other elements of style.  We are interposing our own consciousness between the conceptual and the linguistic centres (…) and rewriting his poem as he would have written it if he had spoken English…” (Servitor…, page 186)

For weeks after publication of Martín Fierro in English, Owen was a kind of folk hero in Buenos Aires.  People would track him down at lunch in his regular restaurants and ask him for autographs in their copies of the book. Failing that, he had sign scraps of paper and even napkins.

All of Owen’s original writings and translations were aimed at helping to build “a bridge to better understanding between the peoples” of the world, an objective which he repeatedly used in descriptions given to one of his principal mentors, the former British ambassador, Sir Eugen Millington-Drake (1889-1972, well known in Buenos Aires for his lectures on the Battle of the River Plate in 1939 and in Montevideo for helping to fund out of pocket the start of the Pluna airline), and friends, including Courtenay Luck, one of the best known mystics in the British community in Buenos Aires, and brothers Luis and Juan Alejandro de Marval, among others.  Millington-Drake described the Martín Fierro translation as having “the raciness of an old Border ballad.”

Owen wrote one philosophical/historical treatise, The Ordeal of Christendom (Grant Richards, 1938), wherein he argues that “Christ is the only evolutionary factor in consciousness”, and two novels. His reputation as an author of supernatural fiction rests with these two novels.

Of these his most important fiction was, again, his first book The Cross of Carl, (published by Grant Richards, London, in 1931), written at one sitting in an evening in 1917 – this after his first extended hospitalization for a painful abdominal complaint.  It was accepted for publication in Britain the following year, but was stopped by the censor. It was seen as brutal, surrealistic and bleakly anti-war, too harsh for the immediate period following the Great War. It was finally published in London in 1931, and in the US by Little, Brown, and Company (Boston), also in 1931. It was described as a rhythmic fantasy in prose.

The “Carl” of the title is a foot soldier in the trenches of World War I. Mistaken for dead he is bundled off to a rendering plant for what we might now term recycling. The Cross of Carl was originally inspired by an element of anti-German newspaper propaganda and an alleged bi-location of personality brought upon the author through dosages of opium, though also influenced by his strong mystic beliefs. Owen’s biographer, Charlotte de Hartingh, says he, “took an intense interest in the stimulative effect that drugs effected over the creative faculties.” Rather cautiously, she says that, “He was by no means the first man of letters, nor the last, to be fascinated by those results… (he) has left a detailed description of his impressions while under the sway of opium…” Carl's nationality is never made wholly clear (though German is usually inferred, based upon source materials and several late-chapter hints). Thus the Cross of the title can be alternately read to mean the Iron Cross, the Victoria Cross, or both.  The Times Literary Supplement review, on 16 July 1931, called the book “A war allegory” that, “brings back the ugly side of war psychology; it is a description of one of the ‘corpse factories’ of legend – an unbearably ghastly description. ‘Sepulture’ is a description of how the dying Carl digs his own grave. ‘Resurrection’ ends the allegory on a note of mystical triumph. This record of what the author himself describes as “an abnormal pathological process” induced by the psychic perturbations of the War, is put forward in the belief that the experience may foreshadow some sort of development in the collective consciousness of mankind.” It was foresight, in a way, but of something more horrible, which would be the Nazi holocaust of World War II.

His other fiction, More Things in Heaven, published by Andrew Dakers (London, 1947), has a narrator (Owen) and a mystic adept named Merlin Alaska investigate a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion. The trail of clues, found in ancient documents, manuscripts and travelogues, leads to the discovery of a two-thousand year old Zoroastrian curse upon the descendants of Alexander the Great.  Really very modern stuff, if you pick up Umberto Eco’s, In the Name of the Rose.

Many of his poems, articles, and stories remain uncollected, having been published mainly in The Standard newspaper and some rare magazines and self-printed pamphlets. These were always signed G.S.O, or the full pen name, “lest he fall into disgrace in Buenos Aires business circles through writing poetry!” (Servitor…, p. 95) In blunt terms, the business community saw poetry as something for “pansies” in the jargon of that time. Owen was known publicly as a scrupulous, punctilious, member of the staff of Messrs. Bessler, Waechter  & Co. Ltd., import agents, and after fifteen years, as manager and model businessman at Juan McCall & Co., customs clearing agents, where he moved in 1928.  In his carefully managed spare time Owen was also a bibliophile, his biographer describes him as a mystic, and others see him as a Baconian (follower of Sir Francis Bacon – proponent of the methodical observation of facts, also said by some to have been the real author of Shakespeare’s writings), a Grand Master in the small Beacon Lodge Theosophist and Philosophical Society, and Duke of the Island of Redonda in the Caribbean Sea, a fictitious court created by a novelist of his acquaintance with a base on a remote rock.  He also enjoyed sports, rowing for the Tigre Boat Club and was the founder of a boxing club.

Though a pacifist of sorts he attempted to enlist for service on the British side during both World Wars. But he was blind in one eye lost in a childhood accident in 1895, aged 11, while playing with a home chemical set with his brother Tom.  In spite of this severe disability, he would later volunteer repeatedly for the two European wars, and was obviously rejected each time. His next blow was the death of his mother, Ellen, a teacher, who had nursed him through the recovery of sight in the remaining eye, died suddenly.  His father, a shipping agent, who in 1889  had brought the family to Montevideo, first, thence Buenos Aires, decided to send his youngest son to live with two aunts in Glasgow, there for his secondary studies at Hillhead High School. On leaving school he worked for a chemical company and later a shipping agent, which paved the way to stowing on a ship that took him back to Buenos Aires.  He was eighteen when he began life in earnest in Argentina in June 1902.  He seems to have returned to the United Kingdom, and once to France, on three quite secret visits, in 1920, 1924 and 1928, on one occasion to meet his girlfriend Beryl and her daughter, at school in southern France. One of those visits was in pursuit of the leading mystic of the time in Europe, Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1877-1949).

His love life was not what you might call a success.  After early failure of an intense love with a woman only named as “Sylvia”,  apparently due to parental disapproval (she visited him briefly on his deathbed at the British Hospital), Owen was married on the rebound to Lily Edith Turner, daughter of a Central Argentine Railway officer.  The marriage on June 6, 1914, two months before the outbreak of war, was doomed from the start: they were totally different characters. She was a lively person intent on a busy social life. He a subdued, reclusive and solitary individual.  They were together for only a few weeks. Separation was followed by attempted reconciliations and failed reunions amid regular arguments. Owen provided for Edith financially all his life, but in 1917, aged 33, he met a woman named Beryl who became the partner he sought.  He said he had found happiness with her. They would be together up to her death in 1947. He became severely depressed.

His final years, ill and unable to work, seemed to have been filled with projects.  Sometimes he lay in bed on his side, dictating translations and correspondence to a secretary, Diana de Marval, the daughter of his friend. He lived on his savings and the help of friends, and of his brother Tom, whom he would ask to sell off his valuable first editions, kept at his last home in Martínez, to pay for expenses.

He died on September 24, 1953, in hospital, his ashes buried at the British cemetery in Chacarita, where a commemorative plaque was placed.  A bust by the Uruguayan sculptor José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín (1891-1975), son of the author of Tabaré, is in the Hillhead High School library, and in Buenos Aires there is one by José Fioravanti (1896-1977).

* Special thanks to Doreen Dalrymple, manager at Hillhead High School, Glasgow, for finding many documents relative to the life of Walter Owen.  With thanks to the director of the Güiraldes Museum, at San Antonio de Areco, Mrs Cynthia Smyth, and to her staff, Mariana Rios, Bibiana Bovetti, Patricia Lucero, Valeria Urruchúa, y Marcela Cigarelli. The originals of Owen’s Martín Fierro in English are held at the Museum.

** www.abcc.org.ar

 

¿Por qué? POETAS ENTRERRIANOS

Pueblo Liebig, martes 14 de febrero de 2012.

por Andrew Graham - Yooll.   

Entre Ríos es rica en POESÍA. 

 Toda antología es injusta porque siempre quedan afuera nombres.  Cada provincia argentina tiene poetas y creadores muy buenos y no deberíamos hacer excepción. 

Pero también, debemos celebrar los lugares que concentran talentos admirables. 

Entre Ríos es uno de esos lugares. 

      A los cinco poetas, de mi selección personal, para esta Antología bilingüe español – inglés, podríamos agregar más, es cierto. Pero estos nombres representan muy bien su lugar natal y transmiten la esencia y fuerza de la poesía entrerriana. 

 

Juan L. ORTIZ
1896 - 1978

Gualeguay

 

Carlos
MASTRONARDI
1901 - 1976
Gualeguay

 

 

Ricardo
ZELARRAYÁN
1922 - 2010
Paraná

 

Jorge E. MARTÍ
1926
Rosario/
Liebig/ Colón

Arnaldo
CALVEYRA
1929
Mansilla



Juan L. Ortiz, le cantó al río Paraná, a lo largo de su vida; y

 Jorge Enrique Martí, al río Uruguay y a Liebig, el pueblo donde se crió. Mastronardi, el poeta más importante de su generación según el propio Borges,  

          descubre la gente que venía de las islas y plasma una visión del

hombre provinciano, sin nombrar jamás a Entre Ríos:

Un fresco abrazo de agua la nombra para siempre/ sus costas están solas y engendran el verano/ Quien mira es influido por un destino suave/ cuando el aire anda en flores y el cielo es delicado/

Por una POESÍA federal argentina

domingo 18 de marzo de 2012 - PERFIL                                                              CULTURA/ LIBROS

  CRÍTICA: Poesía Argentina para el siglo XXI.         

      

  ¿Tiene algo de nuevo?

    En primer lugar, sobresale su caracter de edición bilingüe castellano - inglés. La traducción es sumamente cuidadosa, hipercorrecta, con escaso margen interpretativo. Otra de las virtudes, pasa por su caracter federal. Lejos de aquel prejuicio tan cosmopolita y conservador que afirma que la cultura se produce en las grandes urbes, mientras que las provincias alejadas están sumergidas en un irremediable atraso artístico, esta antología otorga espacio a una cantidad de poetas cuyas pertenencias biográficas - pero también sus estéticas y temáticas - tienen las raíces ancladas en paisajes del interior. Una crítica, especialmente puntillosa, podría achacarle su apego al canon. Sin embargo, el hecho de que la antología está dirigida en parte al público angloparlante, justifica y torna inevitables ciertas elecciones.

http://www.perfil.com.ar/ediciones/2012/3/edicion_660/cultura.html

All together now

Página12, domingo 5 de febrero de 2012 

Por Juan Pablo Bertazza

  

Empieza con “La Siesta” de Macedonio Fernández (“La Siesta omnipotente gravita/ donde el tiempo fulminado/ se detiene”) y termina con “Notas para un agitador” de Verónica Viola Fisher (“cuando era pequeño se le cayó un piano/ en la nuca, desde ese día sus vértebras/ suenan cada vez que baila”). Y entre los extremos figuran cada una de las voces que Andrew Graham-Yooll y Daniel Samoilovich consideraron las más representativas del siglo XX, o por lo menos las que deberían tenerse en cuenta en una lectura retrospectiva del siglo cambalache, pero desde el siglo XXI.

De hecho, si toda antología ofrece su propia perspectiva, su propia visión y su propio tamiz, el nombre de esta compilación permite gravitar, tal vez, no exactamente en las voces más importantes del siglo XX sino en aquellas que lo siguen siendo cuando ya pasó más de una década de otro siglo, y tal vez esa diferencia no sea un detalle menor.

Poesía argentina para el siglo XX, no tropieza con una recurrente piedra en este tipo de trabajos, que tiene que ver con una ausencia notable de federalismo: acá están presentes las diversas provincias con cada uno de sus exponentes, como el mendocino Jorge Enrique Ramponi, el entrerriano Arnaldo Calveyra, el rosarino Hugo Padeletti, el jujeño Néstor Groppa, el cordobés Alejandro Nicotra, el salteño Leopoldo Castilla, el santiagueño Julio Salgado o el catamarqueño Leonardo Martínez.

para seguir leyendo:

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-4567-2012-02-08.html

 

Ser de aquí, pero también de allá

       15 de diciembre de 2011

           Revista El Guardián                                                                                             

   [ Cultura ]

Nueva Escocia, Entre Ríos.
Argentina, 2009

La fascinante historia

de un hombre

de dos mundos

Es el periodista argentino más inglés
y el intelectual británico más gaucho.


            

Escribe: Daniela Pasik

Camden Town, Londres.
Inglaterra, 2010.

     Con una trayectoria profesional que lo ha llevado por medios de aquí y de allá, ahora acaba de publicar la antología de poesía argentina más abarcadora.    

     Este hombre de nombre británico, nacido en Ranelagh   hace 67 años  y con la flemática pausa propia de allá, abre la puerta de su casa: Pasillo al fondo, para recibir a sus visitas. Aunque mis padres eran británicos y me haya criado en Ranelagh, que era un pueblito de ingleses, yo soy porteño, declara Andrew Graham-Yooll y refuerza su tesis: Después de haber pasado 18 años exiliado sobre todo en Londres, en cuanto pude volví a Argentina. Para mí, mi lugar en el mundo es Buenos Aires y siempre en el sur, que es más porteño todavía.

                      

     Sobre ser bilingüe, dice: Más allá del placer de poder agarrar algo inglés, castellano o hasta chapalear en portugués, yo tengo el privilegio de pertenecer a los dos mundos. Es una experiencia de vida diferente la mía, lo sé. El escritor y también juez jujeño Hector Tizón describió a Graham-Yooll como totalmente bilingüe, en lenguaje y cultura.

 De Oficios

El inglés más arrabalero está contento con el resultado y también aliviado de haber terminado con la ardua labor de releer y seleccionar tantos autores. Fue un trabajo arduo, explica y suspira un poco cansado. Antes traducía sólo teatro.

No traduzco mi propia obra porque la reescribiría toda. Y en realidad, si traduzco lo que hacen otros también quiero reescribirlos, así que lo mejor es no traducir. Pero con la poesía es diferente. Con la poesía me entiendo mejor.



En esta nueva y más ambiciosa antología poética, Graham-Yooll hace un racconto bastante completo de la poesía argentina. Pasea a través de clásicos de todos los tiempos… y también hay obra de generaciones más jóvenes como los cuarentañeros…

En el caso de la poesía yo prefiero decir que se traslada, no que se traduce. De un idioma a otro lo que se hace es trasladar, porque nunca va a quedar igual al original en otra lengua, explica Graham-Yooll. Así, con la selección cubro 100 años. Samoilovich me propuso gente más actual, pero yo le dije que por ahora no. Suena feo, pero la verdad es como es y no estoy aún metido con la generación de poetas de ahora. No los tengo leídos. Me gustaría hacer un mapa de poetas de este momento y distanciarme de las décadas pasadas. Conocer de verdad y más. Si sigo en esto me voy a poner con lo más nuevo, promete.

La entrevista completa se encuentra en: www.elguardian.com.ar