In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Homage to Jean Cocteau
  • Gastón Baquero (bio), Greg Simon (bio), and Steven F. White (bio)

Il vous faudrait mourir pour joindre les deux boust.

—Jean Cocteau, on the death of Eluard

The rope dancer, crossing at the apex of the circus, astonishes his audience. People can't believe how he feels his way past mirrors,      pleading for keys in order to get across that other, tenser, more perilous wire. On each side, angels dressed as harlequins support him, above the womb that is the night. Who could always be the innocent child, innocent, I mean, as the owner of a thousand secrets! And, fortunately, he has given us the skilled disguise      or the snowball, the ability to dream that a horse is a candelabrum, a flame thrower to hold onto as we cross the plains of      death. God has to be at the other end of that wire; it's not possible that only the void awaits us there, opening its powerful jaws. It's good to walk on the tightrope, leap like the clowns, or pirouette like a swan; it's good to shout olé to the smile of a stuffed swallow, and the little bullfighter killed by surprise. It's good to get a steel nightingale started on its trajectory      every night in order to extract from its guts the music deposited there by the last Orpheus. [End Page 296] The railroad line that seemed interminable made a quick cut like a knife over a ditch impossible      to jump. The rail car emptied in a second: Hey, you! Comrades, friends, watchmen, don't go! Take me to your game, to the other magic acts, please! Quick! Run! Pull a rabbit from your hat! Bring Nijinsky back to life! Do something! Let me have another ride on the carrousel, or turn into a statue, or paint another little star on the door to Eurydice's      bedroom! We must die, my friend, in order to unite the extremes of this daily wire stretching over the chasm of being alive. No mistake about it: we must die so we can begin      to understand if it's true that poetry must exist, that there are guardians on the other side of the castle, an orchestra and a theater. And, above all, my friend, we must die in order to be persuaded – no, totally convinced – the sun of the statues is the moon.

Gastón Baquero

Gastón Baquero (1916–1997) was born in Banes, which is now part of the province of Holguin in Cuba. In spite of the rural poverty in which he was born and reared, he was educated as an agronomist before becoming a journalist and poet. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution began, he left the island nation for Spain, where he lived until his death in Madrid in 1997, having published several collections of essays, as well as eight volumes of poems. The Angel of Rain, a selection of his poetry in English translation by Greg Simon and Steven F. White, will be published this summer by Eastern Washington University Press.

Greg Simon

Greg Simon, a native of Minnesota, has published translations of poetry from the work of Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian writers. He is the co-translator, with Steven F. White and Christopher Maurer, of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York (FSG, 1988). Simon is currently an associate editor with Trask House Books and The Salt River Review. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Steven F. White

Steven F. White, a professor of modern languages and literature at St. Lawrence University, has edited and translated anthologies of contemporary poetry from Nicaragua, Chile, and Brazil. He is author of Modern Nicaraguan Poetry: Dialogues with France and the United States (1993) and five books of poems, including Landscape with One Candle and Assyrian Bees (1995), published in a bilingual edition in Brazil, and Fire that Engenders Fire (2000), published in bilingual edition in Madrid. He is a corresponding member of the Nicaraguan Academy of the Language and an advisory and contributing editor of Callaloo.

...

pdf

Share