Poets of Nicaragua: A Bilingual Anthology ed. by Steven F. White (review)

Book Reviews271 STEVEN F. WHITE, ed. Poets of Nicaragua: A Bilingual Anthology. Greensboro, North Carolina: Unicorn Press, 1982. 209 p. TheEnglishspeakingworld will rejoicetoknowthat Nicaraguaisnotonlya country emerging from the scars of an almost perennial dictatorship, but a land of poets that have continued to sing in spite of the too well known adversities that have affected the Nicaraguan people. Poets of Nicaragua: A Bilingual Anthology, selected and translated by Steven F. White with an introduction by Grace Schulman, is a timely contribution to the understanding of Nicaraguan poetry after Rubén Darío and also to the dissemination of the country's poetic tradition. The anthology gravitates towards poets ofsocial and political inclination and for this reason perhaps the work of the well known Marco Antonio Montes de Oca and others are not present here. Rubén Dario's greatness rests mostly on his revolutionary approach to language, and thus from its earliest foundations the Nicaraguan contemporary poetic scene had an air ofexperimentation that encompassed the ideas of freedom and renewal. White very wisely begins his selection with the poets belonging to the so-called Postmodernistschool, those that reacted against the exotism and flowery language of the first Darío. The poets included are Alfonso Cortés and Salomón de la Selva. Of the two, Alfonso Cortés, often called "el poeta loco" (the mad poet), is the most intriguing because of his well crafted imagery and mysterious symbolism. The next generation that followed, the Nicaraguan literary vanguard, is represented in this anthology by its leading members: Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Joaquín Pasos, José Coronel Urtecho, and Juan Francisco Guitiérrez. Pablo Antonio Cuadra's Poemas nicaragüenses, published in 1934, herald a new beginning in Nicaraguan poetry and revived the traditional village song replete with colloquial language. Although they are very diverse in their writings, the poets of this group struggled to free themselves of the archaic poetic rhetoric that derived from the formal European conventions. The Nicaraguan vanguard movement, organized by José Coronel Urtecho and a group of university students in 1927, initiated a lasting tradition in Nicaraguan letters of socially committed poetry inspired by Sandino, now the ideological leader of today's Nicaragua. These "vanguardistas" also paved the way for future poets who were politically oriented, such as Ernesto Cardenal, the poet priest who has stated numerous times that literature should be at the service of the people and for this reason should be political. Ernesto Cardenal, Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, and Carlos Martinez Rivas are the poets that follow the Nicaraguan literary vanguard of the late Twenties and begin to emerge around the 1940s. Their poetry is a fascinating mixture of human amazement at the beauty of things, and also at the horrors of human brutality. Among the younger poets represented, White includes Ernesto Gutiérrez, Francisco Valle, Ana lice, and Alvaro Urtecho. These poets continue with the long established tradition of socially committed poetry. It's unfortunate that only one female is included in this anthology when there is an outstanding group of young women poets that would rank among the best of Latin America, such as Gioconda Belli, winner of the 1978 Casa de las Americas poetry prize in Cuba, Rosario Murillo, and Yolanda Blanco. Steven White is a very meticulous translator who does not undermine the original source and is quite generous to include at least six poems per poet. 272Rocky Mountain Review The selected bibliography dealing with contemporary Nicaraguan literature is extremely useful, as is the rest of this anthology that reaffirms once again that the word of poets is very much alive. MARJORIE AGOSIN Wellesley College ...