For a selection of poetry from Migrations
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Migraciones/Migrations
By Gloria Gervitz
Translated by Mark Schafer
San Diego: Junction
Press, 2004
ISBN: 1-881523-14-4 161
161 pp.
$18
_______
To order: Email
By mail:
Junction Press,
PO Box F
New York, N.Y. 10034.
_______
Photo of Gloria Gervitz by Garciela Iturbide
Photo of Mark Schafer by
Marjorie Attignol Salvodon
Translated by Mark Schafer
San Diego: Junction Press, 2004
ISBN: 1-881523-14-4 161
161 pp.
$18
“Poetry is nothing but a mouthful of air, nothing but words. But these words transform the human heart and open you to the immensity of life.” These sentences, spoken by Mexican poet Gloria Gervitz to her exceedingly able translator Mark Schafer, could well serve as the talisman by which to enter the poetic universe Gervitz reveals in her extraordinary sequence of poems, Migraciones/Migrations. This book, 27 years in the making, is one of the more important poetic texts to emerge from Mexico, or just about anywhere, in recent decades. Lyrical and mystical, a song of the self and of exile and ancestry and tradition, of paradox and ambiguity, in which the reality of existence collides with the imagination of that existence, Migrations is truly an epic undertaking so immense that it defies, like all great poems, easy categorizing.
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno in Talisman
To say that this is a book of the immigrant experience—which in some sense it is—is to underrate the range of form and feeling that Gervitz brings to it, creating thereby an epic of the migratory self. Like Pound’s Cantos or Zukofsky’s A, hers is the work of a lifetime; a life’s work including not only autobiograpy and familiar memories as a kind of history but rife with religious and mystical imagery from Jewish kabbala to Mexican folk Catholicism and beyond, Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long and difficult poem which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a complex tribute to the complex world from which it comes.
—Jerome
Rothenberg
Migrations presents the unmistable, majestic voice of Gloria
Gervitz, one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporary
Jewish Latin American literature, in all its fullness, and Mark
Schafer’s translation does it justice. Mystical, at times wrenching, it
is a poem of ancestral as well as modern voices, a poem that should be
read slowly as if reading a prayer. —Marjorie Agosín
Migraciones is an extraordinary and deeply moving poem. Gloria Gervitz looks out all the world’s windows and Mark Schafer throws them open to gather in the most soaring and luminous of words. Migraciones is a journey to the depths, to the heights, and across the range of our most profound emotions. This is poetry that rains inside us, leading us back to primordial waters.
—Elena
Poniatowksa
The sorrowful voice of Gloria Gervitz resounds within a terrifying vastness. Her words—prayer, oracle, litany—soar and plunge into the abyss, tempered by a breath that transcends meaning. They cross to the other side, to what precedes them, where submerged words breath. Born of dark silence, her poetry rescues memory; it returns to the origin of its own pale dreams. Her poetry enthralls and overwhelms.
—Saúl Yurkievich.
Gloria Gervitz is a lifelong
resident of Mexico City, where she was born in 1943. A recipient of
fellowships in poetry from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes for 1993 and 1997 to 2002, she has been publishing her poetry
since 1979, when “Shaharit”, the first part of
Migraciones, appeared as a separate volume. It has been followed
by Fragmento de ventana (1986), Yiskor (1987),
Pythia (1993), Treno (2003), and Septiembre (2003),
and, between 1991 and 2002, a series of editions of Migraciones,
each incorporating the new sections. The present volume includes
numerous revisions and is the definitive edition. She has published
studies of the work of Clarice Lispector and Osip and Nadezhda
Mandelstam and translations of poems by Samuel Beckette, Anna Akhmatova,
Kenneth Rexroth, Susan Howe, Rita Dove, and, under a grant from the Fund
for Culture Mexico-USA, Lorine Niedecker. Her own work has been
translated into French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and
Russian. A German edition of Migraciones appeared in 2002.
Mark Schafer was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1962 and
lives in Cambridge. He has published numerous translations of Latin
American poetry and prose including Virgilio Piñera, Cold Tales
(1988) and René’s Flesh (1989); Eduard Galeano, The Book of
Embraces, with Cedric Belfrage (1990); Alberto Ruy Sánchez,
Mogador (1992); and Jesús Gardea, Stripping Away the Sorrows
of This World (1998). He has received two NEA Translation Fellowships (1994, 2005), a grant from the Fund for Culture Mexico-USA, and the
Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize.
Migraciones/Migrations
Translated by Mark Schafer
San Diego: Junction Press, 2004
ISBN: 1-881523-14-4 161
161 pp.
$18
To order: Email
By mail:
Junction Press,
PO Box F
New York, N.Y. 10034.
For more information on Mark Schafer’s new translation of the work of David Huerta Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of David Huerta, go to www.beforesaying.com.
