Mexican Poetry: An Anthology [Paperback]

Anthologies are the way to go when you want to discover new (or old) poets with minimal risk. Anthologies give you a sampling of many different poets and then you decide which ones you really like.

This is a method I have used to explore the wide range of world poetry out there. It gives me a taste of many poets without having to purchase a thousand books. Having financial limits, this is greatly beneficial.

"Mexican Poetry" is a collection of poems translated by Samuel Beckett and edited by Octavio Paz. These two Nobel Laureates have provided us with nearly 400 years of poetry beginning in 1521 and ending in 1910. This comprehensive book includes 35 different poets and provides a great overview of the great poetry produced by Mexico.

Paz, being a Mexican poet has great insight into the poetic history of his country. He endeavors to include poets from the entire four century span. He also writes a fine introduction to place proper historical perspective to the many poets included here.

The collection features poets such as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz who is an early model of a feminist heroine. Her beautiful poems still resonate over three centuries later. It also has works by Bernando de Balbuena, Juan Ruis de Alarcon, Alfonso Reyes and Juana de Asbaje. This book will instill in one a sense of the breadth and range of Mexican poetry. It is a great way to familiarize oneself with a great poetic tradition that is often overlooked.

and an OK introduction by CM Bowra (I'd much rather read the French edition's intro by Paul Claudel!).

One of the greatest mysteries of modern literature (aside from the novel Ulysses) is how the young Samuel Beckett, fresh from the Protestant University in Dublin, who in the Sixties would receive the Nobel Prize for literature, could begin his career with such terrible translations funded by UNESCO and many times republished in the USA by Evergreen's Grove Press, our nation's owner of the Beckett franchise.

I am reading the 1985 Grove Press edition. The best that could happen would be a bilingual edition, in which one might gracefully and mercifully put aside the unreadable, terrible translations and read the originals as written, including the archaicisms of the Carmelite Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.

The young Beckett also performed some unreadable translations from the French of the Bateaux Ivre, for example. This is odd as after the Second World War he became our greatest playwright in English by translating his plays (such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days, Ohio Impromptu, Come and Go, etc.) from his own original French into English. In order for this to occur of course, he needed to pass through service as secretary to the greatest writer of the Twentieth Cnetury, Mr. James Joyce, who tragically did not survive to observe his own recognition. Beckett's novels in the main grew more diffficult (his great trilogy, ending in the Unnameable, sometimes called the Unreadable); yet to him we owe such enormously entertaining earlier novels as Murphy and Mercier et Camier

In any case, the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, through the encouragement of UNESCO of the United Nation (while still interested in the advancement of culture and education and health and the development of peoples, of international peace and of human rights, long before this promising international body was reduced to being a mercenary arm of other interests), compiled a representative sampling of poerty from throughout the history of his heroic nation between about 1600 until three centuries later, ending in 1910. Indeed for a flavor of the translation let us look at the opening sonnet by Don Francisco de Terrazas:

I dreamed that I was thrown from a crag
by one who held my will in servitude,
and all but fallen to the griping jaws
of a wild beast in wait for me below

In terror, gropingly, I cast around
for wherewith to uphold me with my hands,
and the ones closed about a trenchant sword,
and the other twined about a little herb.

Little and little the herb came swift away,
and the sword ever sorer vexed my hand
as I more fiercely clutched its cruel edges. . . . (sic)

Oh wretched me, and how from self estranged,
that I rejoice to see me mangled thus
for dread of ending, dying, my distress!

I do not rejoice to see this sonnet mangled thus, but would rejoice to see the original as written some four centuries ago. I would indeed rejoice to do my own translation, thank you, without a twining hand nor trenchant sword.

Certainly the most valuable element of this edition is the lengthy, comprehensive and profound introduction by Octavio Paz himself (translator unidentified) which retraces the entire history and development of his nation's poetic literature, and presents the criteria for his selections in this compilation, which he admits is lacking as there is no Nahuatl nor other pre-Columbian poetry, but for which he refers to the reader to other sources.

An excellent if troubled edition, handy anthology for students of this field. But find the originals; here as in other places, particularly in poetry we find true the ancient dictum: translation is treason (which sounds so much better in the original Latin, or French, or Spanish!).

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