For aselection of poetry from Migrations
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Migraciones/Migrations
By Gloria Gervitz
Translated by Mark Schafer
San Diego: JunctionPress, 2004
ISBN: 1-881523-14-4 161
161 pp.
$18
_______
To order: [email protected]
By mail:
Junction Press,
PO Box F
New York, N.Y. 10034.
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Photo of Gloria Gervitz by Garciela Iturbide
Photo of Mark Schafer byMarjorie Attignol Salvodon
Translated by Mark Schafer
San Diego: JunctionPress, 2004
ISBN: 1-881523-14-4 161
161 pp.
$18
“Poetry is nothing but a mouthful of air, nothing but words. But thesewords transform the human heart and open you to the immensity of life.” These sentences, spoken by Mexican poet Gloria Gervitz to herexceedingly able translator Mark Schafer, could well serve as thetalisman by which to enter the poetic universe Gervitz reveals in herextraordinary sequence of poems, Migraciones/Migrations. This book, 27years in the making, is one of the more important poetic texts to emergefrom Mexico, or just about anywhere, in recent decades. Lyrical andmystical, a song of the self and of exile and ancestry and tradition, ofparadox and ambiguity, in which the reality of existence collides withthe imagination of that existence, Migrations is truly an epicundertaking so immense that it defies, like all great poems, easycategorizing.
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno in Talisman
To say that this is a book of the immigrant experience—which insome sense it is—is to underrate the range of form and feeling thatGervitz brings to it, creating thereby an epic of the migratory self.Like Pound’s Cantos or Zukofsky’s A, hers is the work of alifetime; a life’s work including not only autobiograpy and familiarmemories as a kind of history but rife with religious and mysticalimagery from Jewish kabbala to Mexican folk Catholicism and beyond,Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long and difficultpoem which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a complex tributeto the complex world from which it comes.
—JeromeRothenberg
Migrations presents the unmistable, majestic voice of GloriaGervitz, one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporaryJewish Latin American literature, in all its fullness, and MarkSchafer’s translation does it justice. Mystical, at times wrenching, itis a poem of ancestral as well as modern voices, a poem that should beread slowly as if reading a prayer. —Marjorie Agosín
Migraciones is an extraordinary and deeply moving poem. GloriaGervitz looks out all the world’s windows and Mark Schafer throws themopen to gather in the most soaring and luminous of words.Migraciones is a journey to the depths, to the heights, andacross the range of our most profound emotions. This is poetry thatrains inside us, leading us back to primordial waters.
—ElenaPoniatowksa
The sorrowful voice of Gloria Gervitz resoundswithin a terrifying vastness. Her words—prayer, oracle,litany—soar and plunge into the abyss, tempered by a breath thattranscends meaning. They cross to the other side, to what precedes them,where submerged words breath. Born of dark silence, her poetry rescuesmemory; it returns to the origin of its own pale dreams. Her poetryenthralls and overwhelms.
—Saúl Yurkievich.
Gloria Gervitz is a lifelongresident of Mexico City, where she was born in 1943. A recipient offellowships in poetry from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y lasArtes for 1993 and 1997 to 2002, she has been publishing her poetrysince 1979, when “Shaharit”, the first part ofMigraciones, appeared as a separate volume. It has been followedby 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 includesnumerous revisions and is the definitive edition. She has publishedstudies of the work of Clarice Lispector and Osip and NadezhdaMandelstam and translations of poems by Samuel Beckette, Anna Akhmatova,Kenneth Rexroth, Susan Howe, Rita Dove, and, under a grant from the Fundfor Culture Mexico-USA, Lorine Niedecker. Her own work has beentranslated into French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese andRussian. A German edition of Migraciones appeared in 2002.
Mark Schafer was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1962 andlives in Cambridge. He has published numerous translations of LatinAmerican poetry and prose including Virgilio Piñera, Cold Tales(1988) and René’s Flesh (1989); Eduard Galeano, The Book ofEmbraces, with Cedric Belfrage (1990); Alberto Ruy Sánchez,Mogador (1992); and Jesús Gardea, Stripping Away the Sorrowsof This World (1998). He has received two NEA Translation Fellowships (1994, 2005), a grant from the Fund for Culture Mexico-USA, and theRobert Fitzgerald Translation Prize.Migraciones/Migrations
Translated by Mark Schafer
San Diego: JunctionPress, 2004
ISBN: 1-881523-14-4 161
161 pp.
$18
To order: [email protected]
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.
