Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Edition.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

edited by Stephen Tapscott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

This wonderful new anthology brings together poetry by eighty-five of Latin America's finest poets in both the original language--Spanish or Portuguese--and English translation. Tapscott has chosen a wide variety of material, ranging from the early modernists to experimentalists such as Augusto de Campos and Pedro Xisto. In addition to literary giants--expected names such as Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz--he has included many lesser known poets whose work deserves wider recognition. Most of these--Chilean Raul Zurita, Argentine Roberto Juarroz, and Mexican Gabriel Zaid, for example--are well known in their own countries and by specialists in Latin American poetry, but not by the general international reading public.

Tapscott also includes compositions by writers not acclaimed primarily for their poetry. A case in point is Julio Cortazar's delightful prose-poems from Historias de cronopios y famas [Stories of Cronopios and Famas]. In works such as "Conducta de los espejos en la isle de Pascua" [The Behavior of Mirrors on Easter Island], "Historia veridica" [A Very Real Story], and "Costumbres de los fames" [Normal Behavior of the Famas], the fantastic is commonplace and the routine, miraculous. The inclusion of these playful hybrids not only reminds us of the enormous breadth and artistry of Cortazar's writing, as well as of the complexity of his vision, but also underscores the amplitude of the poetic genre itself.

Before this century, the work of Latin American poets reflected, for the most part, the great European movements. Modernism marked a turning point; Ruben Dano's innovative verses inspired not only a new generation of poets from diverse parts of the Americas, but also writers on the other side of the Atlantic. Throughout this century, Latin America has been on poetry's cutting edge. Tapscott's anthology provides a fascinating glimpse of the evolution of Latin American poetry, from the formal exactitude of Jose Martis Versos sencillos and the sonnets of Dario and Joao da Cruz Sousa, for example, through the creationist innovations of Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda's epic songs of the Americas, crossbred forms such as Cortazar's prose poems, Octavio Paz's revolutionary metaphors, and the Brazilian concretists' "verbal artifacts." It offers an overview of the movements that have had an impact on the development of contemporary...