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Watchword
Translated by Forrest Gander
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2012-02-08
176 Pages, 6.25 x 9.25 in
Intimate, intense poems forge a language for life when life is at stake
In her most recent book, Watchword—the winner of the Villaurrutia, Mexico's most esteemed literary prize—acclaimed poet Pura López Colomé writes of life at its brink with fierce honesty and an unblinking eye. This work shares the darkness, intensity, and skeptical hope of Thomas Hardy's great poems. Like them, López Colomé's poems have flashes of secular mysticism, sparked from language itself, which generate unforgettable passages and give voice to a world familiar and odd, wounded and buoyant. In the energy and intensity of her work and in her exhilarating words, we discover both a line of conduct and the source for a richer life. This bilingual edition features the poems en face in Spanish and English.
SPANISH
Prefacio de traductor (en inglés)
Quién eres, qué
Tibuchina
Tres escenas lacustres
Eco
Llaga profunda
Almendra
Acaso Borneo
DOS POEMAS LUCTUOSOS, TARDÍOS
El cuadro de mi vida
Diálogo de las cenizas
Fábula disuelta, ensimismada
Y el anturio, impávido
Qué escándalo
Cor cordis
Pasa
Celda
Visión
Una mancha
Colas
Atormentada
Año Uno * Conejo / Año Luz * Liebre
Dulzura
Machihembrado
Sueño de música estelar
Los viejos almacenes
Contar los hilos
Agua helada
ABORESCENCIAS
Imitatio Christi
Güiro
Allée Marie Laurent
ENGLISH
Translator's Preface
Who Are You; What
Tibuchina Flower
Three Lacustrine Scenes
Echo
Deep Wound
Almond
Maybe Borneo
TWO POEMS OF MOURNING (BELATEDLY)
My Life's Portrait
Dialogue of the Ashes
Dehiscent, Enraptured Invention
And the Intrepid Anthurium
The Roar
Heart's Core
Come On In
Cell
Vision
A Mark
Tails
Tormented
First Year: Rabbit / Light Year: Hare
Sweetness
Tongue-and-grooved
Dreaming a Music of the Stars
Those Old Grocery Shops
Counting Threads
Ice Cold Water
ARBORESCENCES
Imitatio Christi
Yokel
Allée Marie Laurent
Poet's Afterword — Ethereal Slipknot: The Intangible Integrity of the Poetic Word (On winning the Villaurrutia Prize)
Acknowledgments
Translator's Notes
PURA LÓPEZ COLOMÉ is the Villaurrutia Prize – winning author of several important books, including El sueño del cazador, Aurora, and Intemperie, as well as a volume of collected poems, Música inaudita. She is also the translator into Spanish of works by Samuel Beckett, H.D., Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and others. In 2010, she was awarded the Linda Gaboriau Literary Translation Award. FORREST GANDER is a noted poet and translator. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Core Samples from the World. His most recent translation, Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. He is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.
"Searching for 'divine narration,' this poet drums on the heart of oblivion."
~Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail
"Both Dante and Dickinson preside over Watchword, Pura Lopéz Colomé's brilliant 'notes that day by day gather / something profound and gentle, eternal, / melodious, imagined, maternal' She reminds us just how worldly the otherworldly is. Forrest Gander's translation rings flawless and true."
~John Ashbery
"Widely acknowledged and celebrated as a poet of lyric intensity and concision, Pura Lopéz Colomé here attains a new level of engagement with the poetics of perception in a world marked at once by harrowing personal experience and the transformative revelations of things as they are. Truly a splendid 'garden / of signs within signs.'""
~Michael Palmer
""Watchword is a thought- and emotion-provoking book in that the subtext of several poems is a personal struggle with cancer whereas the texts themselves gander widely and maintain a kind of height that transcends the individual human condition.""
~John Taylor, Antioch Review
""Searching for 'divine narration,' this poet drums on the heart of oblivion.""
~Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail
""Gander observes that López Colomé's poetry has hermetic qualities, but he seems to want to let us in. His careful set of choices in the act of translation complements this attitude, allowing him to heighten the warmth in English even as he retains the discipline of López Colomé's movements.""
~Kristin Dykstra, BOMBsite
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