Bilingual poetry books are a great reading experience. It's a deeper pleasure, like hearing music in stereo, and you improve your knowledge of the other language. Bookshops don't cater at all well for the nearly bilingual reader. There are almost no bilingual novels, but there are many bilingual poetry books - so many that it's best if I just give you some pointers, taking the main publishers one by one, so you can plunge in or, if you wish, look at the descriptions in their catalogues. It isn't at all like recommending novels, because the most famous poets appear in several editions, maybe with several translators and from several publishers.
Many of the best books are from Shearsman: a beautiful illustrated edition of Mexico's national poem, 'La Suave Patria' by Ramón López Velarde; big names Rosalía de Castro and Gustavo Bécquer from the nineteenth century, then Fernando Pessoa, Antonio Machado, Alejandra Pizarnik, and multiple editions of César Vallejo and of Vicente Huidobro, the Chilean loved by the surrealists, who is translated by the publisher himself, Tony Frazer; the Golden Age poets, and their forerunner, Fernando de Herrera; a fine book of Flamenco songs; and much more, especially from Mexico and from Spain, both Spanish and Galician.
Florentino and the Devil is a Venezuelan favourite, an epic rapid-rhyming duel set in the cattle-ranches of the great plains. The local champion singer-poet accepts a challenge from a formidable opponent. Boasting, needling, and abruptly changing the rhyme, they go at it all night, until...
Translated by myself, notes by scholar-diplomat Gloria Carnevali steered me through it: they are included. It's sung on YouTube by great exponents like Carrao de Palmarito.
Alfonso Reyes - Miracle of Mexico is a feast of this colossal writer's ingenious, witty, quirky verse. Revered by Octavio Paz, praised by Borges, he translated much of Homer's Iliad, using rhyme and metre: his elegant comments on Homer, 'Homer in Cuernavaca', included here, won me a translator's award (thanks, don Alfonso!) He was Ambassador in Argentina, and in Brazil ('Romances of Rio de Janeiro'); and an exquisite third sequence lets us into a grand banquet. Which sums this book up.
Only one Latino writer is a double superstar, as poet and as novelist: it's José Luis Borges, of course. He's better known for his novels, but counted himself as mainly a poet. Penguin has three volumes of his poems, all featuring many brilliant translators.
Contrast another literary giant, Octavio Paz, whose poems are translated by just one, Eliot Weinberger, in the volume from W.W. Norton. Norton has another big name due out in July - it's Alberto Caeiro - just one of the many identities of the amazing Fernando Pessoa. (More in next issue.
Pablo Neruda (Neftalí Reyes) was 'the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language': so said Gabriel García Márquez. His Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, at age twenty, made him a star. The film Il Postino has brought his poems to a wider public - there's a little book of that. Then came the drama of his exhumation. So many editions of Neruda!
Top of Arc Publications' long list of bilingual poetry is their new Neruda translated by Adam Feinstein. (His excellent rhymed versions of Rubén Darío are coming soon.) There are Nerudas from Bloodaxe, and Anvil. Penguin's Neruda has the great translator and American Laureate, W.S. Merwin.
And so many editions of Lorca! For my bookstall I prefer the Oxford edition with translations by Martin Sorrell. Penguin has the Twenty Love Poems and now the Two Snails. Enitharmon has two Lorcas, green and purple, translated by Jane Duran, with Lorca's niece, Gloria.
From Arc: Kofman is Argentino. So is Mujica, a priest, once a Trappist monk. Rodríguez is Cuban, Serrano Mexican, Moura Brazilian; Tolaretxipi is Spanish, she translated Plath and Elizabeth Bishop.
Arc has Six Basque Poets and Six Galician Poets. Bloodaxe has the Brazilian, Adélia Prado, and the Catalan, Joan Margarit, who won the Cervantes Prize in 2019. Carcanet has Pessoa, Aridjis, Jaramillo, and (from Anvil) Josep Carner. Going in the reverse direction, Visor de Poesía has bilingual books of Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, and Audre Lorde.
Dedalus Press in Ireland has a Latino list including the fine translator, Michael Smith. Salmon Poetry, another Irish house, has the accomplished poet Hélène Cardona translating her father José in Birnam Wood, a huge achievement. City Lights has their early Neruda and their compact Cortázar. White Pine has the Nobel prizewinner Juan Ramón Jiménez, generation of 1898, and Cuban star Nancy Morejón. Right back in the Golden Age, there are three volumes from the University of Chicago. So - take your pick!
