New Zealand’s Cold Hub Press continues to present international poetry in
bi-lingual editions. Its latest publication is a 48pp chapbook featuring
translations of celebrated Nicaraguan poet Ernesto
Cardenal.
One of the most influential and controversial poets of
his generation, Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) is widely acknowledged as the greatest living poet of Latin
America. Poet, priest, polemicist, liberation theologian, founder of the
Solentiname primitivist art community, Nicaraguan Minister of Culture in the
first Sandinista Government, 1979–87, Cardenal,
in poetry which is both epic and lyrical, presents a vision of the social,
political, historical and natural worlds of Latin America.
In the three recent and previously untranslated long
poems in this volume Cardenal writes about Venice, ageing and nostalgia; gives
a vivid account of the elderly Alexander von Humboldt as he recalls his
explorations in Venezuela and his encounters with Simón Bolívar and Thomas
Jefferson; and considers the history of human evolution.
As a result of
his participation in the IXth Granada International Poetry
Festival in Nicaragua in 2013, translator Roger Hickin was offered a number of
Cardenal’s recent poems to translate. He has previously published translations
of Chilean poets Juan Cameron and Sergio Badilla Castillo, and Nicaraguan poet
Blanca Castellón.
In August Cold
Hub will publish “Si no te hubieras ido / If
only you hadn’t gone”, a sequence of poems by Dunedin-resident Mexican
poet Rogelio Guedea.
Ernesto Cardenal: 3 Poems (Nostalgia for Venice, Humboldt, The third
chimpanzee) with translations from the Spanish by Roger Hickin. Cold
Hub Press. ISBN: 978-0-473-28536-4.
Softcover
chapbook, 48 pp, 210 x 145mm. NZ$19.50.
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