Roberto Juarroz


Roberto Juarroz was an Argentine poet famous for his "Poesía vertical".

Biography

Born in Coronel Dorrego, Roberto Juarroz published 14 volumes of poetry in all, numbered successively 1 to 14, under the general title "Poesía vertical", the first appearing in 1958 and the final one posthumously in 1997. A fifteenth volume was edited by his wife, the poet and critic Laura Cerrato, and published after his death. W.S. Merwin published a bilingual selection of Juarroz' poems in 1977 which was re-issued in an enlarged edition in 1987, both volumes entitled Vertical Poetry. In 1992 Mary Crow published her translations of the later work as Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems, which won a Colorado Book Award. In 2011 Crow's translations of a selection of Juarroz' final poems will appear as Vertical Poetry: Last Poems. He died in 1995 in Temperley.

Literary style and critical reception

The poetry of Juarroz is spare and sometimes cryptic, with lines such as "busco las espaldas de Dios". Octavio Paz wrote: "Each poem of Roberto Juarroz is a surprising verbal crystallisation: language reduced to a bead of light. A major poet of absolute moments." For Julio Cortázar, his poems included both "the most elevated, and most profound, written in Spanish in recent years". Andreas Dorschel calls the "philosophical poetry" of Roberto Juarroz "transparent and dark at the same time", and praises "its lightness and its metaphysical wit".

Example

English translations

Translations of individual poems have appeared in many anthologies, including "The Vintage Book of World Poetry" and "The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry," and literary magazines, including Salamander, Literal: Latin American Voices, Seneca Review, Hawai'i Review, and Visions International.