Book record
Sorrow
Claribel Alegría
Translated from Spanish by Carolyn Forche
Claribel Alegría’s Sorrow, translated by Carolyn Forché, brings together two poets deeply associated with witness, grief, and political lyric. Alegría’s Salvadoran poetry often carries loss without surrendering tenderness, and the bluntness of the title is part of its strength. Sorrow here is not ornamental sadness. It is an atmosphere, a history, a beloved dead, a nation wounded, a life continuing in the presence of absence. Forché’s translation gives English-language readers a version of the work attentive to both intimacy and public suffering. I would read this book slowly, not because the language is inaccessible, but because grief deserves not to be rushed. It is a collection that understands poetry as one way human beings keep speaking to what has been taken.
- Publisher
- Curbstone Press
- Language
- Spanish
- Country
- El Salvador