Today by Juan Gelman and translated by Lisa Rose Bradford

This is poetry from Argentina.

Today by Juan Gelman translated by Lisa Rose Bradford is published by co-im-press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781947918009E12.

Juan Gelman’s Today, translated by Lisa Rose Bradford, gathers the urgency of the present tense in a poet whose work is always haunted by what history has taken. Today is a deceptively simple title for Gelman because the present is never empty. It carries exile, the dead, political violence, desire, memory, and the stubborn fact of continuing to love. Bradford’s translation lets the poems remain intimate and angular, preserving the way Gelman’s language can sound wounded and tender at once. I like that the book does not make the present into a clean beginning. It treats today as the place where everything unresolved keeps arriving. For readers new to Gelman, this is a strong encounter with a poet who understands lyric time as layered rather than linear. The poem says today, and inside that word, the past answers.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.