Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria
Editorial Reviews
From Independent Publisher
There are those poets whose very lives have come to signify more than the work they have written, and such is the case with Nicaragua's great poet-priest, Ernesto Cardenal. A student of Thomas Merton at Gethsemani, an ordained priest at the age of forty, a fighter against the brutal repressions of the Somoza dictatorship, minister of culture in the Sandinista government from 19791988, his is the sort of life an American film company might want to depict in some large screen epic. But it is the poetry to which we keep returning, strong narrative poems that everywhere are concerned with the lives of the people of Nicaragua. In Flights of Victory (originally published in 1985 by Orbis Books), Cardenal represents the struggle against Somoza and his backers, the Sandinista triumph and the attempt to forge a new Nicaragua. The later poems seem to me less accomplished, less certain, perhaps because the task of redefining and reshaping a society under siege is continually tentative and filled with error. But the earlier, more engaged poems ("Barricade" and "Lights," for example) are fine examples of liberationist poetry. However, in Cardenal's more recent work in which he attempts to develop a popular and engaged poetry, many poems come off to North American ears as derivative socialist realism. But then our ears may not be accustomed to political poetry. The translations-for the most part coming out of a collaborative process--are faithful to Cardenal's hard language and seem successful in capturing the poems' revolutionary fervor. Zimmerman's introduction to the volume is especially intelhgent. This volume should be in all libraries and individual colIections of Latin American literature.
Book Description
poetry, Nicaragua, tr Marc Zimmerman, bilingual
Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria
Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria,Ernesto Cardenal,Marc Zimmerman,Curbstone Press,0915306743,General,Humor,Latin American Poetry,Poetry,Poetry / General
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