At the beginning of the Fall 2023 semester, the Florham Library organized book displays to celebrate the rich and varied art and contributions made by writers and poets across the Latin American diaspora.
Collected Fictions by
From Jorge Luis Borges's 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display his talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.
The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition by
This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian C#65533;sar Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939). Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo's is a tragic vision--perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature--in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman's long relationship with Vallejo's poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo's life and work.
The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems (A Bilingual Edition) by 
The Hurting Kind: Poems by
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves--from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. "I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limón. "I am the hurting kind." What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings--and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"? With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions--incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families. Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. "Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade," writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, "she is doing what she can to survive."
Jorge Luis Borges by
"Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face." These words, inseparably marrying Jorge Luis Borges's life and work, encapsulate how he interwove the two throughout his legendary career. But the Borges of popular imagination is the blind, lauded librarian and man of letters; few biographers have explored his tumultuous early life in the streets and cafes of Buenos Aires, a young man searching for his path in the world. In Jorge Luis Borges, Jason Wilson uncovers the young poet who wrote, loved, and lost with adventurous passion, and he considers the later work and life of the writer who claimed he never created a character other than himself. As Borges declared, "It's always me, subtly disguised." Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges was a voracious reader from childhood, perhaps in part because he knew he lived under an inescapable sentence of adult-onset blindness inherited from his father. Wilson chronicles Borges's life as he raced against time and his fated blindness, charting the literary friendships, love affairs, and polemical writings that formed the foundation of his youth. Illuminating the connections running between the biography and fictions of Borges, Wilson traces the outline of this self-effacing literary figure. Though in his later writings Borges would subjugate emotion to the wild play of ideas, this bracing book reminds us that his works always recreated his life in subtle and delicate ways. Restoring Borges to his Argentine roots, Jorge Luis Borges will be an invaluable resource for all those who treasure this modern master.
The Last Poems of Miguel de Unamuno by
Miguel de Unamuno's Cancionero is a poetic diary only inasmuch as it records, for Unamuno himself rather than for any possible reader, the tumultuous actions and reactions of a mind that has not learned to proceed on its speculative path without the company of the heart.
The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz by 
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral by
The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a "poetess" of children and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress. These are included in the "Complete" Nobel edition published in Madrid; the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation will finally allow people in the North to hear the originality, power, purity, and intransigence of this great American voice. Le Guin has published five volumes of her own poetry, an English version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and a volume of mutual translation with the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, The Twins, the Dream/Las Gemalas, El Sueño. Strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it, Le Guin has been working on this translation for five years.
Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda by
The winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, Pablo Neruda is regarded as the greatest Latin American poet of the twentieth century. This bilingual edition makes available a major selection of his poems, both in the original Spanish and impressively rendered into English by "his most enduring translator, the poet Ben Belitt" (Robert Creeley).
Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith by
Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana InÉs de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age. Her life reads like a novel. A spirited and precocious girl, one of six illegitimate children, is sent to live with relatives in the capital city. She becomes known for her beauty, wit, and amazing erudition, and is taken into the court as the Vicereine's protÉgÉe. For five years she enjoys the pleasures of life at court--then abruptly, at twenty, enters a convent for life. Yet, no recluse, she transforms the convent locutory into a literary and intellectual salon; she amasses an impressive library and collects scientific instruments, reads insatiably, composes poems, and corresponds with literati in Spain. To the consternation of the prelates of the Church, she persists in circulating her poems, redolent more of the court than the cloister. Her plays are performed, volumes of her poetry are published abroad, and her genius begins to be recognized throughout the Hispanic world. Suddenly she surrenders her books, forswears all literary pursuits, and signs in blood a renunciation of secular learning. The rest is silence. She dies two years later, at forty-six. Octavio Paz has long been intrigued by the enigmas of Sor Juana's personality and career. Why did she become a nun? How could she renounce her lifelong passion for writing and learning? Such questions can be answered only in the context of the world in which she lived. Paz gives a masterly portrayal of the life and culture of New Spain and the political and ideological forces at work in that autocratic, theocratic, male-dominated society, in which the subjugation of women was absolute. Just as Paz illuminates Sor Juana's life by placing it in its historical setting, so he situates her work in relation to the traditions that nurtured it. With critical authority he singles out the qualities that distinguish her work and mark her uniqueness as a poet. To Paz her writings, like her life, epitomize the struggle of the individual, and in particular the individual woman, for creative fulfillment and self-expression.
This Craft of Verse by
Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candour, wit and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the 20th century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony of to the life of literature.
Versos Sencillos = Single Verses by
Versos Sencillos/Simple Verses is the first translation edition of Cuban master Jose Marti's classic book of poems. The nineteenth-century literary great and philosopher was one of the most influential literary figures across the expanse of the Americas, and these poems were written during his years of exile and revolutionary plotting in the United States. A spiritual autobiography, Versos sencillos/Simple Verses captures in each poem an experience, a sensation or a moment which shaped the poet and the man. For more than 100 years, these poems have been part of the life of an island and a continent. The poet and the warrior, the troubadour and the philosopher, the lawgiver and the truthseeker, the enraptured and the disenchanted lover, the defender of poetry and its reformer, the genius and the pure man, all alternate in a symphony as perfectly modulated as the life it represents. Jose Marti's masterpiece, Versos sencillos/Simple Verses is one of those rare books that can be read on infinite levels and is never outgrown. It is the most accessible of all the landmarks of multiculturalism, and there is no other book in Hispanic literature whose appeal is more universal.
With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba by
Milton Rogovin traveled to Cuba twice in the mid-1980s to photograph those he calls "the forgotten ones." He encountered renowned poet Nancy Morejon, who, upon seeing his images, decided to write new poems and select poems from her work that resonated with the photographs. The result is a spectacular collaboration between poet and artist that creates a multi-dimensional portrait of the landscape and people of a place that has been all but invisible to us since the embargo of Cubamore than 40 years ago. Translators Pamela Carmell and David Frye retain the voice and feel of the original poems. Nancy Morejon is one of Cuba's most important contemporary poets. Milton Rogovin is a world-renowned documentary photographer with works in many major collections.
