ONE-SENTENCE DESCRIPTION
This is a translation of an expansive volume of poetry by an award winning Chilean poet who has been compared to Pablo Neruda.
CATEGORY
Poetry/translation
AUDIENCE
Primary: Readers of poetry in English worldwide, especially those interested in Latin American literature and history in general.
Secondary: University faculty teaching poetry, Latin American literature, and 21st century literature in general, along with faculty teaching Spanish and translation.
PURPOSE AND NEED
Educated readers worldwide are hungry to expand their cultural vision. In addition, there's a resurgence of interest in poetry, and poetry in translation, in our times, due to an increasingly global world, where we deeply need to understand the overall trajectory of the past 500 years of the planet, stretching back to the explosion of exploration from Europe to conquer and colonize much of the rest of the planet. This is the journey that Christian Formoso's "The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile" takes us on. Centered in a single locale--the Strait of Magellan in Tierra del Fuego--it poetically evokes ancient myths, the journey of the conquistadors, the struggle for survival in what Sarmiento de Gamboa somehow convinced himself (and the king of Spain!) would be a fruitful paradise. From 300 ships and 3000 soldiers and potential soldiers, Sarmiento finally landed on the shores of the Strait with three ships and a little over 100 of his people remaining. Formoso starts with these ancient stories and deftly weaves them, via intense, ground-breaking language, forward through time and into our contemporary psyche. If we want to know "where we are now" in this 500-year-old history, not just from a scholar's viewpoint but through the perspective and vision of a compelling new voice of Latin American poetry, this book needs to be available to a wide range of English-language readers.