Jose Lezama Lima: Selections: 4 (Poets for the Millennium) - Softcover

"Jose Lezama Lima is a rare writer, both a great novelist and a great poet. He is highly regarded as a true father to the current Renaissance in Latin American poetry. Good translations of Lezama Lima's work are of the highest importance and any post-Joycean reader should welcome them with gratitude." - Jose Kozer, author of Anima and Una Huella Destartalada"

Recognized as one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century, Jose Lezama Lima, born in Cuba in 1910, is associated with the Latin American neo-baroque and has influenced several generations of writers in and out of Cuba, including such prominent poets as Severo Sarduy and Nestor Perlongher. Lezama Lima's vision of America in a continental sense stands at the fertile confluence of indigenous, African, and European influences. A crucial experimental writer, he has been known in English chiefly for his novel Paradiso, while little of his poetry has been translated. This anthology is a comprehensive introduction to Lezama Lima's poetry. It presents for the first time in English a generous selection of his poems, as well as an interview, essays, and critical work on his poetics. Ernesto Livon-Grosman has selected elegant and precise translations by James Irby, G.J. Racz, Nathaniel Tarn, and Roberto Tejada. His insightful introduction places the poet in the wider context of Cuban and Latin American cultural history.