Receipient, 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship
Dante’s Vita Nova (circa 1292–1295) depicts the joys and sorrows, the discoveries and conflicts of Dante’s early love for Beatrice—who would achieve later and even greater fame in Commedia—starting with his first sighting of her and culminating in his prevision of Beatrice among the beatified in heaven. Award-winning translator and poet Andrew Frisardi channels the vigor and nuance of Dante’s first masterpiece for a modern audience.
The “little book,” as Dante calls it, consists of thirty-one lyric poems—mostly sonnets—embedded in a prose narrative, which both recounts an apparently autobiographical set of events also evoked in the poems and offers analysis of the poems’ construction in the medieval critical tradition of divisio textus, or division of the text. Dante selected poetry he had written before age twenty-eight or so and wrote the prose to shape it into a story. The poems anthologize Dante’s growth as a poet, from the influence of his earliest mentors to the stylistic and thematic breakthroughs of his poetic coming-of-age.
The interplay of poetry and prose in Vita Nova, along with the further distinction in the latter between autobiography and critical divisioni, presents a particular challenge for any translator. Frisardi faithfully voices the complex meter and rhyme schemes of the poetry while capturing the tone of each of the prose styles. His introduction and in-depth annotations provide additional context for the twenty-first-century reader.
The aim of this anthology is to present a selection of plays that are representative of a fresh spirit and of societal pressures and changes in Spanish American culture. The plays shun the earlier realistic, sentimental, and melodramatic conventions of Spanish American theater. Instead, they reflect the tenor of the dramatic imagination of the mid-to-late twentieth century—an imagination that sought new forms and ways of expressing a new awareness of the Spanish American dilemma.
In selecting these plays, William I. Oliver looked for more than mere illustrations of these changes. As a practicing director and playwright, he sought works that are effective on the stage as well as on the page. As an editor and translator, he sought works “that could be translated culturally as well as linguistically.” The six plays in this varied and vigorous anthology are the measure of his success.
The plays included are The Day They Let the Lions Loose, by Emilio Carballido (Mexico); The Camp, by Griselda Gambaro (Argentina); The Library, by Carlos Maggi (Uruguay); In the Right Hand of God the Father, by Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia); The Mulatto’s Orgy, by Luisa Josefina Hernández (Mexico); and Viña: Three Beach Plays, by Sergio Vodánovic (Chile).
Collected and translated by Carolyn Alessio, this bilingual anthology of poems, stories, memories, and philosophies was written and illustrated by the children of La Esperanza, Guatemala. Drawing upon the fortitude of their mothers, who began hand-sewing crafts to sell in the United States in order to survive the hardships of this war-torn impoverished country, Alessio’s students, aged four to sixteen, reveal amazing survival skills, fertile imaginations, and dreams of attaining better lives. The resulting work is a collection of poems and drawings that are terse, funny, sometimes sad, but always humanly, gloriously alive.
As Alessio explains, “At first, I thought I might be imagining the echoes of magical realism, but as I continued to read the students’ writing and study their drawings, I found similar themes. Witches killed children who didn’t respect the spirits; women abused by their husbands sought refuge in trees with magical doors. People who didn’t have money or jobs lived on the road and in forests, where they alternately fought and partied with the animals.”
The volume features a foreword from Luis Alberto Urrea,author of Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border and By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border.
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