Mercedes Cortazar

Orbs Mercedes Cortazar

Orbs: Collected Poems is the first English-language collection of the poetry of Mercedes Cortázar, presented in translations by Andrée Conrad and the author. The volume includes three long poems and three collections of individual works: The Long Chant, Earth/Water/Fire, Terrestrial Orb, The Aphrodite of Knidos, Reason of Eros, and Nature in the Mirror. Cortázar's poems encompass a progression of themes: realization of the need for -and the cost of-personal freedom; contemplation of the extinction of humanity by dissenting political and religious systems; the many faces of human confrontation in the multicultural context of a giant metropolis; a visionary view of love in its most exquisite and agonizing manifestations; and, ultimately, an epiphany regarding the place of humanity in the universe. "This work has urgent significance because it really deals with the suffering of man - human beings - but also with the deeper meaning of poetry, the poem's task to descend to the most profound levels, or rise to the highest [....] Everything is entering, getting to the heart, breaking the locks," said the late poet Gastón Baquero. "This broad compilation invites the 'powers that read' from other nations or cultural heritages to consider the universal magnitude of the poetry of Mercedes Cortázar." - From the introduction by Jesús J. Barquet, editor/publisher of the Spanish-language Orbes 1959-2016. Born in Havana, Cuba, Mercedes Cortázar resides in the US, of which she is a naturalized citizen. Editor-in-chief of two consumer and four trade magazines published in the US for distribution throughout Latin America, Cortázar's literary prose, poetry, and criticism have appeared in print and electronic literary magazines for the past six decades. Most recently, she contributed an essay to the catalogue Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (Yale University Press/The Phillips Collection, 2019). Mercedes Cortázar is a founding member of the generation of Cuban poets and writers in Havana called El Puente (The Bridge), a movement in process of rediscovery at the present time. Cortázar's first book of poetry, El largo canto (The Long Chant), was the third book published by El Puente, and her work was included in El Puente's first poetry anthology, La novísima poesía cubana I (The Latest Cuban Poetry I). In response to its avant-garde editorial policy, and also because it had published Cortázar's work after she had gone into exile in the United States, the Cuban Government closed the El Puente publishing house and persecuted its members. Cortázar continued to write in New York while working in factories and restaurants, and at other blue-collar jobs. Her poems attracted the attention of Chilean literary critic and translator Servando Sacaluga, a professor of French at Columbia University, who translated her poems in Deux Poèmes de Mercedes Cortázar (1965), a bilingual Spanish-French edition of El largo canto and another long poem, Tierra. With a group of El Puente poets living in New York, Cortázar founded Protesta, the first literary magazine of Cuban writers in exile. She later joined with Cuban and Puerto Rican poets in New York to found La nueva sangre (The New Blood), publishing Spanish-language writers and poets as well as translations into Spanish, including from Vietnamese. Cortázar's poems, stories, articles, essays and literary criticism appeared in publications including Mundo Nuevo (New World), published and edited in Paris by Uruguayan literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the first critic to identify and describe the Boom in Latin American literature; Mexican literary magazine El corno emplumado (The Feathered Horn); and Spain's cultural magazine Turia. Cortázar was poetry consultant for the translation into English of José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (available in the University of Texas Press's Texas Pan American Paperback series). Cortázar is a past recipient of the Cintas Fellowship