Seiferle, Rebecca

The Black Heralds (Lannan Literary Selections)

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The Poet of Suffering
Vallejo's Language of Arrest

The Black Heralds (Lannan Literary Selections)
Cesar Vallejo
Manufacturer: Copper Canyon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1556591993

Book Description

Throughout his life, Cesar Vallejo (1892â€“1938) focused on human suffering and the isolation of people victimized by inexplicable forces. One of the great Spanish language poets, he merged radical politics and language consciousness, resulting in the first examples of a truly new world poetry.

The Black Heralds is Vallejo's first book and contains a wide range of poems, from love sonnets in which he struggles to free his erotic life from the bounds of Spanish Catholicism to the linguistically inventive sequence, "Imperial Nostalgias," where he parodies with considerable savagery the pastoral romanticism of Indian and rural life.

In this bilingual volume, translator Rebecca Seiferle attempts to undo the "colonization" of Vallejo in other translations. As Seiferle writes in her introduction: "Reading and translating Vallejo has been a long process of trying to meet him on his own terms, to discover what those terms were within the contexts of his particular time and, finally, taking his word for it."

from "Our Bread"

And in this frigid hour, when the earth smells of human dust and is so sad, I want to knock on every door and beg forgiveness of I don't know whom, and bake bits of fresh bread for him, here, in the oven of my heart...!

Cesar Vallejo (1892â€“1938) was born in Peru to a family of mixed Spanish and native descent. He wrote two books of poetry, the second of which was partly composed during a short prison term. Disappointed by the reception of his poetry in his own country, Vallejo moved to Paris, where he became active in Marxist politics and the antifascist campaign in Spain, while publishing essays, political -articles, a play, and short stories. Vallejo died in Paris, in utter poverty, on the day Franco's armies entered Madrid.

Customer Reviews:

The Poet of Suffering.......2003-11-13

I have not read Ms. Seiferle's translation of Los Heraldos Negros (so please ignore the rating) but I have read her translation of Trilce: this is much better than either of the others I have by David Smith and Clayton Eshelman, which would lead one to reasonably believe that her version of Vallejo's first work would exhibit most if not all of the same qualities: a receptive tenderness toward Poetic as opposed to Literal meanings, and, a rhythmic intuitiveness neccessary to good translation; something Mr. Eshelman is sadly lacking in his own work on this great Poet (Smith hardly bears up to any scrutiny at all, being non-poet, although well intentioned). But I did want to clarify two things for the uninitiated about Vallejo himself and this work: 1) Los Heraldos Negros did have another English Language publication, contrary to what the book review above is telling you: in 1990, by Latin American Literary Review Press (Richard Schaaf & Kathleen Ross were the translators). 2) Vallejo's Marxist beliefs are nowhere to be found in his poetry. This is the sort of thinking one associates with people who are only marginally aware of what Vallejo is trying to say and who thus confuse it with his later activities while in France (Los Heraldos Negros was composed Before the move, not after). The best advice here is to ignore Vallejo's public pronouncements at all times and concentrate instead upon his Poems; these will tell you what he actually thinking as well as why. You will also avoid the embarassment of linking it to any sort of politics or theory. Suffering is Vallejo's political affiliation, his literary theory, not the Marxism he was later drawn to because he could not bear to live in a world completely devoid of all practical hope. We should always bear this in mind when we recall his poetry: that he could not live without love (hope) and so chose to devote himself to Marxism because it seemed to him (then) as the best hope for a just future. That it was not only deepens the sweet/sad content (trilce) of his indisputably great poetry.

Vallejo's Language of Arrest.......2000-05-05

Readers who first encounter the militant, intellectual Vallejo stumble, as must have the first patrons of Picasso's *Guernica*, into a territory where radical politics and language consciousness cannot be divided. Famous for his revulsion at the capitalist conscious (or lack of one), Vallejo's poetry--from its most profane to its most threateningly lyrical--is an hardline education in the Marxist point of view. Middle class comfort, with its notion of safety, self-destructs on contact with Vallejo's "auroral dagger"; even in translation his verse splices the "burning coals" of the lip with the deliberate confusion of syntax and the extremities of diction.

When Vallejo proclaims "my lip/will split open into a hundred sacred petals./Tilda will hold the dagger/the flower-killing and auroral dagger!" ("Burning Coals") he places the speaker under intellectual and emotional arrest. Often with Vallejo there is no where to go but into the terrible dwellings of all experience and a life that struggles toward the new--fusing politics and romance, invention and lyric. The reader, very likely the middle class reader or writer under accusation, is faced with the impossible: syntax lures the reader into suffering. Diction becomes "a pariah's neurasthenic song," a verse of the nerve ("Leaves of Ebony"). The reader is placed on the rack of what Vallejo himself calls a "multisense of sweet unbeing" ("For the Impossible Soul of My Beloved") .

Book Description

poetry, Peru, tr Rebecca Seiferle, bilingual

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The Music We Dance To: Poems
Rebecca Seiferle
Manufacturer: Sheep Meadow Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Bitters
The Ripped-Out Seam: Poems

ASIN: 1878818767

Book Description

New Mexican, with a place in American poetry fused to Latin American tradition, Rebecca Seiferle is a poet of enormous range. In her second collection, she writes of family life and human tragedy, of ancient myth and Native American sources. This is a poetry of compassion and intensity--fierce and unflinching in its level of inquiry.

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Bitters
Rebecca Seiferle
Manufacturer: Copper Canyon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Music We Dance To: Poems
The Ripped-Out Seam: Poems

ASIN: 1556591683

Book Description

Bitters is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.

Seraphim

Even houseflies must have their angels. Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch, it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them, can they blame me? Like all good messengers, they're just testing whether we are still alive. By such means, the priest taught me, "God creates. All the living and the dead, just a nursery for his hatching." So when I found a trinity of maggots in the abdominal wall of a living kitten, though I had to pinch them out, I could not blame them-Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses of a homesick God, caught in the furnace of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.

Against the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.

Rebecca Seiferle's The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in The Best American Poetry 2000. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.

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The Ripped-Out Seam: Poems
Rebecca Seiferle
Manufacturer: Sheep Meadow Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Music We Dance To: Poems
Bitters

ASIN: 1878818228

Book Description

This is the prize-winning poet's first collection. The poems in this collection are various in style, from the highly experimental to shape poems to prose poems to sequences, and in subject matter, from the personal subjects of family, to various landscapes, predominantly that of New Mexico, and to historical and philosophical themes. The volume contains two collections: THE RIPPED-OUT SEAM and VOLTE, and etchings from the great Spanish painter Goya. Poems from this collection won the Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America: the Bogin Award is given to a group of four or five poems that reflect "the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, uses language in an original way, and takes a stand against oppression in any of its forms." Poems from the volume also won the Writers' Exchange Award, and the volume itself was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Poems in the volume previously appeared in American Poetry Review, The American Writer, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Croton Review, Cutbank, Indiana Review, Negative Capability, PSA News, Poem, South Coast Poetry Journal, The Taos Review, Triquarterly, The Denny Poems and have been anthologized in NEW MEXICO POETRY RENAISSANCE, (Red Crane 1994) and SALUDOS: POEMAS DE NUEVO MEXICO (Pennywhistle Press 1995).

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Wild Tongue
Rebecca Seiferle
Manufacturer: Copper Canyon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1556592620

Book Description

"With a bitter and withering irony and an eye for shocking beauty . . . Seiferle cuts straight to the emotionally honest kernel within family, spirit and myth."-Publishers Weekly

Poet Rebecca Seiferle once said that "one should always read a poem as if it was a matter of life and death." Seiferle's fourth book of poems, Wild Tongue, suggests a simi-lar belief about writing poems.

The tongue is both voice and body, and Wild Tongue rages against these global bits, bridles, and palliatives that attempt to calm and control. Combining shocking beauty and compelling directness, Seiferle counterbalances divorce and domestic violence with newfound love and cathartic wit. Her poems, like cave drawings, are inspired by urgency and concern, working into the cracks and contours of truth and wound.

So, it came to this, she could barely bear
to be touched, though she was glad for that
moment in the kitchen, tense with containers,
scrapings of delicacies adhering, floating
in the sink, and the other woman who turned and walked toward
her, holding out her arms, extended
from her shoulders, those most human wings,
to gather her up . . . 

PAINTED BRIDE QUARTERLY #29
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PAINTED BRIDE QUARTERLY #29
Louis and Louis McKee, Editors (David Ignatow, Lee W. Potts, Joanne W. Riley, Tim Troll, Heather McHugh, Karen Blomain, Rebecca Seiferle, Darcy Cummings, Gregoire Turgeon, ave jeanne, Lee Stern, Thomas Haslam, Mary Fell, Marge Piercy) CAMP
Manufacturer: Painted Bride Art Center
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000IZHTFG

The gift
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The gift
Rebecca Seiferle
Manufacturer: Copper Canyon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0006RXQ0I

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