Poemas de Amor / Love Poems - Paperback

by Idea Vilari (Author), Jesse Lee Kercheval (Translator)

Longlist, 2021 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilari released Poemas del Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of '45--which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale--Vilari is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets.

Vilari and Onetti's love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature. Poemas del Amor is an intense book, full of poems about sexuality and what it means to be a woman, and stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love. This translation brings these highly personal poems to English speaking audiences for the first time side-by-side with the original Spanish language versions.

THE WITNESS

I don't ask you for anything
don't accept anything from you.
It's enough that you are
in the world
that you know I am
in the world
that you might be
To me, you might be
witness judge and god.
If not
what is it for.

Author Biography

Idea Vilari (1920 - 2009) was an Uruguayan poet and is still an essential figure in Latin American poetry. Poemas de Amor/ Love Poems is her best known book, which is dedicated to the Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer and translator whose translations include El puente invisible/ The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia. She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.