Poetry
ISBN: 9781781723340
Publication date: November 3, 2016
Price: £14.99
‘A glittering bilingual anthology.’ – George Szirtes
‘The Other Tiger serves as a window on what is, to many readers, still another world. It is a great and generous gift, a legacy that will endure.’ – New Welsh Review
The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America is an anthology of Spanish language contemporary poetry from the Americas. Produced bilingually, with Spanish and English versions on facing pages, it is a welcome addition to the canon of translation, focusing on poets born since 1945.
Richard Gwyn has arranged the poems thematically – Where We Live; Memory, Childhood, Family; the Natural World; Politics, Journey and Exile; Love, Sex and the Body – to cut across nationality and the generations, illustrating the things poets have in common, and how they differ, across continents.
The Other Tiger (the title is a nod to Borges – “the one not in this poem”) consists of 97 poets from 16 countries, born over five decades. It includes work from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Bolivia and El Salvador. Among the mix of poets are established names such as Juan Manuel Roca, Daniel Samoilovich, Mirta Rosenberg, Romulo Bustos Aguirre, Clemente Riedemann and Jorge Fondebrider. The younger poets featured include Andres Neuman, Damsi Figueroa, Alejandro Crotto and Carolina Davila.
The resulting anthology is an eclectic and catholic mix of fine poetry and fine translation that opens a window on to a relatively neglected group of literary worlds. The poems are at once exotic and other yet recognizably drawing on a poetic tradition that includes Novel prize-winner Octavio Paz. They conjure big landscapes and moments of tenderness, celebrate the individual but also engage with the politics of so many repressive regimes in Latin and South America. The Other Tiger vividly reflects the many contrasts present in the lives and literatures of the peoples of this continent.
‘By turns delicate and bold, passionate and tender, political and intimate, Richard Gwyn’s vivid translations provide a fascinating and timely introduction to this great poetic continent.’– Daniel Hahn
‘This big, generous, varied and colourful anthology contains a whole continent of marvellous poetry. It is a feat of translation, but also of empathy.’ – Patrick McGuinness
‘This is an indispensable and comprehensive introduction to Spanish American poetry of the last forty years which no reader of poetry should be without. We already know it, thanks to Borges, Cardenal, Neruda, Parra, Paz, and Vallejo, as one of the great world poetries, but what is so exciting here is the deepening sense, as you read on through Richard Gwyn’s beautifully voiced, meticulous translations, of that illustrious pantheon being replaced by a new generation of urgent voices, some old acquaintances, some entirely new – some, crucially, of equal significance.’ – W.N. Herbert
‘An incisive overview of recent, innovative writing we’re not likely to find elsewhere in English. The preface is solid: informative, intelligent, and immensely useful to both novices and old hands; the thematic organization is revelatory and moves us far from the rather pedantic, strictly historical or geographical focus of so many other anthologies; and the translations are beautiful and to the point. This is a book that belongs in every library, private or institutional, that has shelf-space for volumes of poetry. I think Alastair Reid, to whom the book is dedicated, would have been very happy with the tribute.’ Edith Grossman
Richard Gwyn
Richard Gwyn grew up in Breconshire. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics, but dropped out after two years and after a brief career as a punk poet spent the decade of the 1980s travelling around the Mediterranean, working on fishing boats and as a waiter in Greece, and as an agricultural labourer in France and Spain. Following several years of alcoholic vagabondage he fell seriously ill in Barcelona. His account of these years appears in The Vagabond’s Breakfast (which won Wales Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2012). Gwyn started out as a poet, and has published four collections, most recently Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure (2018), and is editor of an anthology of work by Welsh poets, The Pterodactyl’s Wing (2003). His first novel, The Colour of a Dog Running Away (2005), set in Barcelona, was translated into many languages and brought him international recognition. His other novels include Deep Hanging Out (2007)) and, most recently, The Blue Tent (2019), which appeared in French translation as Les Invités (Gallimard 2022). He is a translator from Spanish, specialising in poetry and short fiction. Between 2011 and 2016 he travelled widely in South America, which resulted in The Other Tiger, a major anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry (2016). His other translations from Spanish include Impossible Loves by Darío Jaramillo and Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito. For ten years he was Professor of Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University. He is the author of Ricardo Blanco’s Blog, which can be found at richardgwyn.me.
