Gloria Gervitz was born in Mexico City into an Eastern European
Jewish immigrant family. She was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize for
Poetry in 2019. Her main body of work is Migraciones, a single poem
that evolved organically over forty-four years. Gervitz has
translated poetry by Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Rexroth, Lorine
Niedecker, Susan Howe, and Rita Dove into Spanish. She now lives in
San Diego, California.
Mark Schafer is a literary translator, a visual artist, and a
senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he
teaches Spanish. He has translated works by authors from around the
Spanish-speaking world, including David Huerta, Belen Gopegui,
Virgilio Pinera, and Alberto Ruy Sanchez. Schafer is a founding
member of the Boston Area Literary Translators Group. He lives in
Roxbury, Massachusetts, the traditional and unceded territory of
the Massachusett and Wampanoag Peoples.
“Magisterial. . . .Whitmanian. . . . stunning poetic breadth.”
—Ilan Stavans, Latin American Research Review
"It is difficult to think of a poetic project like that of Gervitz.
Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems come to
mind, but perhaps no other modern author has consistently devoted
the totality of their work to one single volume, patiently
rewritten throughout the years, losing and gaining verses, and
constantly mutating. . . . The search for a language able to slide
through different meanings in the same line [is] at the center of
Gervitz’s poetic project. . . Readers of Migrations find the trace
of a life devoted to writing and rewriting—it is a mutating work,
written with an ink that aspires to the flowing and dissolvent
nature of running water." —Mauro G. Lazarovich, Harvard Review
Online
"Migrations presents the unmistakable, majestic voice of Gloria
Gervitz, one of the most powerful and original voices of
contemporary Jewish Latin American literature, in all its fullness,
and Mark Schafer’s translation does it justice. Mystical, at times
wrenching, it is a poem of ancestral as well as modern voices, a
poem that should be read slowly as if reading a prayer." —Marjorie
Agosín
"Gloria Gervitz’s Migrations, co-written by death, co-written by
eros, is one of the great poems of the twenty-first century. Mark
Schafer, her extraordinary English-language translator, has managed
to keep hold of this poem through all its bucking, its multiplying,
its relentless champing at the bit. Gervitz is a wonder, true, but
so is Schafer." —Forrest Gander
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