When: Friday, January 29
Where: Instituto Cervantes, 211 East 49th St, New York City
What time: 6:00 p.m.
Event information: In English; with Tapas and Wine

Paul Pines, escritor y editor, realizará una presentación del número especial de The Café Review dedicado a homenajear la poesía de Juan Gelman

Paul Pines, author and editor, will present the special issue of The Café Review dedicated as a tribute to the poetry of Juan Gelman.

En inglés. Con tapas y vino / In English. With tapas & wine.

Actividad parcialmente financiada por el Consejo de las Artes del Estado de Nueva York / Event sponsored in part by the New York State Council on the Arts

A TRIBUTE TO JUAN GELMAN: “DARKNESS/FILLED WITH LIGHT.”
The quote is from a Gelman poem and can easily stand for both the poets life and his work. He has arrived at the light which can only be found in a confrontation with the shadow, the dark side of human behavior both in the world and in the self. Those who are able to make that journey become the healers, shamans and poets of significance. For Gelman, whose son, and  pregnant daughter-in-law were “disappeared” in the political upheaval of the 70s, his journey to find out what happened to them is in fact the journey of so many in countries around the world, and especially in Latin America.  Perhaps it is the continuing legacy of the Conquistadors and certainly the pictorial equivalents might be found in Goya’s “Caprichos” the  superscript for which is, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
      I have been invited to lead a discussion of Gelman and his work at the Instituto Cervantes at the end of January.  Among the topics will be why a poet of such international distinction, regarded among many as perhaps the great living master, is virtually unknown in our language. I would suggest that in part it is because he is difficult to translate—but then so were Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo! It must go beyond that to what I suspect this culture has assiduously learned to avoid—the confrontation with the shadow, its own fear filled unconscious. Lorca called it duende and said it must be present in any affecting poem. Cultures that have lived closer to the reality of death,  have found it comforting to confront it in ways that are sometimes humorous—as in the images of Posada and in El Dia de Muerte in Mexico. Our culture  increasingly phobic, prefers to project the shadow onto others, find villains, evil empires outside of its own inequities and corruption. Gelman  is a secular mystic. He has made San Jaun’s de la Curz  journey—been stripped of everything as in a dark night of the soul—to find at the very depths of that darkness the beauty and light of his poems which have expressed the inexpressible for millions of people for whom that journey resonates and left indifferent the cultures that would sooner deny it. But the beauty is real, powerful, and when rendered powerfully, must enlarge the awareness of those who hear it.  
-Paul Pines