Save Twilight: Selected Poems

World-renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortazar was also a prolific poet who, in his final months in Paris, assembled his life's work in verse. This new, expanded edition of "Save Twilight," with over twenty-five newly translated poems, is a distillation of Cortazar's selectio [...]
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World-renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortazar was also a prolific poet who, in his final months in Paris, assembled his life's work in verse. This new, expanded edition of "Save Twilight," with over twenty-five newly translated poems, is a distillation of Cortazar's selection, a bilingual survey of his poetry ranging through various voices, moods, and styles. From free verse to fixed forms, the intimately lyrical to the social-historical, Cortazar is revealed as a virtuoso stylist and a poet of intense personal passion, yet alsotypical of his works in prosea subverter of genres in his playful approach to the book as literary artifact. In "Save Twilight," the author interrupts the high seriousness of poetic art with interludes of earnestly irreverent commentary on the process of selection, turning this volume of collected verse into a game in which the reader is invited to participate as editor-in-progress.The power of eros, the enduring beauty of art, and the tragic folly of politics are some of the recurrent themes. Informed by his immersion in world literature, music, art, and history, but most of all his own emotional geography, Cortazar's poetry traces his paradoxical evolution from provincial Argentinian sophisticate to cosmopolitan Parisian romantic, always maintaining the sense of astonishment of an artist surprised by life."With this expanded edition of "Save Twilight," Stephen Kessler continues his project, begun in the 1980s, of translating poetry by Julio Cortazar. Widely known for his fiction, especially "Hopscotch," a seminal work of the Latin American Boom, Cortazar was also a compelling poet. Kessler has found just the right turns of phrase in English to capture the Argentine's deeply moving writing and exceptionally emotive language.What a gift this collection is for English-speaking readers."Edith Grossman"What a pleasure, this walk in a well-orchestrated park with shades as complex, as light & as dark, as multifoliate as the actual world This bookthe 'poetic ecology' Cortazar had envisioned is an open invitation to make yourselves at home twixt sea and loss, wine & sorrow, birth & riptide, tobacco & talk, laughter & death. Nothing human is foreign to the poet& he brings it home with great clarity & grace. The writing & the book embody a tradition of hospitality, or as Cortazar puts it: 'Hello little black book for the late hours, cats on the prowl under a paper moon.' The injunction to save twilight stands as title it is also exactly what the writing accomplishes. Stephen Kessler's elegant, accurate, and sometimes felicitously ose translations do these poems more than justice. Pierre JorisJulio Cortazar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentinian parents, raised in Argentina, and spent his most productive years in Paris, where he died in 1984.
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