diálogo books, 2014
“‘The original is sometimes not faithful to the translation,’ is a perverse paradox uttered by Jorge Luis Borges. In this English collection of poems from the Spanish of Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Katherine Hedeen is so seamlessly good I should suspect the original. But no, while excellent in English, this Hispanic genius is born in his Spanish semi-surreal surprise, sorrow, and the cruel and ecstatic development of our fate on earth. The poems are too freshly magnificent to have been concocted by their translator. Rodríguez Núñez for me speaks with more fascination than any Latin American poet since Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and especially César Vallejo whose early poetry contains a similar relentless pathos in the voice-echoing reference to living-dead family. Víctor possesses a powerful camera-clear eye for bizarre firmaments, for nature, for quirky earthly occurrences. Lyrically, he has the cunning voice of the nightingale. He will stick with us when in “Thank God” he notes: “Upstairs I’m still here / scratching the silence/ with this pencil’s fragile sanity.” And then, shall we “rise to snow’s black heart?” Or, “What to offer my friends / this dark poem / with a scent of oranges?” As for the tragedy of states who kill, he ends a Christmas carol with “like a pendulum / the hanged man’s brilliance sways.” Like the finest art, his poem has no ending and must keep haunting us. From all his wild, irreverent, diverse candid pictures, we need a Victor Rodríguez Núñez in our English canon. And now he is with us.”
–Willis Barnstone
“Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is a poet after my own heart, a nomad witness who after the long reasoned zigzag dérive through senses & cities, tropics & topics, stands by de Greiff’s sense that “all journeys, all my journeys, are return journeys.” [...] The poet is indeed a master of the craft of otherness.”
–Pierre Joris
“A Cuban poet who has spent much of his adult life outside Cuba, Rodríguez Núñez takes to all he sees and feels in poetry a consciousness of Cuba as place, as communities, and as a country isolated from his adopted home in America, as a form of restraint and dynamism [...] I cannot speak highly enough of this poet.”
–John Kinsella
“Rodríguez Núñez is one of those remarkable writers who has created a poetry and a world between a first home and culture and the new worlds in which he later finds himself. Beautifully translated, here the range of that work and vision becomes clear, to show him as a Cuban poet —experimental and deeply rooted at once— who carries with him a sense of the new and old wherever he’s located. That he has remained active throughout his writing life as an advocate both for himself and others is another fact of that life worth noting. The pleasure is ours to welcome him into the ever growing pantheon of new world writing.”
–Jerome Rothenberg