Hoy / Today
Poetry , 2013
Seix Barral
Today (Hoy) is the final book published during the life of one of Latin America's most important and celebrated poets. Written as both a reckoning and a reflection following the 2011 sentencing of those responsible for disappearing Gelman's son Marcelo in 1976 during Argentina's Dirty War, Today's 288 prose poems vacillate between the depths of anguish and celebrations of the day, as the poet wrestles with being, loss, and the central paradox of much of his late verse: the injustice inherent in knowing anything that exists can't help being fully itself, while simultaneously mired in a process of becoming that has no attainable endpoint. Surprising, beautiful, and relentlessly questioning, Gelman's poetry pushes language's capacity for expression to its absolute limit. Readers will find the poems of Today a treasure trove—rich, moving, musical, and full of complex ideas, lingering imagery, and stunning turns of phrase.
"Grief and crushing darkness are the inescapable companions of these poems, whose world appears to be as fractured as the grammar and form of Juan Gelman's spare and concentrated verse. In this barbaric place where children are disappeared, where pain never ends and justice is ambivalent, the "poem of harsh lineage" and "unsheltered words" just may find, however, "perfection in the loss." —Sidney Wade
"Juan Gelman's last book is a work that grieves, that savors grief, personal and collective. Or more aptly, as ars poetica, these poems find the impulse to grieve deep in poetry itself as Gelman has written: "I've never been the owner of my ashes, my poems. [...] These elegant, chisel's edge inscriptions read like epigrams, like the very first epigrams, which were epitaphs engraved on tombs. The real compression in this poetry—always total—is that "the enormity of the pain covers nothing." —Michelle Gil-Montero
"I find it hard to read Hoy/Today without crying, but it's the kind of crying that's good for you. Full of sadness and beauty, spelling out loss and redemption, and absences remembered, the running verses of Juan Gelman's Hoy speak of longing, singing with sentiment and love." —Sergio Waisman
"This urgent, luminous text is doubly haunted: the poems by the murder of the poet's son, the translations by the death in 2014 of the poet himself." —Geoffrey Brock