Mundar / To World. Mundar
Poetry , 2007
Ed. Visor
‘Death is lying when it says Juan Gelman’s no longer here. He’s still alive in all of us who loved him, in all of us who read him, in all of us who’ve heard in his voice what’s deepest inside of us. We’ll never find words to express our gratitude to the man who was many, who was us, and still is, in the words he left us.’ —Eduardo Galeano
In To World, poems interrogate everything: nature, society, and thought itself, with no prejudice or even principle. In other words, they don’t follow any rule, tradition, or discipline; they are decidedly critical. Thought is not reduced to philosophical, ethical, religious, political, or aesthetic interpretations. Rather, we are before thought in its totality, unwilling to recognize borders — although never in a pure state, not falling into speculation, into thinking just for thinking’s sake. Thought is always related to experience, both personal and collective, and above all, emotion. It never once stops being thought through image, that is to say, lyrical. This poetry speaks of poetry; it takes it all on: the objective and subjective, the real and imagined, I and other. It ventures into virgin territory, on the outskirts of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. Always a model of rebelliousness and freedom, a lesson in devotion and rigor, Gelman’s work places him among today’s best poets.