Poetry
Vertical Poetry
Poesía vertical
Roberto Juarroz · 1958
Synopsis
Numbered poems without titles, which Biografías y Vidas describes as running to three to five stanzas of about twenty lines, in a direct and concise style. The same themes recur: identity, death, language, the relation of the self to the world, in a poetry of doubt that seeks the real beneath its surface. Juarroz, quoted by IntraMed, linked the title to the image of a fall, from the leaf to the universe, followed by a rebound that opens an ascent. The sources describe the whole series rather than the 1958 volume alone.
Context
The first volume appeared in 1958; thirteen others with the same title and a serial number followed, the fourteenth posthumously in 1997, and a fifteenth appeared, edited by his widow, Laura Cerrato. The magazine he edited until 1965, twenty issues, was founded in the same year, 1958. Fernand Verhesen translated him into French as early as 1962, then Roger Munier, and W. S. Merwin into English in 1977. Octavio Paz hailed in each poem a surprising verbal crystallisation.
Who it is for
Short poems in Spanish, untitled, to be read one at a time; translated into French by Verhesen and by Munier.
Prizes and reception
The single title of a body of work pursued from 1958 until its author's death, in numbered volumes.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.