Birnam Wood: El Bosque de Birnam (Bilingual Edition Spanish English)

by Jose Manuel Cardona, Hélène Cardona (Translator), Andrés Neuman (Introduction)

Overview

Bilingual English-Spanish edition. "Birnam Wood embodies the self in the world of myth with its attendant themes of tragedy and fate. If the water of exile is longing, the cup brims over in these sun-shattered works of diaspora. Cardona is an essential twentieth-century Spanish poet. His poems journey toward an ever-receding home."-Marsha de la O.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912561186
Publisher:	Salmon Publishing
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

José Manuel Cardonais a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the author of El Vendimiador (Atzavara, 1953), Poemas a Circe (Adonais, 1959), and El Bosque de Birnam: Antología poética (Consell Insular d'Eivissa, 2007).

He was co-editor of several literary journals and wrote for many publications. He participated in the II Congreso de Poesía in Salamanca and belonged to the Cántico group.

The Franco regime forced him into exile in France. He holds PhDs in literature and humanities (University of Nancy), and political sciences (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva). Hewrote his thesis on the Mexican revolution at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica de Madrid and is an attorney (University of Barcelona).

He worked for the United Nations most of his life, in Geneva, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia, Kiev, Tbilisi, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Panama, among many places.

Hélène Cardona is the author of seven books, most recently the award-winning Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves, and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), winner of a Hemingway Grant, Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux), and Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb.

She has judged the 2017 Jacar Press Full Length Competition, 2016 PEN Center USA Translation Award, 2015 Writer's Digest Challenge, and 2014 Rabindranath Tagore Award. She taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. Her work has been translated into 15 languages. She co-edits Plume, Fulcrum, and Levure Littéraire.

What People are Saying About This

Author of Mexico in My Heart, New and Selected Poems - Willis Barnstone

"Like the great Spanish poets of his time, he takes from 16th and 17th century poets, from Saint John of the Cross to Luis de Góngora to Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca."

Author of The Foundling Wheel - Blas Falconer

"The lush and mystical poetry of José Manuel Cardona's Birnam Wood is firmly rooted in the world of classical mythology as a means of articulating what is human and timeless."

Author of The Book of Men - Dorianne Laux

"From the ghostly amphora that languish at sea bottom "like soft fish that escaped/ the potter's greedy love" to the impulse "to tell how yesterday's solitude was", Hélène Cardona's translations are revelations of language and image, a voice dipped in clear water and wrung through her careful hands."

Author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood - Christopher Merrill

"It's possible things are not/ as we wished them to be," José Manuel Cardona writes in BirnamWood, a superb account of his travels around the world in the service of poetry. Exploring the consequences of the fact that "Only man is capable of destroying/ what he never created/ and he along believes belong to him," he creates a rival system of belief, which depends upon his vivid imagery, sophisticated ear, and wisdom borne of experience, all of which his daughter, Hélène, a gifted poet in her own right, has gracefully preserved in her translations. This selection of his poems, spanning the length of an illustrious career, are everything we might wish them to be.

Author of Traveler of the Century - Andres Neuman

"These are poems of solid classical diction, keenly aware of the rich traditions that precede it, where mythology, travel or personal memory represent starting points for erotic and metaphysical reflection. Time and space are malleable matter in the hands of the author, whose social commitment blends naturally into the lyrical song."

Editorial Reviews

There’s something about Spanish poetry, this particular poetry, where nothing appears lost in translation. Its bold, declarative tone, elevated content, mystical moments, contemplation, and fire show through in Spanish and now English. Especially memorable are the 20 poems to Circe.

The Washington Independent Review of Books - Grace Cavalieri

One of the most impressive collections of poetry I’ve read in recent years. It is a work that can sit easily beside Seferis’s great poems of exile and return, or beside Elytis’s gigantic sequence of the Albanian campaign. This is Europe yearning: ‘Exalted were you in my dreams,/ Almost inaccessible like an island/ Sought and sought for years.’

Poetry International - Thomas McCarthy

"Cardona is a deeply engagé poet embodying human suffering in Spain as elsewhere. A spirited, inspired translation by José Manuel Cardona's daughter, the polyglot American poet Hélène Cardona."

California Quarterly - Margaret Saine

"Hélène Cardona is a seasoned translator. She has provided a service in sharing her father's work with us in English, shedding additional light on that generation of Spanish poets who were forced into exile from their country. She lets us feel the pain of distance and separation as well as of life in new places."

The Ofi Press Magazine - Don Cellini

"In years, I have not read a poetry more expansive, gripping, and beautiful for the true music of language. I have been enthusiastically revitalized by the recent encounter with the poetry of José Manual Cardona, masterfully translated by his daughter, poet Hélène Cardona. In her hands, Birnam Wood sings to us in a rendering that is lush and passionate."

The Iowa Source - Rustin Larson

"Hélène Cardona has produced a very fine translation in 'Birnam Wood', a collection of her father's poetry of travel and experience, the Ibiza poet, José Manuel Cardona, rich in language, metaphor and imagery. A lovely book and a must for students and poetry-lovers alike."

Galway Western Writers' Centre - Fred Johnston

"When you take down a book by a master poet like José Cardona you are, while reading his work, reliving, at least for a short spell, the magic of the great moderns and ancients. Hélène Cardona's translation of her father's work must be the crowning achievement so far in her own poetic career. For he reads in English as poetry, not as mere translation. I can't offer better praise then this."

Levure Litteraire - Peter O'Neill