BROWSE Columns
✕
Primero
Que nada:
Me complace
Enormísimamente
Ser
Un buen
Poeta
De segunda
Del
Tercer
Mundo
First
of all:
I am very pleased
excited
to be
a good
poet
second-class
from
the Third
World
An enemy of the mounted police, the petty bourgeoisie and its publicist poets, Efraín Huerta (1914-1982) devoted poems to Hemingway, "Che" Guevara, Roque Dalton and Javier Heraud, among many others, as well as to landscapes of Puebla and Oaxaca, avenues, streets and old bars of Mexico City. He recommended, long before Charles Bukowski, that poets should drink to infinity, "until the black night and the sour dawn." A large part of his work, however, stands outside that darkness and melancholy. These are the “poemínimos”, which may be considered homologous to the antipoetry and artifacts of Nicanor Parra.
Juan Arabia is a poet, translator and literary critic. Born in Buenos Aires in 1983, he is founder and director of the cultural and literary project Buenos Aires Poetry. Arabia is also in-house literary critic for the Cultural Supplement of Diario Perfil and Revista Ñ of Diario Clarín. Among his most recent poetry titles are Desalojo de la Naturaleza [Eviction of Nature] (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), Hacia Carcassonne [Towards Carcassonne] (Pre-Textos, 2021), and Bulmenia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022). After the publication of El enemigo de los Thirsties [Enemy of the Thirties] (2015), awarded in France, Italy, and Macedonia, Juan participated in several poetry festivals in Latin America, Europe, and China. In 2018, on behalf of Argentina, he was invited to the “Voix vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée” poetry festival in Sète (France). The following year he became the second Latin American poet to be invited to the “Poetry Comes to Museum LXI,” sponsored by the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum. Arabia has translated works by Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, and Dan Fante, among others. Two of his books have been translated into French (L’Océan Avare, trad. Jean Portante, Al Manar, 2018) and Italian (Verso Carcassonne, trad. Mattia Tarantino, Raffaelli Editore, 2022). He lives in San Telmo (Buenos Aires) with his wife — the designer, poet, and literary translator Camila Evia — and son Cátulo.
