ISBN: 978-1-7363248-9-9
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 162
A bilingual Spanish/English edition of poetry by Venezuelan surrealist Vicente Gerbasi who died in 1992. In this volume, Guillermo Parra translates Gerbasi's early and late poems.
Born in 1913 in Canaobo in Venezuela, Vicente Gerbasi was a member of the surrealist Grupo Viernes and published many books of poetry. His later works were mainly published by Monte Avila Editores. His Obra Poetica was published in 1986 by Biblioteca Ayacucho. He was also an ambassador for Venezuela, to Haiti (1959), Israel (1960- 64), Denmark, Norway and Poland (1969-71). He received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Carabobo in 1984. He died in Caracas in 1992.
Parra is an American poet and translator who was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970. His translations include The Conspiracy by Israel Centeno (Phoneme Media, 2017), Selected Works by Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre (Noemi Press, 2016), and Air on the Air: Selected Poems of Juan Sanchez Pealed (Black Square Editions, 2016). His own work is published in Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009) and Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006).
The Portable Gerbasi by Vicente Gerbasi translated by Guillermo Parra
Vicente Gerbasi marks a unique moment in Venezuelan and Latin American poetry: the birth of a contemporary verse that associates the best of our Baroque and our Modernismo to a material and profound imagination of the Americas. Gerbasi paints his astonishment before the American wilderness with accents where we can simultaneously hear the discourse of the autochthonic and the voice of the European other, as part of an unsettling dialogue, an unsettling alterity.