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SEQUENCE:18945242
CREATED:20180104T010900Z
DESCRIPTION:Victor Serge (1890-1947) played many parts, as he recounts in his indelible 
 Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, 
 Serge was a young anarchist in Paris, a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona, a 
 Bolshevik in Petrograd, a Comintern agent in Central Europe, a comrade of 
 Trotsky, a prisoner of Stalin, a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico . . . 
 He was also a the author of a series of “witness novels,” as well as a 
 poet in the great arc of French poetry from Baudelaire to Surrealism. Like 
 other poets in that tradition, Serge was in essence a deeply politicized 
 poète maudit, a critical outsider, or, in his words, “a torn man of 
 Eurasia.”\n\nIn A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems, Serge bears witness 
 to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of 
 totalitarian rule; much of the poetry was written during the “immense 
 shipwreck” of Stalin’s ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, 
 Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico City, Serge composed 
 elegies for the fallen who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter 
 disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth 
 century. A Blaze in a Desert includes Serge’s one published book, 
 Resistance (1938), and an unpublished manuscript, Messages (1946), as well 
 as his last poem, “Hands,” written the day before his death in Mexico 
 City.\n\n“Victor Serge was a major novelist, a revolutionary, and a 
 historical witness, so it is perhaps not surprising that his poetry has 
 been overlooked. But his poetry is for real. It is as grounded in specifics 
 as you might expect from a fighter in some of the twentieth century’s 
 great struggles, and as visionary as you’d hope from a disciple of 
 Rimbaud and a friend to the Surrealists. Reading it is like coming upon an 
 unsuspected corridor in the house of literature. James Brook’s lucid 
 translation does it full justice.” -- Luc Sante, author of The Other 
 Paris\n\nJames Brook is a poet whose translations include works by Guy 
 Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu Naum, and Benjamin Péret. He is the principal 
 editor of Resisting the Virtual Life (with Iain Boal) and Reclaiming San 
 Francisco (with Chris Carlsson and Nancy J. Peters). The New York Times 
 named his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Prone Gunman a 
 Notable Book.\n\nLuis Cernuda (1902-1963) was a leading member of Spain’s 
 fabled Generation of 1927. In 1938, during the civil war, he left the 
 country, never to return. He lived in Great Britain for most of the next 
 decade, migrated to New England, where he taught at Mount Holyoke College, 
 and spent the last eleven years of his life in Mexico. In the 1961-62 
 academic year he taught literature at San Francisco State, and in 1962-63 
 at UCLA. Cernuda’s triple alienation as a poet, an exile, and an openly 
 gay man, combined with his great lyric gift, have given his poetry enormous 
 resonance with poets and readers in Spain and Latin America and made him 
 one of the most influential and revered modern poets in the 
 Spanish-speaking world.\nForbidden Pleasures: New Selected Poems is Stephen 
 Kessler’s generous selection from Cernuda’s work up to 1950, to 
 complement his earlier translations of Desolation of the Chimera: Last 
 Poems and Written in Water: Prose Poems. From early experiments with 
 surrealism through the increasingly classical clarity and eloquence of his 
 years of exile, Cernuda explores themes of desire, beauty, heartbreak, 
 time, fate, and nostalgia with a love-hate longing for his native 
 Andalucía and grief for his country through the horror and tragedy of war 
 and dictatorship.\n\nStephen Kessler is a poet, essayist, editor, and 
 translator whose versions of Luis Cernuda have received a Lambda Literary 
 Award, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of 
 American Poets, and the PEN Center USA Translation Award. His translation 
 of Save Twilight: Selected Poems by Julio Cortázar received a Northern 
 California Book Award. He is also the editor and principal translator of 
 The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. www.stephenkessler.com\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/01/03/18805659.php
SUMMARY:Two Revolutionaries Who Were Also Poets - Serge and Cernuda
LOCATION:The Green Arcade\n1680 Market Street\nSan Francisco, CA  94102
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/01/03/18805659.php
DTSTART:20180125T030000Z
DTEND:20180125T043000Z
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