El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
November, 2018Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmen Brannon Vega, 1899-1974) is one of El Salvador’s most important and beloved poets. She is required reading in many Salvadoran schools, and several schools have been named in her honor. I first came to know her work in the 1990s, when I worked with a human rights organization in El Salvador: whenever I asked about poets, the reply included Lars, and I was delighted to discover that many of the Salvadorans I met had one or more of her poems memorized. As Stephen Tapscott notes, Lars was “a writer of integrity and continuity whose example and generosity toward younger writers, especially young woman poets, made her a beloved—and even symbolically maternal—figure in Latin American poetry.”
Born to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, she was raised bilingual, and she learned French in Catholic school. Her youth was spent in the Salvadoran countryside reading Shakespeare, Jules Verne, and Lorca. She eventually translated a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into Spanish. Though she never traveled to Ireland, she retained a strong sense of connection to what she called “the land of my song.” Her “two bloods” (as Gabriela Mistral writes in a famous letter) became an important theme in her work. Over the course of thirteen volumes of poetry, her poetics expand from an early reliance on the sonnet, ballad, and lira to uniquely-voiced explorations in free verse.
It feels important to bring Lars’s work into English. Beyond the remarkable language and the many worlds brought into view, these poems offer a fresh glimpse of a country many of us in the United States think we know. El Salvador has long been in the news, at first because of the brutal civil war and later because of the U.N.-brokered ceasefire and elections. More recently, violence (in particular gang violence) has garnered headlines. Through it all, the U.S. has played a devastating and disproportionate role, whether by supporting the military governments of the 1980s or by deporting gang members in the years after the war. While such developments have kept the country in our sights, I have always felt that it is too easy to attend to the disasters. We should bear witness to them, certainly, and Lars herself takes note (in a poem like “Crumbs”) as her country veers toward civil war. But the danger is that we let the catastrophes define the country and thereby narrow our sense of the world beyond our borders. What Lars’s work offers is a glimpse of a woman’s mind at work in the years before the tumultuous events of recent decades. Her concerns are worldly, spiritual, and lyrical; her verse offers the perspective of a poet who looks at the world around her—and into the future that is coming—with a longing and hopefulness that strike me as fundamentally and importantly human.
- Philip Pardi
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Francisco Gavidia (1863-1955) was a well-respected public figure in El Salvador known for his work as a writer, politician, lawyer, historian, educator, and journalist. His wide-ranging body of work includes everything from poetry and plays to music, pedagogy, and literary translation. In 1964, the Salvadoran government created a medal for intellectual merit named after Gavidia, to be awarded each year to a Central American writer or journalist who has made significant cultural contributions.
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Vicente Acosta (1867-1908) was a Salvadoran poet, professor, and politician. He was widely published in Salvadoran journals and magazines, and in 1904 founded La Quincena, a journal of scientific and cultural studies.
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Susana Reyes earned a master’s degree in Estudios de la Cultura Centroamericana with an emphasis in literature before working at several universities in El Salvador as a professor. She currently teaches at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas UCA. Reyes ran the now-defunct Escuela para Jóvenes Talento en Letras, a workshop for young writers; co-hosted the radio program La Bohemia on YSUK during the 1990s; and has participated in various theatrical productions, and led numerous theatrical workshops. She has also participated in investigations regarding the state of both literature at large and literature written by women in El Salvador. She is the literature editor of Índole Editores, belongs to the Grupo Literario Poesía y Más, serves as the current president of the Claribel Alegría Foundation, and directs the literary workshop Palabra y Obra.
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Krisma Mancía was born in El Salvador in 1980. She has studied literature at the University of El Salvador, theater at La Escuela Arte del Actor, and sculpture and ceramics at the National Center of the Arts in El Salvador. She has also participated in the workshop La Casa del Escritor of El Salvador under the tutelage of Rafael Menjívar Ochoa. She is the author of La era del llanto, from Colección Nuevapalabra, published under the DPI imprint (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos); Viaje al Imperio de las Ventanas Cerradas, which was awarded first place in the international La Garúa prize for young poetry and was published in 2006 by La Garúa Press in Barcelona, Spain; Nueva Cosecha, with Editorial Casa de Poesía de Costa Rica; and Pájaros imaginarios y trenes invisibles entre tu ciudad y la mía, edited by Valparaíso de España and published by the Editorial Municipal de la Alcaldía de San Salvador. For more poetry and information, please visit https://krismatica.wordpress.com.
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Aída Párraga is a Salvadorean poet.
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