Magda Portal tweet poetry

Magda Portal (1900 – 1989) was a Peruvian poet, feminist, author, and political activist.

A key figure in the vanguardia movement in Peru and beyond, she also founded APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) political party with others

You can read the full sonnet here:
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Liberación

Un día seré libre, aún más libre que el viento,
será claro mi canto de audaz liberación
y hasta me habré librado de este remordimiento
secreto que me hunde su astilla al corazón.

Un día seré libre con los brazos abiertos,
con los ojos abiertos y limpios frente al sol,
el Miedo y el Recuerdo no estarán encubiertos
y agazapados para desgarrarme mejor.

Un día seré libre . . . Seré libre presiento,
con una gran sonrisa a flor de corazón,
con una gran sonrisa como no tengo hoy.
Y ya no habrá la sombra de mi remordimiento,
el cobarde silencio que merma mi Emoción.
Un día habré logrado la verdad de mi Yo!


You can find the full poem in a translation by Liz Henry here http://bookmaniac.org/poetry/antologia/magda-portal/liberacion/

Harawi poetry

Harawi poetry derives from the time of the Incas and is found in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia - it combines traditional Andean Music and lyric poetry.

Harawi poetry speak of deep feelings - love, and those who don't love us, the harshness of life sung over melodies mainly in minor key played on the quena (a type of flute). 

Although original Incan lyrics are extant, today you are more likely to hear examples from the mestizo genre yaravi - which connects to the Spanish/Moorish troubadour tradition of poetry and accompanying music. This was formalised by the short-lived revolutionary poet Mariano Melgar (Lorenzo Mariano Melgar Valdiviezo) (1790 - 1815) as a way of expressing traditional Peruvian independence of form in opposition to European culture and norms.

The music of the form influenced Messiaen and was sampled by Simon and Garfunkel. You can find some example of yaravi - the Spanish form here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4EM5mOLoaw (familiar) and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyr0pMa3-zc&feature=related. And more on the yaravi form here http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarav%C3%AD_Arequipe%C3%B1o and Mariano Melgar here http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariano_Melgar.

Un crucero a las Islas Galápagos

Tony Frazer - to whom we send a big shout for publishing Spanish language poetry - from Shearsman is publishing this book from Antonio Cisneros the Peruvian poet who died last year: this is a bilingual edition too - thank you...this is what we like at p&g - and translated by William Rowe.

Shearsman describe it this way: and for a change I will include this in total because the book sounds irresistible

A Cruise to the Galapagos Islands was the last book published by Antonio Cisneros. The book has the subtitle, New Marian Songs (nuevos cantos marianos) and consists of 25 prose poems that invoke the Virgin as protector in danger, not in order to escape from fear but so as to traverse the zones of greatest anxiety, without turning the gaze away from catastrophe. The themes of shipwreck, illness, and death occur alongside intense alertness of the skin to the prick of an insulin injection, the feel of salt on things that flash through the slit of a skirt, or the body sensitized to the prickle of a woolly blanket on a hot night. This absolute physical aliveness causes the image of the Virgin to give way to a shipwrecked man’s vision of a bar with pints of beer coming towards him over the sea.

More from Shearsman and you can buy the book here http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/cisneros.html and find out more about Cisneros here http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Cisneros

Calling Spanish English translators, Cisneros has only in a stub on Wiki in English - p&g will try and get round to translating the substantial Spanish entry for him but busy over here at the moment so good oppportunity for our collection of geeks to try their hand at wiki-ing in the cause of poetry

Snippet

distant yet never so close
we walk a sinking earth
lying down on her or simply standing
we feel the bucking of time...

Read the full poem here http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/7/Distant_Yet_Never_So_Close