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 Excilia
Saldaña
1946-1999
"In the Vortex of the Cyclone": Selected Poems by Excilia
Saldaña: A Bilingual Edition
Overview
"A wonderful book, strong, with enormous energy, fast-paced, truly
poetic, with a varied and rich vocabulary ranging from the vernacular to
the exalted. This is poetry to be said aloud, sometimes chanted, sometimes
shouted, sometimes sung . . . a book that is both original and
significant."--Cola Franzen, translator of Horses in the Air and
Other Poems, by Jorge Guillen
"A much-needed contribution to Afro-Cuban and Caribbean
studies."--Vera M. Kutzinski, Yale University
The first-ever bilingual anthology by the Afro-Cuban poet Excilia
Saldaña contains a wide-ranging selection of her work, from lullabies to
an erotic letter, from lengthy autobiographical poems to quiet reflections
on her Caribbean island as the inspiration for her writing. She celebrates
her African ancestry with poems that are filled with the flora and fauna
of Afro-Cuban rituals. She explores her feminine rites of passage in the
context of her country's momentous journey. In these poems, Saldana weaves
the personal, the mythical, and the literary, bringing together the
domestic with the transcendental, the temporal with the eternal.
Known in Cuba as a poet, essayist, translator, and professor, Saldana
won the prestigious Nicholas Guillen Award for Distinction in Poetry in
1998 and the La Rosa Blanca Prize for La Noche, a children's book,
in 1989. Before her death in 1999, most of her work had appeared in
Spanish exclusively in Cuba with only scattered translations. This
collection emphasizes her construction of a personal and poetic
autobiography to reveal the identity of one of the best Afro-Caribbean
poets of the twentieth century.
Contents:
Foreword by Nancy Morejon
Introduction by Flora Gonzalez Mandri
Anonymous Landscape
The Wife's Monologue
Through the Looking Glass
Lullabies: Lullaby for an Elephant Out for a Stroll, Lullaby for the
Child-Cosmos, Lullaby for My Naughty Child, Lullaby for the Missing
Daughter
I'm Thirsty, Grandmother
My Faithful One
My Name (A Family Anti-Elegy)
Unfinished Danzon for Night and Island
Afterword by Cintio Vitier
Flora Gonzalez Mandri is associate professor of writing, literature,
and publishing at Emerson College, Boston.
Rosamond Rosenmeier is professor emerita at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston.
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