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Tamara Kamenszain
Men and Women Alone / Solos y solas (Available October 2010)
Translated by Cecilia Rossi
ISBN 978-1-906742-27-0
£9.00
| Tamara Kamenszain was born in Buenos Aires and is one of Argentina’s leading poets and essayists. She is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as four essay collections. She was awarded a number of prizes, such as Primer Premio Municipal de Ensayo (First Municipal Prize) and Tercer Premio Nacional (First National Prize) for her essay collections, a Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship, the Premio Konex for Poetry, and the Pablo Neruda Medalla de Honor from the Chilean government. Her works have been totally or partially translated into English, French, Portuguese and German. She has worked as advisor to various publishing houses and as Director of Extra Mural Activities for the University of Buenos Aires. She has taught at various higher education institutions in Argentina, Mexico and the US. Currently she teaches at the Argentine branch of New York University. | |
| Cecilia Rossi was born in Buenos Aires. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. She has taught literary translation at MA level at both Middlesex University and the University of East Anglia, where she still teaches. Her original poetry has appeared in various journals such as New Welsh Review and Poetry Wales, as well as anthologised in The Pterodactyl’s Wing (Parthian, 2003). Her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry into English have won various awards, including First Prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition and a commendation in the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, and have appeared in Comparative Criticism, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Alejandra, a volume of essays published by Syracuse University Press. She is currently on the editorial committee of In Other Words, the journal for literary translators. | |
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This first English translation of Solos y solas consolidates Tamara Kamenszain’s status as one of Argentina’s senior poets, and introduces her arresting, thought-provoking work to new audiences. The poems of Men and Women Alone explore the lives of single men and women: their blind dates; their meetings both planned and casual, realized and frustrated. In this hesitant new world of postmodern urban matchmaking it’s no longer possible to strive for the elusive wedding ring — what do I see when I see something in the name of gold? It’s not going to be the names of the spouses: all the poet can strive for is the sheltering word — or tent-word in Michael Hamburger’s rendering of Celan’s wonderfully suggestive Zeltwort. For to write poetry for Kamenszain is to visit the desert and start afresh, to begin by ‘tenting it’ yet remain always focused on building, in order to one day inhabit — and own — the house of poetry.
Work published within the framework of ‘Sur’ Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic.
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