The South American poet
the South American poet demands a context
bitter flowers that stand out from the garden
and at best stimulate the vanished voices
but the long run is twice as somber
a deluge now contains another
like a new tumor after a metastasis
audible solely to a few—
….
translated from the Spanish by Patricio Ferrari | Asymptote© 2024
Juan Arabia is a poet, literary translator, critic, and editor. Born in Buenos Aires, Arabia is also the founder and director of the cultural and literary project Buenos Aires Poetry. He regularly contributes as a critic for Perfil and Revista Ñ of Clarín, one of the most circulated newspapers in the Spanish-speaking world. Among his latest poetry collections, we find Desalojo de la Naturaleza (Eviction of Nature; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), Hacia Carcassonne (Towards Carcassonne; Pre-Textos, 2021), and Bulmenia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022). Arabia gained international recognition with El enemigo de los Thirties (Enemy of the Thirties; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2013), leading to his participation in poetry festivals across Latin America, Europe, and China. He has translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and John Fante, among others, and his poetry has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Romanian. Arabia lives in San Telmo (Buenos Aires) with his wife, designer, and translator Camila Evia, and their son Cátulo.
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. Born in Merlo to Piemontesi and Calabresi immigrants, he left Argentina at the age of sixteen to attend high school and play soccer in the United States as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. His most recent translations include Verde amargo / Bitter Green by Martin Corless-Smith (with Graciela S. Guglielmone; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022), The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa (with Margaret Jull Costa; New Directions, 2023), and Habla terreña (Field Talk) by Frank Stanford (with Guglielmone; Pre-Textos, 2023). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Southwest Review, and Fence, among others. Since 2017, he has resided in New York City, where he is currently working on “Elsehere,” an exophonic trilogy of multilingual poetry. Additionally, he teaches the Master of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence College, collaborates with the Endangered Language Alliance, and hosts the World Poetry in Translation reading series.
Juan Arabia 