Full Description
Garden of Silica is the first poetry anthology of the Uruguayan Ida Vitale to appear in English, spanning eight books published from 1960 to the present. Vitale is one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature, and her work also encompasses essays, short stories, journalism, and translation. She belongs to Uruguay's Critical Generation of the 1940s, whose mission was the construction of a participative intellectual subject. Vitale's poetry illustrates the incompatibility of the construction of that intellectual subject and realism. It is not the case of an idealist aesthetic that denies the existence of objective reality or offers only a testimony of individuality. Rather, these texts seek a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, and accordingly the private and the public. In addition, with a revealing gesture of feminist undertones, intellectual capacity is privileged above that of sentimentality. As a result, Vitale's message is implicit, requiring an active reader, one involved in the very process of creation. Placing the intellectual subject at the forefront, and thus relegating the national and the feminine to a second plane, Ida Vitale's poetry offers one of the most profound and provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Ida Vitale or the Brilliances of the Intellectual Subject
FROM EACH IN HIS NIGHT
This World
Daily Obligations
FROM LISTENER ERRANT
Queen Sphinx
Pallid Signs
One Chooses
Recreational
Backroom
FROM GARDEN OF SILICA
Tracing through Transparency
Natural Fortunes
Distance's Square
Summer
Against Time
Past's Liquid
The Dervish's Answer
Perspective
Homage to Magritte
Nocturnal Wheel
The Hunt, Infinite?
Psalm
Star's Passage
Confirmation of Shadow
At the Speed of Fear
The Blind Machine
Alameda
Garden of Silica
Zoon Politikon
FROM DREAMS OF CONSTANCY
Style
Justice
Composition with Symbols
Residue
Chaos
Efrain's Burial
Destiny
Rest
Story
FROM SEARCH FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE
Moth, Poem
Hummingbird
Rivers
Houses
The Day, A Labyrinth
Destinies
Midday Demon
Equation
Scarcely Concert
Small Kingdom
The Dark Table
I
II
III
Exiles
Still Canto
Cocoon
To Burn, To Quiet
The Lie
The Injured Man's Greeting
Botanica
Laurels
San Miniato
FROM REDUCTION OF THE INfiNITE
Parenthesis, Fragile Home
Culture of Palimpsest
Sums
Slow Obstacles
Salamanders' Mail
Annunciation
The Glory of Philitis
To Arms
Order of Angels
Lunatic Solo, Legitimate Isolation
3
4
FROM BYOBU'S ABCS
A Story
Very Platonic Love
Knots
Anguish
FROM TREMA
Task
Calculated Error
Arrows
Last Night of Some Year
On the Back of the Sky
The Visible God
If Blind
No Saga
Fortune
The Street
Bogota, 2001
New Certainties
Merry-Go-Round
Courtesies
Riches
On the Dark Porch
Return Trip
Perhaps an Explanation
Milan Cafe
Closing
Mining the Wall
Gratitude
