Poemas de la Isla
De la Torre, now 93 and living in Madrid, was born in the Canary Islands and was among the original members of the “generation of ’27”—the Latino Bloomsbury Group that included such stars as Buñuel, Salinas, and Lorca. Since those heady days, de la Torre has vanished from the literary scene and her poems, most of them written in the 1920s and ’30s, have fallen into obscurity. She has lamented this fate most notably in her poem “Medida del tiempo”: “And though it may happen / that the winds of fate will bring us together again / I don’t know in which city that will be / and if a day will come / when I feel discovered again.” The present bilingual edition, with translations by Carlos Reyes, is thus offered as an overdue re-issue of several unfairly neglected masterpieces. The evidence of the poems, however, does not support this contention. The lyrics share a restricted lexicon of shore, sun, moon, and wind. The poet dances on the beach, sports with wavelets, and searches the horizon for the barques of far-off lovers. The tone is hushed and somnolent throughout, with an adolescent’s awe of the poet’s task, and the few attempts at metaphor are so frail they barely even register: “Over the sea, under the sky, / come all the dense white sails, / unfurled in the air, golden and transparent.” To say that Reyes has ably translated these lines is merely to congratulate his feel for insipid language. Whether the unwarranted unearthing of these poems should be chalked up to a translator’s idiosyncratic obsession—in his introduction Reyes claims to have searched for de la Torre over a 12-year period—or the snaky pathways of academic politics, is open to speculation: either way, this is no Laocoön. --Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.