Save Twilight ― Selected Poems

World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortázar was also a prolific poet who, in his final months in Paris, assembled his life's work in verse. This new, expanded edition ofSave Twilight, with over twenty-five newly translated poems, is a distillation of Cortázar's selection, a bilingual survey of his poetry ranging through various voices, moods, and styles. From free verse to fixed forms, the intimately lyrical to the social-historical, Cortázar is revealed as a virtuoso stylist and a poet of intense personal passion, yet alsotypical of his works in prosea subverter of genres in his playful approach to the book as literary artifact. InSave Twilight, the author interrupts the high seriousness of poetic art with interludes of earnestly irreverent commentary on the process of selection, turning this volume of collected verse into a game in which the reader is invited to participate as editor-in-progress.

The power of eros, the enduring beauty of art, and the tragic folly of politics are some of the recurrent themes. Informed by his immersion in world literature, music, art, and history, but most of all his own emotional geography, Cortázar's poetry traces his paradoxical evolution from provincial Argentinian sophisticate to cosmopolitan Parisian Romantic, always maintaining the sense of astonishment of an artist surprised by life.

Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentinian parents, raised in Argentina, and spent his most productive years in Paris, where he died in 1984.