Still Life With Flies

Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by G.J. Racz. Spanish/English bilingual edition. "Here we peek in on Chirinos and Racz, two Old Masters in the studio entertaining the muse as she animates a vast tableau across time and space: light and shade square off, layered cities resurrect, and real animals proliferate into art's bestiaries. Here is the language of 'absence and fluttering,' poems where 'anarchist names contend with those / of saints,' all-seeing poems like winged creatures of the tetramorph. Here are sudden illuminations in a breakneck tour of the galleries of Creation, from the primordial soup to the Surrealist salon. In them we find the humble human creator 'meticulously dreaming / every leaf, every petal and every tiny thorn' of rose-poems, willful guests at 'The Party in the Garden of Logos'..."—Kelly Washbourne

G. J. Racz is professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at LIU Brooklyn, review editor for Translation Review, and past president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). In addition to his critical writings on literary translation, Racz has contributed poetry translations to The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry 1980-1996 (Roof Books, 1997), José Lezama Lima: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), and The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Oxford University Press, 2009). Racz edited Three Comedies by Jaime Salom (University Press of Colorado, 2004), in which his translation of the mock-Renaissance farce Rigmaroles appears. Racz's translation of Salom's Callas and Medea was staged by the Thalia Spanish Theatre in New York City in 2013. His translations of the Spanish Golden Age dramatists Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream and Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna were commissioned for the Norton Anthology of Drama (2009). The two works were also published as stand- alone volumes, the former in the Penguin Classics series (2006) and the latter by Yale University Press (2010). His translation of Eduardo Chirinos's The Smoke of Distant Fires was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry Translation in 2013.