Ida Vitale, Katherine M. Hedeen (Trans.) & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Trans.)

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Biographical note:  Ida Vitale (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1923) is one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature. Vitale has authored some thirty books, among which poetry prevails. From her first collection The Light of this Memory (1949) to her most recent Trema (2005), her poetry constructs an intellectual, participative subject that relegates the national and the feminine to a second plane. Thus, Vitale offers one of the most profound and provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714650
ISBN:  9781844714650
Author:  Ida Vitale
Title:  Garden of Silica
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  06-Jan-10
Extent:  140pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  210 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  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. Her work seeks a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, privileges intellectual capacity above that of sentimentality, and requires an active reader. Placing the intellectual subject at the forefront, Vitale's poetry offers one of the most provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.

Main 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.

Table of 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

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Excerpt from book:  

Against Time

There, in the indecisiveness leading
to the dead woman's posthumous room
they placed the lily of the valley's snow.
I waited silently
to see if it would sing meanings
a lute that in the nakedness of infancy
was going to tell stories without safeguard,
offer an omen's trepidation.
But it was a drop of silence,
                              so we would quiet,
simply
sumptuously.
Its music,
           constellation of white,
diamond,
         placid silver bell,
still plays transparently,
above, against time,
among lights.

Unpublished endorsement:  An undeniable purpose of austerity… a sacred fear of the emphatic… an always contained impulse

Mario Benedetti (winner of the Reina Sofía Prize, 1999)

Unpublished endorsement:  Ida Vitale lingers in words, scrutinizes them, peers at them, respects them. She knows what they are and they become matter of her art… She is capable of nurturing and making flower a garden of silica

Rafael Courtoisie, author of The Red Sea