Juan Bañuelos, Katherine M. Hedeen (Trans.) & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Trans.)

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Biographical note:  Juan Bañuelos (Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, 1932) is one of today’s most popular Mexican poets. He has published eleven books of poetry and has received the Chiapas Prize (Mexico, 1984), the Palermo Prize (Italy, 1987), and the José Lezama Lima Prize (Cuba, 2004), among others. He is also a renowned editor and university professor. His poems have been translated into numerous languages, and now here, for the first time, English.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715206
ISBN:  9781844715206
Author:  Juan Bañuelos
Title:  Blue Coyote with Guitar
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Dec-10
Extent:  152pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  228 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:  Appearing for the first time in English, Blue Coyote with Guitar and Other Songs, by renowned Mexican poet Juan Bañuelos, creates an alternative poetics that rejects individualism, defies nationalism, and opts for the alterity of the most marginalized social subjects in modern Mexico, the Indigenous population, whose cultures increasingly determine this poetry’s vision of the world.

Main description:  Blue Coyote with Guitar and Other Songs is the first anthology to appear in English by the renowned Mexican poet, Juan Bañuelos (Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, 1932). From its beginnings to its most recent manifestations, this poetry assumes a predominantly dissident stance. In both content and form, the poet’s craft is carried out against the tide of recolonization that has washed over his country since the mid-forties. Among the foremost elements of this alternative poetics is its rejection of individualism, one of the ideological pillars of modernization. Another key factor is the way it challenges the nationalism instrumental in the co-optation of the Mexican Revolution, one of the twentieth century’s most radical struggles, which, in turn, constitutes a questioning of the comprador class and its exclusionary national project. Lastly, it opts for the alterity of the most marginalized social subjects in modern Mexico, the Indigenous population, whose cultures increasingly determine Bañuelos’s poetic vision of the world, moving beyond contemplation and seeking participation.

Table of contents:
Juan Bauelos, the Poet as Indigenous
From Doors of the World
Images for a Surprise
Naked First-Born
This Eve and Its Old Nomads in White
Diamond Wind
Tripping Stone
From I Write on Walls
Immediate Prophecy
Endlessly Among Men
Prehistory
Stone Song
With the Rain and Its Pale Sound of Ferns
Hunger Strike
From Smoking Mirror
Phrases
Definitive Fable
An Hour in Our Face
The Desert of the Cross
Day of the Dead
The Heart of Us All
Waiting Room
A Prisoner Dreams
Satire with a Waltz Ending
Unanimous
Rifle, Leaf Shaking the Entire Tree
Skin of Time
Inlet
So They Might Hear Our Steps
The Descent on the Moon
From Random Destination
Where Stones Move Toward the Day
Perversity of Separation
Coitus Non Interruptus
The Suicide
From Off the Record
Off the Record
From Blue Coyote with Guitar
Blue Coyote with Guitar
Palimpsest
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter XIII: Owl Puzzle
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XIX
From Neighborswithnocondos
Melancholy in the Scale of Being
Aegean Sea Canticle
No One Lives in My Country Now
From Nomads of the Aurora Borealis
Pilgrims of Oxchuc
Mutations
The Mail of Forests
Pap Solito

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Excerpt from book:  

With the Rain and Its Pale Sound of Ferns
The whale is only the dream of the shipwrecked.
But I do not speak of sea. What dreams is the rain.

With spasm of sponge
Light is extinguished while it rains,
Time sleeps while it rains,
While it rains sand is a rider
Over the prints we leave.
Windows suddenly fall
With the faces in them long ago forgotten.
There is nothing but the gallop and horseshoe
Of wet earth and ants,
Evening’s sad mouth
Left like a glove upon the ice,
The bark with no one and what takes place,
But foam and scales of an evening
Dressed brutally,
When among tumbles words splinter
And desire tramples bones and flesh.

How doggedly I am shattered while it rains,
Because I rain so very deep and helpless
I am nothing more than this building
Collapsing at moments
When I close my eyes.
And I’m sniffed out, mercilessly, by the snout
Of everything that rains.

And it’s clear that it’s raining.
And it’s evening. And it’s rain.
And it rains and rains and rains.

Unpublished endorsement:  The sign that corresponds to Bañuelos is Thunder…but it is not born from above, rather it sprouts from the Earth.

Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1990

Unpublished endorsement:  Bañuelos doesn’t go to the people, he is the people, from their place, from its humility and glow, from exploitation, hunger, poverty. Juan knows how to extract beauty and hope from everything, and that is a miracle.

Juan Gelman