Francisco Urondo’s poems speak from beyond the grave, rebuking the forces of repression that ended his life in the early stages of the Argentine Dirty War. His poems burn with life, speaking in the language of that moment, a “Milonga of the Marginalized Paranoid,” but also as a messenger of passionate, eternal truths: “I will give my life so that nothing continues as it is.” Julia Leverone’s translations from Spanish bring Urondo’s voice, his time, his brief existence, to life on the page. —Jesse Lee Kercheval, translator The Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia A fierce poet and a just as fierce revolutionary, Urondo breaks free from the false dichotomies of social commitment and formal experimentation. This poetry is stripped-down, powerful, uncompromising…a long time coming. Thanks to Julia Leverone’s skilled selection and translation, we can finally know it in English.
—Katherine M. Hedeen, translator of With a Strange Scent of World, by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Urondo, a militant and a poet, once claimed to have taken up arms because he was looking for the right word. Julia Leverone has found the right selection of Urondo’s words in these pages, and in so doing has armed English with a powerful new voice. —Geoffrey Brock, Editor-in-Chief, The Arkansas International