John Gelman, the great poet. died a few days ago
and a part of Argentina lost its soul.
Juan Gelman, an Argentine poet who challenged the petty and profound tyrannies of his country’s military junta — including those directed against his family — in works that established him as a formidable presence in the Spanish-language literary canon, died on Tuesday at his home in Mexico City, where he had lived for many years. He was 83.
News reports in Mexico attributed the death to myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of bone marrow disease. However, a friend of Mr. Gelman, Iván Trejo, said the cause was lung cancer.
Mr. Gelman, the author of more than 20 books, was revered in Spain and Latin America, especially for his work in opposition to the durable far-right strain of governance in Argentina. His subjects included oppression and injustice (his ire often expressed with philosophical and linguistic vigor rather than visceral punch); the power and impotence of language; the eternalness of art, and poetry itself.
His work was not routinely translated into English, partly because he was interested in exploiting nuances of language that were difficult to capture in other tongues. In his 60s Mr. Gelman taught himself Ladino, a language of Sephardic Jews derived from Old Spanish and written in Hebrew letters. He then wrote “Dibaxu,” a book that explored the Sephardic diaspora following the Spanish Inquisition.
The independence of languages and the relation of language to life were issues he addressed often, notably in “Translations III: The Poems of Sidney West.” A cagey 1969 collection of blank verse eulogies, its poems are ostensibly Spanish translations of the work of an American that suggest an avant-garde Edgar Lee Masters, except that there is no such poet and there were no English poems to translate.
(When the poems actually were translated into English and published in 2008, the translators, Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez, wrote, “West is among the best imaginary poets not only of Whitman’s native land, allegedly his as well, but of all possible lands.”)
Mr. Gelman wrote essays and journalistic pieces as well as poems, and he was already a revered writer from the left when he became tragically embroiled in the so-called dirty war, the state-sponsored terrorist campaign propagated by Argentina’s right-wing junta after a military coup in 1976.
By the time democracy was restored, in 1983, thousands of citizens with suspected ties to socialism and dissident groups had been seized and “disappeared.” Mr. Gelman had been living in exile in Europe, but among the kidnapped in 1976 were his 19-year-old daughter, Nora Eva; his 20-year-old son, Marcelo Ariel; and his son’s wife, María Claudia García Iruretagoyena de Gelman, who was seven months pregnant.
Nora Eva survived, but Mr. Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law were killed, and their child, a girl, was given away to a Uruguayan family. Mr. Gelman’s search for information about his family members’ fates made him a symbol of the fight for human rights. Years later he was able to find and identify the remains of his son, and he finally located his granddaughter in 2000.
In 2007 Mr. Gelman was given the Cervantes Prize, an annual award for lifetime achievement that is considered the highest honor in Spanish-language literature. (Its laureates include Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.)
“He is a gigantic voice in the constellation of Latin American poetry of the 20th century,” Ilan Stavans, a professor of Hispanic culture at Amherst College, said of Mr. Gelman in an interview.
Mr. Gelman’s poetry, he added, was in the tradition of Pablo Neruda’s, “mixing or juxtaposing politics and poetics, calling attention to social problems, confronting the powers that be and sympathizing with the disenfranchised.”
Mr. Gelman’s favorite themes can be found woven into the conclusion of the poem “End,” translated by Professor Stavans:
Poetry is a way of living.
Look at the people at your side.
Do they eat? Suffer? Sing? Cry?
Help them fight for their hands, their eyes, their mouth, for the kiss to kiss and the kiss to give away, for their table, their bread, their letter a and their letter h, for their past — were they not children? — for their present, for the piece of peace, of history and happiness that belongs to them, for the piece of love, big, small, sad, joy, that belongs to them and is taken away in the name of what, of what?
Your life will then be an innumerable river to be called pedro, juan, ana, maria, bird, lung, the air, my shirt, violin, sunset, stone, that handkerchief, old waltz, wooden horse.
Poetry is this.
Afterward, write it.
Juan Gelman Burichson was born on May 3, 1930, in Buenos Aires to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. As a boy he read widely in Russian and European literature under the tutelage of his brother Boris. Though he studied chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires, he never finished his degree and instead, as a Communist, went to work as an editor and columnist for left-leaning publications.
In the 1960s he joined the guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, though he eventually parted ways with them as their militarism advanced. His first book of poems, “Violin and Other Issues,” was published in 1956.
Mr. Gelman’s survivors include his wife, Mara; a daughter, Paola; and three grandchildren, including the one with whom he was reunited in 2000. His death elicited official statements of grief in two nations.
In announcing the death on Twitter, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, president of Conaculta, Mexico’s culture and arts council, called Mr. Gelman a “poet of the Mexican soul.”
In Argentina, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner declared a three-day national period of mourning. The nation’s culture secretary, Jorge Coscia, said of Mr. Gelman in a television interview, “His whole life was a committed poem.”
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