The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology

This collection is broad enough for a lifetime of reading

Great collection of poems at a great price.

good selection of Latin American poetrybilingual edition is beneficial for us for whom Spanish and Portuguese are second languagesintroduction is also good

In excellent condition.

This is the widest and richest collection of Latin American poetry I've found. Poetry translation is a profound challenge; the poem in the new language is never an accurate recreation of the poem in the original language. Sometimes the translator must take significant liberties with the literal content in order to approximate the spirit of the original. Beyond such liberties, however, this book is marred by numerous, careless mistranslations of words--mistranslations that are clearly mistakes, not deliberate liberties. A couple of examples: "choza" (in English, "hut") translated as "helmet," resulting in a Teillier's pastoral scene to feature a "helmet with a hay roof." Or "improvisación” (in English, “improvisation”—clearly appropriate for Rojas’s paean to jazz) translated as “impoverished.” Despite the errors, many of the translations are thoughtful and engaging. But the non-Spanish-speaking reader should be aware that some poetic peculiarities may be the result of errors in translation.