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The summer 2009 issue of The Café Review, guest edited by poet Paul Pines, is a tribute to the Argentinean poet Juan Gelman. Here is an excerpt from the forward written by Ilan Stavans.

” (Juan Gelman)…fits into the tradition of Latin American poetry by the relentless courage he displays to speak truth to power.  Where did the Argentine experiment go wrong?  How could it reach such levels of human depravity after it was generally seen as the most advanced, cosmopolitan country in the Southern Hemisphere? Time and again Gelman has pondered these questions, but he refuses to answer them.  The most a poet can do is describe what he sees.  In a 1980 poem about the prisoners’ loneliness, he described the protagonists as “dreaming they’re dreamed / quieted / they’ll never see other faces growing / leaning out / continued / in this sun / someday in the sun of justice.”  And in his remarkable piece, “The Art of Poetry,” dated 1961, he affirms: “I’ve never been the owner of my ashes, my poems, / obscure faces write them like firing bullets at death.

It features various poets and translators like Asa Zatz, David Unger, Ilan Stavans, Hardie St. Martin, Mónica Bruno Galmozzi, Sabeli Ceballos Franco, Jonathan Cohen, Robert Arnoldm, Daisy Zamora, Stephen Vincent, Susan Sherman, Sergio Ramírez, Paul Pines, Juan Daniel Perrotta, Sam Hamill, George Evans, Martín Espada, Ernesto Cardenal, Jorge Boccanera, Gioconda Belli, Doug Anderson, Claribel Alegría, Juan Gelman and artwork by Joséphine Sacabo and Josefina Auslender.

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