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 Entertainment | Books | November 2006 
Book Unites Poets From U.S., Mexico
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
The chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) moved through Mexico City and Guadalajara Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing with him 200 poets and translators from both sides of the border and a message of better binational understanding through verse.
Four of the poets read in Spanish and English at a gathering in Mexico City Tuesday night, but the other 196 were represented in book form as collaborators in an ambitious NEA-sponsored bilingual project called Connecting Lines/Líneas Conectadas.
In introducing the two-volume anthology highlighting the work of 50 Mexican and 50 U.S. poets, NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said the chief aim of the work was not so much to promote poetry as to stimulate cross-border relationships.
"It gave us the opportunity, the challenge, the pleasure of introducing American and Mexican artists to one another," said Gioia, a poet appointed by U.S. President George W. Bush to lead the NEA in 2003. "There is a vast cultural creation on both sides of the border, (but) although every day we have enormous economic activity going back and forth, the arts are a surprisingly tiny portion of it."
RESTORING ORDER
Gioia, of Sicilian descent on his father´s side and Mexican on his mother´s, is widely credited with restoring calm at the NEA, which was under attack throughout the 1990s by conservatives opposed to public art funding in general and certain recipients in particular.
He was speaking Tuesday night at the Casa del Lago in Chapultepec Park during a book presentation and poetry reading sponsored by U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Antonio Garza. The U.S. Embassy was involved in the production of the twin volumes, as were the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) and Mexico´s National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta).
The idea for a joint Mexico-U.S. arts project grew out of a cultural summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the auspices of the President´s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, chaired by Adair Margo who was also in attendance Tuesday night.
"The question was where to begin," Gioia said. "Being a poet, it seemed to me that it might be easy to begin with poetry, the oldest and most basic of the human arts. Poetry is in some ways the most expressive, concise, intimate mode of language."
TWO-VOLUME SET
The result was a two-volume set. One, subtitled New Poetry from the United States, features one or two poems in the original English from 50 U.S. writers born after World War II, with facing-page Spanish versions from 50 different translators. The other, Nueva poesía de México, follows the same format, in reverse.
But, Gioia said, the books themselves are not what matters most.
"What I think is most important is that there are 100 writers and 100 translators who now know one another," he said. "That´s the legacy of this project." |
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