I am reading translations of Peruvian surrealist César Moro’s La tortuga ecuestre [The equestrian turtle], composed in Mexico in the late 1930s and first published in Lima in 1956, at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Co-translator Esteban A. Quispe and I published early versions of some translations in Asymptote last year, and our volume The equestrian turtle and other poems is in preparation.
April 1981
My cousin Alexei Aizenman (Moscow, 1918-1993) painted his city. April is from 1981. Aizenman’s mother was the artist Olga Bari-Aizenman and he studied with Leonid Pasternak.
My artist cousins
They are Olga and Anna Bary, daughters of Alexander B. Bary. Olga, to the left, became a painter, as did her son, Alexei Aizenman.
A course on García Lorca
This is the website in progress for my research course The Modernist Poetics of Federico García Lorca at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. We will read Poet in New York, Diván del Tamarit, Así que pasen cinco años, Play without a title and El público, and annotate some of his lectures and manifestos.
What are modernist poetics? What makes García Lorca a major European modernist? Who were his Spanish contemporaries? These are some of the questions our annotation project will help us answer.
Students who have not read El poema del cante jondo, Romancero gitano and the trilogy Yerma, Bodas de sangre, and La casa de Bernarda Alba may do so. Others may want to investigate the earliest poems or some additional theatre.
The image here is of the Presidio in Santa Barbara, California, my home town, where I first read Lorca. This course is generously funded by the UL Lafayette Undergraduate Research Council and the Friends of the Humanities.
A vase in progress
I glazed this in a cobalt blue, with a turquoise interior.
Leslie Bary Arts and Letters 