The first time I looked for web pages about Mexican and Latin American poetry I didn't find many good sites in the web. Since I was learning to create Internet pages, it seemed to me a good idea to create this page with my personal selection of Mexican poetry of the twentieth century as an exercise in web page making. I am neither an expert in poetry nor a poet, but just someone who likes reading poetry and who thinks that everybody should have his or her own anthology of poetry. This is not intended to be a comprehensive anthology and I decided just to include some major poets of this century. I think that it would have been better to have a collection of Latin American poetry rather than just a selection of Mexican poetry, which is just a chapter of Latin American poetry and it's almost incomprehensible without the context of it; but this is something that goes beyond me, and this is why I put links to some other pages of Latin American poetry. This selection includes contemporary poets from José Juan Tablada, our first really modern poet, and finishes with poets born before 1940. I don't plan to include poets born after that date, mainly because of the enormous amount of people who are writing right now in Mexico, and also because this is not intended to be an exhaustive anthology, but just a token of Mexico's poetry in this century. However, there are many poets who are creating their own web sites and I put links to some of these pages. If you're looking for a good anthology of young Mexican poetry you can take a look at Horizontes de poesía mexicana.
To make a selection of this kind always implies to keep some poets aside and I'm sure that I'm being unfair to many good poets. This selection reflects my personal taste. Anyway, a web page, even more than a book, is an open work, in the sense that it can be constantly modified and updated. Suggestions and comments are always welcome. However, it also reflects the availability of translations in other languages. I tried to put poems for which translations into other languages were available. Unfortunately, there are few good translations into other languages of some of our most important poets — and in many cases there are no translations at all. Poems translated into different languages were not always the same, and these is one of the reasons why some of the translations included do not coincide with the Spanish originals that I have selected. In any case, many of our most important writers are still waiting to be translated.
Finally, I want to thank my friend, the Quebecker writer Claude Major,
for his enthusiasm in translating some of these poems into French. I also
want to thank Marco Di Terlizzi, Italian translator from Milan, who has
altruistically contributed with splendid translations into Italian. I hope
their efforts can help spreading the knowledge of a poetry worth reading.
Hacer una selección de este tipo siempre implica dejar de lado a algunos poetas, y estoy seguro que he sido injusto con muchos buenos poetas. Esta selección refleja mi gusto personal. De cualquier forma, una página web, incluso más que un libro, es una obra abierta, en el sentido de que puede ser modificada y actualizada constantemente. Cualquier sugerencia o comentario es siempre bienvenido. Sin embargo, también refleja la existencia de traducciones en otras lenguas. Traté de poner poemas para los cuales hubiera traducción. Desafortunadamente, hay pocas traducciones a otras lenguas de mucho de nuestros poetas más importantes —y en muchos casos no hay traducciones en lo absoluto. Los poemas traducidos a otras lenguas no son siempre los mismos, y esa es la razón por la cual algunas traducciones incluidas no coinciden con el original en español que seleccioné. En todo caso, muchos de nuestros poetas más importantes están todavía esperando ser traducidos.
Finalmente, quiero agradecer a mi amigo, el escritor quebequense Claude
Major, por su entusiasmo para traducir algunos de estos poemas al francés.
A él debemos algunas de las primeras versiones en esta lengua de
varios poemas aquí presentados. También quiero agradecer
a Marco Di Terlizzi, traductor italiano de Milán, quien ha contribuido
altruistamente con sus espléndidas traducciones al italiano. Espero
que sus esfuerzos sirvan para difundir el conocimiento de una poesía
que vale la pena leer.
Though this is a personal selection (as personal, by the way, as all the work in this web page is) I have relied on other anthologies of Mexican poetry, either in Spanish, English or French. In most of the cases I have consulted the books of each author and these are credited in all the biographical notes that accompany each page. These are some of the anthologies that I have consulted, I hope these can useful to those who want to know more about Mexican poetry.
A pesar de que ésta es una selección personal (tan personal como lo es todo el trabajo de esta página, por cierto), he dependido de otras antologías de poesía mexicana en español, inglés y francés. En la mayoría de los casos, he consultado los libros de cada autor que se mencionan en las notas biográficas que acompañan a cada página. Estas son algunas de las antologías que he consultado, espero que sean útiles para quien desee profundizar en la lectura de poesía mexicana.
Hay muchas traducciones de poesía mexicana más reciente que la que se incluye en esta página. Estas son algunas antologías bilingües recientes.
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