Catulo / Marcial

This volume, Catullus/Martial, brings together Ernesto Cardenal's extraordinary translations of two of the great Latin poets, transforming classical translation into a vibrant and contemporary experience. Following in the footsteps of his admired Ezra Pound and his mentor José Coronel Urtecho, Cardenal, upon encountering classical epigrams with their humor and wit in a simple form, embraced them in his search for his own voice. They became indispensable to him and to the young poets of the Americas seeking a new language. With the same sense of naturalness and far removed from academic pretension, Cardenal brings Catullus and Martial into our present through a direct, colloquial, ironic, even incisive language, charged with emotional intensity. Passion, jealousy, scorn from the literary world, worldly and power criticism, social divide, but also love and friendship are the axes of these poems created two millennia ago and which, nevertheless, do not lose relevance, so close to our sensibility.