Labyrinth - by Lorenzo García Vega (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book introduces English-speaking readers to the Cuban writer Lorenzo Garcí a Vega, one of the great outliers of modern Latin American poetry, who devoted his work to what he called "the vocation of losing." Variously associated with Surrealism and the neo-Baroque, but rejecting all literary pigeonholing, Garcí a Vega constructed a personal labyrinth in whose recesses are encountered precocious lyrical musings, ironic yet anguished examinations of childhood and youth in Cuba and daily life in the exilic deserts of Miami, and self-interrogations of personal memories and psychic obsessions and the limits of language in articulating them. Edited, introduced, and translated by Christopher Winks, LABYRINTH presents in dual-language translation the full range of Garcí a Vega's radical, uncompromising body of work.

About the Author

Lorenzo Garcí a Vega (1926-2012) was born in Matanzas, Cuba. Over his lifetime, he has published nearly two dozen works of poetry and prose, and in 1952 won Cuba's Premio Nacional de Literatura. A poet living in exile since the late 1960s, Garcí a Vega is best known for his involvement in the literary group Orí genes. Reviled for his representation of José Lezama Lima, the group's founder, Garcí a Vega suffered a kind of double exile: the first from Cuba, and the second from the Cuban literary and intellectual milieu to which he formerly belonged. Since leaving Cuba, Garcí a Vega lived in Madrid, New York, and Caracas before settling in Miami, Florida, where he died. Christopher Winks (Editor and Translator) is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College/The City University of New York. He is the author of Symbolic Cities in Caribbean literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and he has published essays, reviews, and translations from French and Spanish in many journals and edited collections. He is the editor and co-translator with Adriana Gonzá lez Mateos of Los danzantes del tiempo: Antologí a poé tica, a bilingual English-Spanish anthology of Kamau Brathwaite's poems that received the 2011 Casa de las Amé ricas prize. Recent translations include Lila Zemborain's poetic sequence Soft Matter (Quantum Prose, 2023).