The Reasoning Behind the Act of Striking a Spent Match - by Hernán Fontanet (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In 1976, at 2:00 one winter morning, paramilitary forces broke into a house in a quiet upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Inside, sleeping, were two nineteen-year-old girls and a twenty-year-old boy. This was the house of the esteemed Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, but he was not home. Frustrated, the soldiers kidnapped the three young people--Gelman's daughter, son, and seven-months-pregnant daughter-in-law. They disappeared into the night. In 1990, Gelman found out that his son had been executed and his remains buried in a barrel filled with sand and cement. Ten years later he was able to locate his granddaughter, who had been born in a back-door hospital and given to a pro-government family.

For Juan Gelman, one of the most celebrated Latin American poets of the twentieth century, this was one of many grim events. Born in 1930, his was a life of narrow escapes. As an Ashkenazi Jew, poet, guerrilla fighter, freethinker, and prolific journalist, he escaped three death sentences decreed by groups on both the right and the left in Argentina. He was a victim of state terrorism in that country, and still he made his voice heard.

For his poetry, Gelman was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2007, the most prestigious award in Spanish literature. Because nothing could suppress his voice, he expressed the dreams of an entire generation.

This biography explores both his writing and the physical, intellectual, and political environment in South America during Gelman's life, a life that was punctuated by near misses, imprisonments, and the disappearance and torture of family members. Through it all we hear the ringing voice of a singular poet.

Review Quotes

"This first English-language biography of Juan Gelman is a most welcome and necessary book. It begins to set the record straight: Juan Gelman is the major but most neglected (in the anglophone world) South American poet of the late 20th and early 21st century. Poetically as experimental as César Vallejo, poethically more clear-eyed, engaged--and wounded--than Neruda, Gelman is who we need to read & study today. We need Gelman's polyglot, at times heteronymic, nomadism with which he destabilized a fossilized language, tango'd its syntax & brought it into a wider sense of the Americas. Start with this book, and read on, into Juan Gelman's oeuvre."--Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh and A Nomad Poetics

"Hernan Fontanet's biography of Juan Gelman brings to the forefront the trajectory of one of the best Latin American poets of our time. Mainly based on interviews given by the poet, this biography reads like a novel. The author shares keen insight into Gelman's poetry, replete with the adventures of an existence marked by revolutionary engagement, the violence of dictatorship and also the wonder at love and poetic creation. This is an absolute must-read book!"
--Literary critic Geneviève Fabry

About the Author

HERNÁN FONTANET is an Argentinian-Spanish-American author who is intrigued by poetics that emerge in conflict and their potential influence on history. His previous publications include The Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo. He has served as a professor of literature at Yale, Rider, and North Carolina State Universities and was recently honored with the 2015 Pakal de Oro award for his groundbreaking work.