Seven Trees Against the Dying Light

Standing against the visible landscape—the mountainous volcanoes, the jungles and savannahs—the seven trees conjured in these narrative poems by one of Latin America's masters also evoke another, more mysterious terrain.? It is this other landscape, as invisible as poetry before it is written down but etched by history and animated by the collective memory of a people, that speaks through Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Seven Trees against the Dying Light.

??????????? Storing experience as they exist, these tree-poems conserve local soil and memory in the place they inhabit. They are figures of life, stained by seawater and gun powder, by the bright red, bittersweet juice of the many life-giving plums that flourish in Nicaragua, and blood that has been spilled there.? And they offer a way of remembering who we are, where we come from, and, above all, where we are bound if we cannot learn to root language in the earth that sustains us.

??????????? Printed here in Spanish with facing English translations, the edition includes an introduction with ecocritical focus, as well as complete notes on botanical, historical, mythological, and socio-political references.

Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912?2002) is Nicaragua’s most prominent vanguardista, an author who defined his poetics in the 1920s and 1930s.?His work was first translated into English by Thomas Merton. Cuadra was nominated by his country for the Nobel Prize for literature twice and received numerous literary honors, including the prestigious Gabriela Mistral Prize from the Organization of American States. In Nicaragua, he is revered as perhaps his country’s greatest poet since Ruben Dario.

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Steven White is a professor of modern languages and literature at St. Lawrence University.

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Greg Simon is an associate editor with Trask House Books and the Salt River Review. Both White and Simon are poets themselves and have translated several books, including translations of Federico Garcia Lorca and Ruben Dario.