National Endowment for the Arts Joins Mexican Partners in Launch of Bilingual Poetry Anthologies and Book Tour

Pedro Serrano

Pedro Serrano is an accomplished poet, scholar, critic and translator. He is the author of four poetry collections: El miedo, Ignorancia, Tres voces and Turba, and he is well known for his excellent Spanish translations of Shakespeare and of modern British poets. Mr. Serrano wrote the libretto for the opera Las Marimbas de l'Exil, which toured through France and Mexico to great acclaim. He studied Spanish literature at Mexico's National Autonomous University and English literature at the University of London. Mr. Serrano currently holds a professorship at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

From Three Songs of the Lunatic Moon

Cold holds sway in the vast, unsheltered slaughterhouse of the sky,
a missing, unprotected suffering,
the tremendous weight of clouds and squalls,
the landscape laid waste, torn to shreds,
open terrain, torn to shreds.

In the unsheltered fields,
the dance all of gulfweed and shut-out voices,
drownings and ripples from the drowning.

(Translated by Mark Schafer)

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