Description

Rafael Alcides

Translated by Pablo Medina

ISBN 978-1-956921-40-3 (pbk)

188 pages: $22.95
February, 2025

In A Poet in the Neighborhood, Rafael Alcides, one of Cuba’s most important poets, renders in verse the mood and rhythm of life from the 20th to 21st centuries—its everydayness punctured by exceptional moments of splendor, crisis, and oblivion.  Selected by Pablo Medina, an esteemed Cuban American poet and novelist in his own right, these poems unfold scenes of love, violation, hunger, boredom, corruption, and regret, set against the backdrop of villages and cities and framed by grand and mundane subjects. Through these vivid portrayals, Alcides offers profound insights into the interplay of individual thought and larger sociopolitical forces. In Medina’s masterful English translations, the original beauty and power of Alcides’s Cuban Spanish resonate with equal aesthetic depth.

—Jacqueline Loss, Co-editor, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature

Alcides’ poems are poems of the earth, Cuban earth, universal earth. They are filled with death and joy, love-making and memory, mother and son, water pump and community, boiling espaguetis, paradise, God/dream, hope, frustration, theater, silence, prayer. In a life both telenovela and all too real, Alcides plain-spoken and rapid, graceful poems give some of what poetry gives best: vision, clarity, connection. Medina’s translations are a triumph, a conversation and collaboration between two poets with which this third poet is delighted.

—Mark Statman, author of Hechizo

Rafael Alcides (1933-2018) started as a poet emphatically of the people and finished as a self-described stranger. His plain-spoken poems document an energetic vision ranging from the romantic, to the irreverent, to the sardonic. In earlier poems dating to the 1960s, Alcides dreams of “cars full of women / traveling toward our arms,” his hands inside all things comprising a youthful, seductive world. Then one day he perceives that a Soviet Lada sedan has become a sign of social mobility and writes about backing away from friends becoming bureaucrats. In the twenty-first century, the poet speaks as one who sought faith yet “came upon wind, silence, oblivion.” Poet-translator Pablo Medina has selected a series of poems that walk English-language readers down Alcides’ well-known path to internal exile – stirring glimpses of how a “world fell apart / and recomposed itself.”

—Kristin Dykstra, translator of Other Letters to Milena

Alcides’s poetry hits you square in the chest and knocks the wind out of you. Medina’s deft translation delivers the same punch. What a wondrous collection.

—Anna Kushner, translator of Marcial Gala, Leonardo Padura, Guillermo Rosales, and others

Plainspoken but far from plain, these are poems of love and of disenchantment, of memory and invention, of the twists and turns of life and of characters not to be forgotten. Poems of the Cuban hinterland, of Havana, and of the cosmos. Poems of a lifetime, flaming moments and long views. The translations are as simple and as strange as the originals—as steady as a stream and as jumpy as rapids when they need to be. And then suddenly, the longer lyrical world-weary poems, with soulful translations to  match. I loved meeting Rafael Alcides’ work by way of Pablo Medina’s words.

—Dick Cluster,  translator of Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux and Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells, and author of The History of Havana