G. J. Racz, one of Long Island University’s (LIU) most prominent scholars, has issued a translation of Eduardo Chirinos’ new posthumous selection of poetry, The Bayard Street Tightrope Walker (University of Montana Press, 2017).
Eduardo Chirinos, a premier Peruvian poet, died in 2016. He was 55.
Throughout this collection, some of the most compelling poems pay tribute to Chirinos’ time spent as a scholar in the tri-state region, particularly New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers University.
The Bayard Street Tightrope Walker’s eponymous initial poem gives Dr. Racz the opportunity to lovingly translate a score celebrating the cheerful stoicism of the tightrope walker. “He proceeds on tippy-toes, the Bayard Street Tightrope Walker/ his gaze avoiding the abyss as he rips all pretension out by the roots./ What good are heroism, grandeur, enthusiasm to him?/ He holds life cheap, the Bayard Street Tightrope Walker.”
Chirinos’ tightrope walker enables Racz to be the freshest and clearest translative voice on the Brooklyn literary scene these days. NYC stirs the imagery of a spiritual awakening for a Peruvian poet in Kings County. Chirinos asserts, “With the tenuous gleam of the bells of St. Patrick’s on the Hudson/ What more can I say about snow scratching New York City’s thick hide?/ For someone who comes from the south, the snow is a gift/ and the city a maid with no breasts, slender as a silver reed./ That’s what old Pound said, /Though we were humming a tune by Frank Sinatra.”
The fast-rising Dr. Racz, chairperson of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at LIU (Brooklyn Center), stands firm in slanted rhymes, in an attempt to give American readers the deep, thoughtful poetry that threatens to return Latin America’s dominance, through its towering men and women of letters from the second half of the 20th century, to modern day literary America.
All that said, we are poorer for Chirinos’ absence.
