One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2016 "Cortazar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortazar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable."--Publishers Weekly, starred review World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortazar was also a prolific poet. While living in Paris during the last months of his life, Cortazar assembled his life's work in verse for publication, and Save Twilight selects the best of that volume, making his poems available in English for the very first time. This expanded edition, with nearly one hundred new pages of poems, prose and illustrations, is a book to be savored by both the familiar reader and the newcomer to Cortazar work. Ranging from the intimate to the political, tenderness to anger, heartbreak to awe, in styles both traditionally formal and free, Cortazar the poet and subverter of genres is revealed as a versatile and passionate virtuoso. More than a collection of poems, this book is a playful and revealing self-portrait of a writer in love with language in all its forms. Praise for Save Twilight: "With this expanded edition of Save Twilight, Stephen Kessler continues his project, begun in the 1980s, of translating poetry by Julio Cortazar. Widely known for his fiction, especially Hopscotch, a seminal work of the Latin American Boom, Cortazar was also a compelling poet. Kessler has found just the right turns of phrase in English to capture the Argentine's deeply moving writing and exceptionally emotive language. What a gift this collection is for English-speaking readers."--Edith Grossman, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation "Some people run the world, others are the world. Cortazar's poems are the world; they have a special consideration for the unknown."--Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel "What a pleasure, this walk in a well-orchestrated park with shades as complex, as light & as dark, as multifoliate as the actual world! This book--the 'poetic ecology' Cortazar had envisioned--is an open invitation to make yourselves at home twixt sea and loss, wine & sorrow, birth & riptide, tobacco & talk, laughter & death. Nothing human is foreign to the poet--& he brings it home with great clarity & grace. The writing & the book embody a tradition of hospitality, or as Cortazar puts it: 'Hello little black book for the late hours, cats on the prowl under a paper moon.' The injunction to save twilight stands as title--it is also exactly what the writing accomplishes. Stephen Kessler's elegant, accurate, and sometimes felicitously ose translations do these poems more than justice."--Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012) "For those who have enjoyed Cortazar's fiction, among the most seminal and compelling of our time, here now are his wonderful poems. And for those who don't know Cortazar from a cat, it's a chance to visit his crepuscular world in all its multiple layers. A tender, experimental, humorous, meditative, jazzy, heart-breaking collection to be relished and savored slowly." --Ariel Dorfman, author of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile Julio Cortazar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentinian parents, raised in Argentina, and spent his most productive years in Paris, where he died in 1984.

The complete sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--in English and SpanishThis landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. More intimate and personally revealing than his fiction, and more classical in form than the inventive metafictions that are his hallmark, the sonnets reflect Borges in full maturity, paying homage to many of his literary and philosophical paragons--Cervantes, Milton, Whitman, Emerson, Joyce, Spinoza--while at the same time engaging the mysteries immanent in the quotidian. A distinguished team of translators--Edith Grossman, Willis Barnstone, John Updike, Mark Strand, Robert Fitzgerald, Alastair Reid, Charles Tomlinson, and Stephen Kessler--lend their gifts to these sonnets, many of which appear here in English for the first time, and all of which accompany their Spanish originals on facing pages.

While Cernuda's verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life's journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: "In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity; the poet doesn't set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. But is it truly ours, this life we live?"

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was one of the leading poets of Spain's Generation of 1927, which included Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Jorge Guillen.