DAVID R. STAMPONE | PHILADELPHIA ENQUIRER
Peruvian poet Odi Gonzales seeks to reclaim what was once thought lost. These well-considered translations of Gonzales’ collection Birds on the Kiswar Tree by Lynn Levin, a Delaware Valley poet, writer, translator, and instructor (at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University), give us unprecedented access to these multi-voiced Gonzales poems.
It’s the first book of poetry published in English along with the original Spanish by the award-winning Gonzales, himself a translator and instructor (currently at New York University) who has earned graduate degrees Stateside and in his native Peru.
Born in Cusco, capital of the Inca empire, Gonzales is a keen scholar of his homeland’s pre-Columbian culture, tracking it through Spanish conquest (1532-72), Peru’s colonial era (until 1824), and into today. He chiefly writes in Spanish and Quechua, the enduring language of the Inca. Kiswar Tree was first published in Peru as La Escuela de Cusco, taking its name from Peru’s early colonial-period tradition of indigenous painters – largely illiterate, thus anonymous – who produced telling retablos, following instructions by art-minded Spanish clerics. >>READ MORE
