Saúl Yurkievich was born in Argentina in 1931. The author of seventeen volumes of poetry and fifteen volumes of criticism and creative prose, he was professor of Latin American literature at the Université de Paris Vincennes. He also taught at many American universities, including Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Maryland, and Pittsburgh. He died in 2005.
BACKGROUND NOISE/RUIDO DE FONDO, a bilingual edition translated by Cola Franzen, is the first volume of poetry in English by an Argentinian writer Carlos Fuentes has called "a virtuoso of words." Yurkievich's poems are like jazz solos, wonderful to read aloud.
“Reading Yurkievich is like entering a Klein bottle where form is function, function form,
where the outside leads to the inside. … Background Noise is dazzling, mysterious, alchemical.
No less miraculous is that Cola Franzen has been able to render this fabulous text,
full of a thousand pitfalls, in such an extraordinarily lucent and poetic fashion.”
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
$13 paper, 237 pages, ISBN 0-945774-58-3
IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS, translated by Cola Franzen, consists of fictional pieces about the artists Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, and Schwitters, and short delights that display this Argentine's humor and imagination.
“Saúl Yurkievich is a virtuoso of words. Like a magnificent pianist, he can go from the softest to the strongest
on the splendid keyboard of the Spanish language. Yurkievich besieges words, finds their god-like resemblances,
goes beyond them with pleasure and, finally, paints his own dream.”
—Carlos Fuentes
$11 paper, 112 pages, ISBN 0-945774-59-1. Also available as an e-book.
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