Translated by Erin Goodman. THE MIRACLE UNFOLDS offers the reader a bilingual selection of thoughtfully crafted, conceptual poetry, written between the years 2010 and 2019 by Cuban American poet Juana Rosa Pita. Recognizing Pita as a prominent voice in contemporary Latin American literature, Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra described her as one of the outstanding voices of Cuba's pilgrim culture. Esoteric yet accessible, grounded in a wide geography from Cuba to Italy to Boston, these poems (originally in Spanish) come alive in Erin Goodman's thoughtful and attentive English translation. Though Pita, who was born in 1939 and migrated from Cuba to the United States in 1961, has authored over thirty collections of poetry, this is her first full-length book.
The Dominican American poet Rhina P. Espaillat introduces Pita's literary journey into metaphysics, religion, art, and destinations beyond by writing, In this selection of poems from seven volumes of Spanish-language poetry by Cuban-born Juana Rosa Pita, many miracles 'unfold' into the one verbal song that is Erin Goodman's English translation. There is the unique but recognizable voice of the poet that takes the reader from country to country, moment to moment, as if memory and meditation were an endless series of railway stations linking the universe. There is the convergence of science and poetry, as if all the forms of human thought were the strings of a single instrument. There is the poet's fervent trust in the capacity of faith itself to work its will, and the confidence in love as a home that accepts and shelters those who love and keeps them united, no matter where they are in space or how seldom they meet.
Religious feeling, art--especially music--the mysterious resonance between invisible particles far apart that nevertheless 'communicate' despite the disturbances wrought by violence and injustice, family lore and history, all converge in these poems, to leave the reader enriched by a silence that embraces and seems determined to endure. Not least of those many miracles is the translation itself, a garment made of whole cloth and wearable by everything we are: feeling and intellect, mortal being and deathless spirit, inherited exile and a hunger for home, individuals doomed--or is it 'blessed?'--with solitude, and inseparable particles of the divine.
THE MIRACLE UNFOLDS, a beautifully written, translated, and designed text, will prove to be one of the most significant contributions to poetry in translation, and in that sense to world literature, in recent years.
Poetry.
