William Archila

Description:

William Archila’s Canícula/Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latine Poetry. Canícula, which means “dog days” in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile’s return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila’s poetry for the Spanish reader.

Advanced Praise

“In this brilliant bilingual anthology, William Archila creates a powerful and fiery poetics of exile, war, and, ultimately and brilliantly, survival. To live in this work is to travel in the language of the Americas, its painful delirium. These poems, in both their English and translated forms, dig into the rancid holes that empire, dictatorship, and nation have left for us to crawl out of. Archila, with honesty and artistry, asks us to see what it is to face destruction with a seething language that documents “the grunt of flesh and bone,” the disappearance of broken bodies, and the refusal to keep them in the realm of the invisible. And with much gratitude for the translator, Mario Zetino, and their contributions to the intertwined poetics of the diaspora.”
— Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner

“With their gritty beauty, their somber hardness, their fealty to the truth, William Archila’s poems have the force and conviction to linger long in the reader’s mind. Indeed, the ephemeral is not this poet’s domain, where cleverness is the name of the game. The poet, born and partially raised in El Salvador, does not squirm from conveying the ravages of civil war but at the same time giving witness to how the downtrodden (the shoeshines, the barefoot boys, the men with torn clothes) struggle to survive in spare language redolent with grace.  In vivid and tender homages, he evokes the enduring influence of those major poets, let’s call them seers, like Neruda and Lorca, who awakened in him a devotion to language and the necessary tenacity for a life devoted to poetry.  Alongside as well are those titans of jazz—Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Duke Ellington—who taught him how to feel, evoke, transmute into words the aural language of music. Dog Days/Canícula presents us with a wealth of unforgettable poems about the duality of home for the immigrant poet, the one lost but still remembered from childhood with a mixture of longing and heartbreak, that “tiny country” riddled with violence, versus the one gained, the East L.A. of his youth, with its own glaring inequalities, through the trauma of assimilation that made Archila the poet that he is, a poet of unswerving conviction whose gift of empathy can make us feel to our core the suffering of “neighbors, all soiled, / figures almost baked in clay, come back / from the greasy stacks of factories.” Mario Zetino should be applauded for imbuing his Spanish versions with a certain majesty that will surely impress those readers not just in El Salvador but also in the wider Spanish-speaking world.”
— Orlando Ricardo Menes, author of Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds

“En esta brillante antología bilingüe, William Archila articula una poética intensa y poderosa del exilio, la guerra y, en última instancia y de manera magistral, la supervivencia. Sumergirse en esta obra es viajar por el lenguaje de las Américas, por su doloroso delirio. Estos poemas, tanto en su versión en inglés como en su traducción, ahondan en los agujeros podridos que el imperio, la dictadura y la nación nos han dejado para que intentemos salir de ellos. Archila, con honestidad y maestría, nos pide que veamos lo que significa enfrentar la destrucción con un lenguaje que hierve al documentar “un lamento de carne y hueso”, la desaparición de cuerpos rotos y se rehúsa a mantenerlos en el reino de lo invisible. Agradezcamos muchísimo al traductor, Mario Zetino, por sus aportes al creciente tejido poético de la diáspora.”
— Daniel Borzutzky, ganador del National Book Award

“Con belleza descarnada, dureza sombría y fidelidad a la verdad, los poemas de William Archila tienen la fuerza y la convicción necesarias para quedarse por mucho tiempo en la mente del lector. En efecto, lo efímero no es el campo de este poeta, donde la agudeza ingeniosa suele ser la regla del juego. El poeta, nacido y por cierto tiempo criado en El Salvador, no rehúye transmitir los estragos de la guerra civil, pero al mismo tiempo da testimonio con un lenguaje sobrio impregnado de gracia de cómo los desposeídos (los lustrabotas, los niños descalzos, los hombres con ropas desgarradas) luchan por sobrevivir. Rinde homenajes vívidos y tiernos, al evocar la influencia perdurable de aquellos grandes poetas —llamémoslos videntes— como Neruda y Lorca, que le despertaron la devoción por el lenguaje y la tenacidad necesaria para una vida consagrada a la poesía. De igual manera aparecen esos titanes del jazz —Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Duke Ellington— que le enseñaron a sentir, a evocar, a transmutar en palabras el lenguaje sonoro de la música. Dog Days/Canícula nos presenta una riqueza de poemas inolvidables sobre la dualidad del hogar para el poeta inmigrante: aquel perdido pero aún recordado desde la infancia con una mezcla de anhelo y desgarro, ese “pequeño país”, marcado por la violencia, frente al país donde llega a vivir, el del Este de Los Ángeles de su juventud, con sus propias y evidentes desigualdades, a través del trauma de la asimilación que hizo de Archila el poeta que es: un poeta de convicciones inquebrantables cuyo don de empatía nos hace sentir, en lo más profundo, el sufrimiento de “los vecinos, todos empolvados, /casi figuras de barro cocido, volviendo / de las chimeneas grasosas de las fábricas”. Se le debe aplaudir a Mario Zetino por infundir a sus versiones en español una cierta majestuosidad que, sin duda, impresionará no solo a los lectores de El Salvador, sino también al amplio mundo hispanohablante.”
— Orlando Ricardo Menes, autor de Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds

Description:

The Gravedigger’s Archaeology writes the urban landscape of the US immigrant, a figure constantly reminded of the nameless and the dispossessed who struggle back home in Central America. Moving between past and present, these poems record a vigil of loss left by the emptiness of tedious excavation―both psychological and spiritual. They travel the fragments and vestiges of a war, the return to one’s homeland or place of childhood, unearthing the landscapes of a jazz riff, myth, or work of art. In a lyrical, sometimes elegiac language, the poems map the complex territory of an exile who understands the answers lie in the ground.

Praise for The Gravedigger’s Archaeology

“Tough music is the first phrase I reached for in describing William Archila’s poems, early Coltrane or perhaps Sonny Rollins or Mingus as analogues. For his dominant (though certainly not exclusive) themes are the almost unspeakably violent world of his Salvadoran childhood and the struggles of immigrant life in the United States, and yet spiraling up repeatedly in stunning riffs of word-song is the rare thing called duende, marvelous in itself but also in its evocations of beauty to be found in the life fully lived, the struggle never abandoned. The Gravedigger’s Archaeology is an aesthetic and moral triumph, and I felt honored to have read it.”―B.H. Fairchild, National Book Critics Circle Award winner

“In his brilliant second book, The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, poet William Archila excavates the cratered memory of war and its aftermath, his pen chiseling a language of ‘black roosters & fossil bones’ in a lost country, ‘a country rift in half.’ But Archila’s pen is also a spade, as poet Seamus Heaney suggested, and this spade unearths ‘the ribcage / still clinging to its shirt and bodies / dumped in a black lava bed’. This is clandestine territory for the lyric, but it is territory Archila traverses with consummate skill. I have been waiting many years for a book that would guide us through that time and place, exhuming the remains with grace and dignity. Archila has written it.”—Carolyn Forché