
CADAVERS
Néstor Perlongher
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Néstor Perlongher
Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman
Cover image and illustrations by Yudi Yudoyoko
Poetry. Chapbook
Bilingual edition
44 pages
ISBN
978-1-945720-10-9
January 24, 2018
For international deliveries, we will send you a request for payment of additional shipping costs.
La Loca whose queer opulence shatters categories and the liberating projects these prescribe, la Loca whose opulence citizens violate so as to constitute the very idea of citizenship, esta es la Loca whose opulence finds form in the life and work of Néstor Perlongher to sing Argentina its most proper public hymn. Cadavers in the streets, in the crotches, in the words, and in military helicopters about to be tossed – so goes a haunting toward “the preciseness of this absence.” To meet it, Perlongher lifts its perfect shadow in his mouth out of the ground.
—FARID MATUK
In ‘Cadavers,’ his
long poem on the desaparecidos – the
disappeared victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship – Perlongher does not seek
to return their presence or whereabouts to those unnamed, absent corpses, but
to restore their corporeity to them. He does so by means of a poetic
language that can be as coarse and funny as it is ornate, bringing together
such disparate elements as Góngora’s Baroque and the neighborhood hair salon,
Rubén Darío’s Modernismo and
Argentine public elementary schools.
Legend has it that
Perlongher wrote his poem on the interminable bus trip from Buenos Aires to São
Paulo that would take him into exile from a regime that had paradoxically
criminalized him not for his fierce political activism, but for his militant
homosexuality. This gorgeous translation by
Roberto
Echavarren
and
Donald Wellman retraces Perlongher’s journey, and finally brings his great poem to
an English-speaking audience.
—
EZEQUIEL ZAIDENWERG

Douglas Messerli @ Hyperallergic
Vicent Moreno @ Latin American Literature Today
Sergio Sarano @ Asymptote
Noah Fields @ Anomaly
Rosemarie Dombrowski @ Angel City Review

Néstor Perlongher was an Argentine poet and gay rights activist. Born in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires Province, on Christmas night in 1949, he was a founder and key member of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front), one of the first LGBT organizations in the world. From 1982, he lived in São Paulo, where he earned a master’s degree in Social Anthropology, and taught as a professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He received the Boris Vian prize in 1987 for his book Alambres, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. His poetic work comprises six books, beginning with Austria-Hungría in 1980. He was a frequent contributor to various Argentine magazines, and in 1991 compiled the bilingual Spanish-Portuguese anthology Caribe transplatino, poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense. One of his best-known essays is La prostitución masculina (Male Prostitution). He died in São Paulo in 1992.
