In To World, poems interrogate everything: nature, society, and thought itself, with no prejudice or even principle. In other words, they don’t follow any rule, tradition, or discipline; they are decidedly critical. Thought is not reduced to philosophical, ethical, religious, political, or aesthetic interpretations. Rather, we are before thought in its totality, unwilling to recognize borders  –  although never in a pure state, not falling into speculation, into thinking just for thinking’s sake. Thought is always related to ­experience, both personal and collective, and above all, emotion. It never once stops being thought through image, that is to say, lyrical. This poetry speaks of poetry; it takes it all on: the objective and subjective, the real and imagined, I and other. It ventures into virgin territory, on the outskirts of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. Always a model of rebelliousness and freedom, a lesson in devotion and rigor, Gelman’s work places him among today’s best poets.

Juan Gelman (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1930) is one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. He was published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956 and was been translated into fourteen languages. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, Gelman was not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. Among his most recent awards were the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (the most important award given to a Hispanic writer, Spain, 2007). He died in Mexico City in 2014.