Jorge Santiago Perednik, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1952, was the author of poetry, essays, and translations. He died this morning in Buenos Aires.
Perednik was a poet of transformations and intimacies, gestures and jests, epochal lyrics and lyric epics, lurid lines and luring stanzas. The sheer intelligence of his social critique brushes constantly against the shine of his poems' sounds and cuts.
His poetry collections include El Shock de los Lender (1986), El fin del no (1991), and El Gran Derrapador (2002), among others. His poems have appeared in English in The XUL Reader (1992) The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009); and The Shock of the Lenders and Other Poems is forthcoming from Action Books. He has translated poets including Charles Olson and Jerome Rothenberg into Spanish. Perednik is Director of the Program of Advanced Studies in Poetry at the University of Buenos Aires. He founded XUL Magazine in 1980.
The first publication of Samuel Greenberg's poetry was Poems from the Greenberg manuscripts: a selection from the work of Samuel B. Greenberg, ed. James Laughlin (New Directions, 1939). Laughlin carefully transcribed from Greenberg's notebooks the best – as he put it – of Greenberg's poems. He also including a holograph reproduction of "Conduct." Laughlin called Greenberg's work "pure poetry":"The poetry of Greenberg is not great poetry, and it is not even important minor poetry ... and yet ... poetry it is, pure poetry, to the extent equal to few other writers."
In a 2010 issue of Larry's Fagin's Sal Mimeo no. 9, there was a selection of poems by Greenberg. Fagin explains: "I had collected some of the Greenberg poems in the past, having run across the New Directions [1947] annual, Spearhead, in an U.S. military library in Frankfurt in 1954. Laughlin kept the original spellings and forms. Like many, I was disappointed in the Holt edition and generally avoided it." Spearhead contains an almost exact republication of Poems from the Greenberg manuscripts, from nine years ealier. I include here the poems published by Fagin, following Laughlin's versions, that are not already on the web at the Greenberg site.
I have had to approximate the shape of "Ruins of Prince Qulachrim" for this HTML version. And I have redone "The Pale Impromptu" based on the manuscript, which is provided befow, thanks to Marvin Taylor at NYU's Fales Collection.
