Synergos

“Manzano’s poems go beyond the traditionally circumscribed lyric, beyond the often humble and household range of so many contemporary poems. Translating those poems, and talking with Manzano about his work, was to experience that energy and ambition at close range, too close indeed to avoid being affected by it permanently. Manzano offers one of the great gifts of translation—to be changed oneself in the process of that other, impossible change: moving a poem out of one language into another.”—Steven Reese
The poems in Synergos smack of Whitman. They outsoar anything pedestrian, even in celebrating the here and now and close-to-hand.
It said to me one day,
the tiny bird of my throat:
What anxious cries keep waking you?
To which I replied:
My astonishing times,
spinning with new stars.
My times, returned roots,
are the hard woods of a dawn.
My days, breaking boundaries,
set dream and sweat on their way,
ride the swelling of the highest notes.
Robert Manzano’s work has won some of the most distinguished awards in the world of Cuban letters. In 1995, he received the Emilio Ballagas Prize for his essay “Mito y texto de José Martí” (“Myth and Text of José Martí”). Born in Ciego de Avila in 1949, Manzano spent much of his life in Camagüey and now resides in Havana. A teacher and critic as well as a poet, Manzano is the founder of Los Talleres Literarios (the Literary Workshops) and is a member of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.