The Duration of the Voyage / La duracion del viaje: Selected Poems.

Lindstrom, Naomi

Luisa Futoransky. Jason Weiss, ed. & tr. San Diego. Junction. 1997. 95 pages. $11. ISBN 1-881523-07-1.

The poet and occasional novelist Luisa Futoransky, born in Argentina in 1939 and now a French resident, is introduced to an English-language public through this brief bilingual anthology, The Duration of the Voyage. Drawn from six of Futoransky's collections of poetry published between 1972 and 1997 (she began publishing her poetry in the early 1960s), the volume is the first collection of Futoransky's poetry in English, though some of the individual poems collected here have appeared in magazines.

The poems are well selected to give English-language readers a sense of why Futoransky's often highly autobiographical poetry is considered important and innovative. Always a great traveler, she left Argentina permanently in 1971 and shifted residences several times before settling in Paris in 1981. Exile and displacement are significant issues in her verse, and the poems selected from the 1970s showcase her geographically and culturally farflung experiences. Futoransky's Jewish background has added complexity to her writing as well as complicating her life situation. The time she has spent in Israel is represented here. Still, new readers should not turn to her work expecting very overt Jewish themes. The poetry from the 1970s shows a Bohemian Futoransky (or her poetic persona) living a precarious existence and reeling through life in search of novel, intense, and all-consuming experiences. Some of the texts recall the free-wheeling ways of the pre-AIDS era and the 1960s-1970s fascination with Eastern cultures, philosophies, and religions. Perhaps inevitably, the later poems feature a more restrained self, reflecting both the effects of age and the staider character of the late twentieth century.

Jason Weiss, Futoransky's translator, is a creative writer and critic. He has a special preoccupation with writers who live and work in Paris, and the Latin American authors in that literary capital have been one of his research concerns. Curiously, although on previous occasions he has written knowledgeably about Futoransky's life and writing, in Duration he presents her work without any foreword or preface. Fortunately for English-language readers, the back cover offers a few orienting notes. With their autobiographical bent, the poems are often fairly self-explanatory; still, since it is Futoransky's first book in English, a short preface would have been helpful. Nevertheless, Weiss's translations, both conscientious and spirited, are an excellent introduction to Futoransky's work of the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

Naomi Lindstrom University of Texas, Austin