Migrations: Poem, 1976–2020
From reviews of Migrations: Poem, 1976–2020
“In its stunning poetic breadth, [Migrations] reminds me of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero sueño (First Dream) an epistemological quest to unravel, during one night, all the secrets of the universe. […] As in Borges’s all-encompassing Aleph, my impression is that all of Jewish Latin American poetry is contained in Migrations, which represents its crowning achievement.” – Ilan Stavans
“Gloria Gervitz’s Migrations, co-written by death, co-written by eros, is one of the great poems of the twenty-first century. Mark Schafer, her extraordinary English-language translator, has managed to keep hold of this poem through all its bucking, its multiplying, its relentless champing at the bit. Gervitz is a wonder, true, but so is Schafer.” —Forrest Gander
“Migrations presents the unmistakable, majestic voice of Gloria Gervitz, one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporary Jewish Latin American literature, in all its fullness, and Mark Schafer’s translation does it justice.” – Marjorie Agosín
“With this book-length poem, here published along with Mark Schafer’s splendid English translation, Gloria Gervitz joins the ranks of Mexico’s greatest poets. … When a change of poetic style calls for it, [Schafer] can turn on a dime. In this translation, he has solved a bewildering number of difficult problems. And yet, his text reads as if the poem were written in English in the first place.” – Steven A Sadow
“Migraciones is an extraordinary and deeply moving poem. Gloria Gervitz looks out all the world’s windows and Mark Schafer throws them open to gather in the most soaring and luminous of words.” – Elena Poniatowska
“It is difficult to think of a poetic project like that of Gervitz. Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems come to mind, but perhaps no other modern author has consistently devoted the totality of their work to one single volume, patiently rewritten throughout the years, losing and gaining verses, and constantly mutating….The search for a language able to slide through different meanings in the same line [is] at the center of Gervitz’s poetic project. . . Readers of Migrations find the trace of a life devoted to writing and rewriting—it is a mutating work, written with an ink that aspires to the flowing and dissolvent nature of running water.” – Mauro G. Lazarovich