Save Twilight: Selected Poems

Newly expanded edition of a classic: the first and only collection of Cortázar's poetry to appear in English.

"Cortázar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortázar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[This new] edition--small and irresistible, the kind you want to pocket and read out on the grass somewhere--is bilingual, with Spanish on the left page and English on the right, and [Stephen] Kessler does us the favor of retaining some of Cortázar's weird, wandering little essays, including "For Listening Through Headphones," his oblique study of poetic intimacy."--The New Yorker

World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortázar was also a prolific poet. While living in Paris during the last months of his life, Cortázar assembled his life's work in verse for publication, and Save Twilight selects the best of that volume, making his poems available in English for the very first time.

This expanded edition, with nearly one hundred new pages of poems, prose and illustrations, is a book to be savored by both the familiar reader and the newcomer to Cortázar work. Ranging from the intimate to the political, tenderness to anger, heartbreak to awe, in styles both traditionally formal and free, Cortázar the poet and subverter of genres is revealed as a versatile and passionate virtuoso. More than a collection of poems, this book is a playful and revealing self-portrait of a writer in love with language in all its forms.

Praise for Save Twilight:

"With this expanded edition of Save Twilight, Stephen Kessler continues his project, begun in the 1980s, of translating poetry by Julio Cortázar. Widely known for his fiction, especially Hopscotch, a seminal work of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar was also a compelling poet. Kessler has found just the right turns of phrase in English to capture the Argentine's deeply moving writing and exceptionally emotive language. What a gift this collection is for English-speaking readers."--Edith Grossman, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation

"Some people run the world, others are the world. Cortázar's poems are the world; they have a special consideration for the unknown."--Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel

"What a pleasure, this walk in a well-orchestrated park with shades as complex, as light & as dark, as multifoliate as the actual world! This book--the 'poetic ecology' Cortázar had envisioned--is an open invitation to make yourselves at home twixt sea and loss, wine & sorrow, birth & riptide, tobacco & talk, laughter & death. Nothing human is foreign to the poet--& he brings it home with great clarity & grace. The writing & the book embody a tradition of hospitality, or as Cortázar puts it: 'Hello little black book for the late hours, cats on the prowl under a paper moon.' The injunction to save twilight stands as title--it is also exactly what the writing accomplishes. Stephen Kessler's elegant, accurate, and sometimes felicitously osé translations do these poems more than justice."--Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012)

"For those who have enjoyed Cortázar's fiction, among the most seminal and compelling of our time, here now are his wonderful poems. And for those who don't know Cortázar from a cat, it's a chance to visit his crepuscular world in all its multiple layers. A tender, experimental, humorous, meditative, jazzy, heart-breaking collection to be relished and savored slowly."--Ariel Dorfman, author of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile

Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914 to Argentinian parents and raised in Argentina, where as a young man he worked as a secondary-school teacher, university professor, and professional translator. In 1951 he moved to Paris, where he earned his primary living as a translator for UNESCO. He is regarded internationally as a modern master of the short story and his novel Hopscotch is considered a seminal work of the Latin American fiction "boom" of the 1960s. Cortázar's other books in English include Blow-Up and Other Stories, 62: A Model Kit, The Winners, All Fires the Fire, A Manual for Manuel, Cronopios and Famas, A Change of Light, We Love Glenda So Much, A Certain Lucas, Unreasonable Hours, and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. He died in Paris in 1984.

Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of ten books and chapbooks of original poetry, sixteen books of literary translation, and three collections of essays. His most recent books are Where Was I? (prose poems/memoirs), Need I Say More? (essays) and Forbidden Pleasures (new selected poems of Luis Cernuda, translation). He is also the author of a novel, The Mental Traveler, the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges, and from 1999 through 2014 was the founder and editor of The Redwood Coast Review, four-time winner of the California Library Association's PR Excellence Award. His other awards include a Lambda Literary Award and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his previous translations of Luis Cernuda, Written in Water and Desolation of the Chimera.