Mexico in My Heart

Selected Poems

Barnstone Willis

Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as "a superb act of restoration". Borges himself declared, "Four of the best things in America are Whitman's Leaves, Melville's Whale, the sonnets of Barnstone's The Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes...". "Mexico in My Heart" is the essential Barnstone, drawing on fifteen collections, poetry from six decades of writing and from several continents. He went to Mexico at the age of fifteen and, gathering languages and literatures, has never stopped learning.

About the Author

Willis Barnstone (1927- ) is one of America's most prolific and highly regarded translators and poets. He has spent extended periods in Mexico, Spain, France, England, Greece, and China. He began writing poetry when he was twenty years old; his first published poem appeared in the Anglo-French periodical "Points". His first book of poems published in the United States was "From This White Island", reflecting on his time on an island in Greece. One of Barnstone's closest friends and mentors was author Jorge Luis Borges. In an essay written for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Barnstone confides, "I see poetry, fiction, and scholarship as Borges did. They are the work of a writer and move into each other, separated by typography". He is a Guggenheim Fellow and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and is presently Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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