Jonathan Cohen’s translation of
Poemas de buen amor... y a veces de fantasía
shows another side entirely of Mir’s work to that seen in
Contracanto a Walt Whitman / Countersong to Walt Whitman
: intensely political in the
Countersong
, sensual and erotic in
Poems of Good Love
. There is a challenge that the translator rises to in making English language poems that are truthful to the deliberately opaquer language of this collection in comparison to the communicative clarity of Mir’s more overtly political collections. Here, Mir sets himself the task of writing about love in a way that is truthful to the Marxist historical materialism he embraced, in contrast to what he saw as the conventions of love poetry where love is seen as some kind of disembodied spiritual experience. As the introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant makes clear, there were negatives as well as positives that followed from the task Mir set himself. It is obvious that fifty years ago (1969), feminism had not yet penetrated Mir’s Latin American Marxism.