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Reasoning behind the Act of Striking a Spent Match Paperback – September 25, 2019
byHernán Fontanet(Author)
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In 1976, at 2:00 one winter morning, paramilitary forces broke into a house in a quiet upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Inside, sleeping, were two nineteen-year-old girls and a twenty-year-old boy. This was the house of the esteemed Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, but he was not home. Frustrated, the soldiers kidnapped the three young people—Gelman’s daughter, son, and seven-months-pregnant daughter-in-law. They disappeared into the night. In 1990, Gelman found out that his son had been executed and his remains buried in a barrel filled with sand and cement. Ten years later he was able to locate his granddaughter, who had been born in a back-door hospital and given to a pro-government family.
For Juan Gelman, one of the most celebrated Latin American poets of the twentieth century, this was one of many grim events. Born in 1930, his was a life of narrow escapes. As an Ashkenazi Jew, poet, guerrilla fighter, freethinker, and prolific journalist, he escaped three death sentences decreed by groups on both the right and the left in Argentina. He was a victim of state terrorism in that country, and still he made his voice heard.
For his poetry, Gelman was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2007, the most prestigious award in Spanish literature. Because nothing could suppress his voice, he expressed the dreams of an entire generation.
This biography explores both his writing and the physical, intellectual, and political environment in South America during Gelman’s life, a life that was punctuated by near misses, imprisonments, and the disappearance and torture of family members. Through it all we hear the ringing voice of a singular poet.
For Juan Gelman, one of the most celebrated Latin American poets of the twentieth century, this was one of many grim events. Born in 1930, his was a life of narrow escapes. As an Ashkenazi Jew, poet, guerrilla fighter, freethinker, and prolific journalist, he escaped three death sentences decreed by groups on both the right and the left in Argentina. He was a victim of state terrorism in that country, and still he made his voice heard.
For his poetry, Gelman was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2007, the most prestigious award in Spanish literature. Because nothing could suppress his voice, he expressed the dreams of an entire generation.
This biography explores both his writing and the physical, intellectual, and political environment in South America during Gelman’s life, a life that was punctuated by near misses, imprisonments, and the disappearance and torture of family members. Through it all we hear the ringing voice of a singular poet.
- Print length220 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTCU Press
- Publication dateSeptember 25, 2019
- Dimensions6 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
- ISBN-100875657141
- ISBN-13978-0875657141
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This first English-language biography of Juan Gelman is a most welcome and necessary book. It begins to set the record straight: Juan Gelman is the major but most neglected (in the anglophone world) South American poet of the late 20th and early 21st century. Poetically as experimental as César Vallejo, poethically more clear-eyed, engaged—and wounded—than Neruda, Gelman is who we need to read & study today. We need Gelman’s polyglot, at times heteronymic, nomadism with which he destabilized a fossilized language, tango’d its syntax & brought it into a wider sense of the Americas. Start with this book, and read on, into Juan Gelman’s oeuvre."
—Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh and A Nomad Poetics
"Hernan Fontanet's biography of Juan Gelman brings to the forefront the trajectory of one of the best Latin American poets of our time. Mainly based on interviews given by the poet, this biography reads like a novel. The author shares keen insight into Gelman's poetry, replete with the adventures of an existence marked by revolutionary engagement, the violence of dictatorship and also the wonder at love and poetic creation. This is an absolute must-read book!"
—Literary critic Geneviève Fabry
About the Author
HERNÁN FONTANET is an Argentinian-Spanish-American author who is intrigued by poetics that emerge in conflict and their potential influence on history. His previous publications includeThe Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo. He has served as a professor of literature at Yale, Rider, and North Carolina State Universities and was recently honored with the 2015 Pakal de Oro award for his groundbreaking work.
Product details
- Publisher : TCU Press
- Publication date : September 25, 2019
- Language : English
- Print length : 220 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0875657141
- ISBN-13 : 978-0875657141
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #10,494,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23,020 inAuthor Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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Hernán Fontanet: Literature, Criticism, and Dissent.
Professor, essayist, and novelist, Hernán Fontanet (Buenos Aires, 1966) has built a distinguished career in literature and critical research. Specializing in postcolonial political poetry, he earned his Ph.D. from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2003 and has since taught at institutions such as Yale University, North Carolina State, and Rider.
His academic work includes essential titles such as Gelman. Un poeta y su vida (Editorial Aguilar), The Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo (University Press of America), and Al sur de casi todo. Humberto Costantini y su obra (Universidad Pedagógica Provincial). Throughout his career, he has explored the power of poetry born from conflict as a tool to challenge hegemonic historical narratives.
In 2025, Fontanet ventures into fiction with Otilia, la imbécil (Ediciones de la Torre), a novel that breaks conventions and questions power structures. A finalist for the Torrente Ballester Prize and honorable mention in the Sed de Mal Noir Novel Competition, the book follows the story of Otilia Dubé, a queer, nerdy, and neurodivergent character who defies traditional stereotypes of female heroism. Otilia is not searching for redemption but for justice—and she refuses to remain silent.
Both, a religious thriller and a literary manifesto, Otilia, la imbécil delivers an intense, uncompromising narrative. It tackles themes such as mental health, abuse, and the fight for the right to be different in a society that rewards obedience and punishes dissent.
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2019Format: PaperbackI’ve always had an interest in Juan Gelman (1930-2014), one of Argentina’s finest poets, who is not well-known enough outside Argentina though he is a recipient of the Cervantes Prize (often referred to as the Spanish-language Nobel). That’s why Hernán Fontanet’s book is such a welcome and excellent introduction to the work and life of this fine and important world poet of the 20th century. Having survived the harrowing Argentine dictatorship and Dirty of War of the ‘70s and early ‘80s – but not without unimaginably tragic consequences (Gelman’s 20-year-old son and daughter-in-law were kidnapped and murdered by the government, and his grandchild was adopted out to a Uruguayan policeman) – he spent much of his life in exile in Europe, Nicaragua and finally Mexico. Gelman’s story is disturbingly representative of the experiences of thousands, if not millions, of refugees in the 20th and 21st centuries, which makes it of particular interest, especially since his is such a powerful, rare and articulate voice. He was an exile doubly, even triply, and ultimately exponentially through his political activism, his journalism and poetry, his ethnicity, language, history, the loss of his child, and for a period, even his own literary voice. He was essentially born an exile as a first generation Argentine-born Jew from a Ukrainian family, his Bolshevik father driven from Russia by Tsarist forces. And so his work and life, almost fatefully, became a profound meditation on language and exile (echoes of Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel Laureate who spent much of his life in California) which makes the book more important still, considering our harrowing times and worldwide refugee crisis coupled with the widespread rise in fascism and political oppression. That’s how this book proves itself truly universal in that its subject matter goes far beyond even its primary subject, Gelman, and would be an excellent addition to any academic course on all manner of 20th subjects, from the Cold War, fascism and anti-Semitism to Latin American guerilla movements and the almost nonstop series of refugee crises of the past two centuries. At under 200 pages, this is one of the most concise and succinct explications of the 20th century epoch, which is an impressive accomplishment by Fontanet. The author’s literary criticism is superb and his love for Gelman’s poetry is evident as the book offers a close reading of much of the poet’s oeuvre. Gelman’s language is powerful and original. In a poem called “Niños: Corea 1952”: “Little brothers…How it hurts/to learn to count by bombers/with the sky as blackboards!” He reworks or reconfigures words - “dictatorshipped, solitudness, sufferive, youme, dieslife, sunshade and untalking, unhaving, unhearting.” At times, the power of his language overwhelms as in Fontanet’s discussion of Gelman’ Carta Abierta, when I had to put the book down as tears filled my eyes coming across terms like: “unsonned” and “unfathered,” “orphaned” which happens to the parent and the child.
Gelman was a journalist as well and I was struck by this observation: “While poetry reveals the secrets of words and of existence, journalism brings what is hidden to the public, the secrets of power.” I’ve read a lot about what happened in Argentina, but this book really took it out of the mind and into the body, and while difficult to process, I am very grateful to Fontanet for giving me a much deeper understanding of not only that period, but of man’s inhumanity to man as well as the amazing strength of human endurance that Gelman is such a fine example of. A man who kept growing right up to the day he passed, evolving and changing – from a militant activist involved with the Montoneros, the main opposition insurgency to the dictatorship, to a man who saw that violence could not be the answer; from a poet writing about himself and his perceptions, to a fully developed and great artist who wrote about the exile of others and expanded his vision to include not just tango lyrics, but actual transcripts from interrogations during the Dirty War and a deep exploration and integration of the great spiritual poetic traditions of the past through the likes of St. John of God, St. Teresa de Ávila, Persian and Hindu poets, and Sephardic poets who wrote from the perspective of the kabbala. There is truly something for any serious reader, poet or student of history and social justice in the work and life of Juan Gelman. Fontanet has given us an extraordinary book.
