Few writers have embodied the heart and soul of a nation as fully as Venezuela's Rafael Cadenas. Poet, translator, and educator, the ninety-year-old Cadenas has been admired and acclaimed by Spanish-language readers for over half a century while remaining virtually unknown to US audiences. At once painterly, personal, and philosophical, Cadenas' poetry conveys both the poet's pride in and his awareness of the struggles of his native land. His poems, probing the relationships between reality and consciousness against the backdrop of intense political ferment, could not be more timely. In The Land of Mild Light, poet, editor, and broadcaster Nidia Hernandez has assembled Cadenas' most important poems in vivid translations by some of the English-speaking world's finest poets and translators, including Robert Pinsky, Forrest Gander, Sophie Cabot Black and others. The selection includes an informative introduction by poet, translator and long-time resident of Venezuela, Rowena Hill.
