Malanga Chasing Vallejo

Three Rooms Press presents Launch Pad 8: An Evening with Gerard Malanga: Launch Party for Malanga Chasing Vallejo on Monday, November 11, 2014 in the Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, in Manhattan. Doors open at 6:30; reading begins at 7. The event is free. Copies of Malanga Chasing Vallejo: Selected Poems of César Vallejo with New Translations and Notes by Gerard Malanga will be available for purchase and signing.

In the forceful, staggering poetry of César Vallejo, poet and photographer Gerard Malanga discovered a kindred spirit. Driven by a deep sense of spiritual kinship and with the encouragement of Vallejo’s widow, Malanga’s translations reveal a profound perspective on Vallejo’s work that brings into focus the brutal desperation behind his genius. Malanga Chasing Vallejo gathers eighty-two of Vallejo’s poems in a bilingual edition that is marked by the spiritual connection between poet and translator.

Malanga will give a very special reading, including his translations and other new work, plus poet Lydia Cortes will be on had to read select Vallejo poems in the original Spanish. It’ll be a night of literature, language, good food and drink, and the best company in town.
 
People are talking about MALANGA CHASING VALLEJO:

“Gerard Malanga is an artist who never apologizes, never explains, and he finds kinship in Vallejo, who died in his late forties several years before Malanga was born. Yet on the evidence of these translations the two are virtually interchangeable. This in turn gives the young poet—in his twenties when he did this work—the courage of his convictions, the essential room to breathe. Malanga chasing Vallejo, or maybe Vallejo chasing Malanga, and the next thing we know they’re, both of  them, airborne.” —Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems
 
“The versions in this generous selection have an appealing vigor and directness, and the correspondence with Vallejo’s widow will speak to anyone who is seriously interested in translation.” —Michael Palma, Inferno: A New Verse Translation
 
“Malanga lives and breathes in what he sees in Vallejo—a fellow agent for a better world.” —Djelloul Marbrook, Far from Algiers
 
“Now and again a poet is found who is a complex of so many capabilities and patterns, all relating but none so isolating in its practice that the one is lost to the other. I have marvelled for years at Gerard Malanga’s articulate endurance as a poet—and also as a photographer of singular power. . . . In short, he reminds me as do few others of what poets might be in a common world if only they could or would.” —Robert Creeley, Chancellor, The Academy of American Poets, 1999-2005
 
About GERARD MALANGA:
Gerard Malanga is acclaimed as a poet, photographer, and filmmaker. He was born in the Bronx in 1943. He is the author of a dozen poetry collections, the most recent being No Respect: New & Selected Poems, the four-volume fanzine set AM: Archives Malanga, and Tomboy & Other Tales. His photography books include Resistance to Memory and Screen Tests Portraits Nudes. He was a founding editor of Interview magazine, alongside Andy Warhol. Malanga lives in upstate New York.