Providence

For the month of July, I've posted my English versions of excerpts from Rafael Castillo Zapata's collection Providence (Angria Ediciones, 1995) over at Antología.

The book is a sequence of 22 untitled prose poems, written in the winter and spring of 1993, when the author was a visiting professor at Brown University. I posted some of these English translations (in slightly different versions) here before, back in 2003.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Castillo Zapata was associated with the Grupo Tráfico, a collective of young poets which also included Armando Rojas Guardia, Yolanda Pantin, Igor Barreto, Alberto Márquez and Miguel Márquez.

Rafael Castillo Zapata is a professor at the Escuela de Letras of the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has been a frequent contributor to various Venezuelan newspapers and magazines and his books of poetry and essays include Árbol que crece torcido (1984), Fenomenología del bolero (1990), Estación de tránsito (1992), and El semiólogo salvaje: Roland Barthes y la semiología, 1953-1973 (1997).

If anyone reading this would like to see the original poems in Spanish, e-mail me and I'll send you a photocopy.