Content area
Full text
Abstract:
Salomón de la Selva (1893-1959) was a Nicaraguan writer/activist who authored many books of verse in Spanish, but only one in English: Tropical Town, And Other Poems (1918). Published in New York by John Lane-and regarded by Silvio Sirias as the first book of English verse published in the U.S. by a Latin American-Tropical Town exhibits a curious dynamic of avant-garde impulse: radically subversive in invoking counter-politics resisting U.S. colonial transnationalism, yet tending toward inherited, traditional aesthetic forms of poetry meant to legitimize Selva's Latin American identity with an impression of authority that contiguous Modernist experimental poetries could not. Through its sympathy for the U.S. immigrant's nostalgia for homeland, coupled with express disapproval of U.S. international affairs, Tropical Town leaves a poetic record that challenges presuppositions about the integral relationships between ethos, aesthetics, and consciousness vis-à-vis assumed understandings of what constitutes radical poetry in the Modernist moment.
Although better known in the world of Spanish letters, Salomón de la Selva is a shadowy figure in the history of U.S. poetry. He was born on March 20, 1893, to be the eldest of ten siblings, in León, Nicaragua-a rare fact in the dearth of information we have about his early life.1 According to Edgardo Buitrago and Carlos Tünerman, de la Selva lived in Nicaragua until the age of eleven, when he left his family and took a scholarship to live and study in the Northeastern U.S. We don't know for sure where he lived in the U.S. from the age of eleven to twenty-one, when, in 1914, he served as Rubén Darío's translator in New York, and the record becomes clearer. In 1915, de la Selva collaborated, with the American poet Thomas Walsh, to publish a translation of Eleven Poems of Rubén Dario, and henceforth his reputation grew. He was mentored by his compatriot Darío and the Dominican poet Pedro Enriquez Ureña, and in 1916 de la Selva was appointed to the faculty of Williams College, to teach Spanish and French. He soon befriended Edna St Vincent Millay, at the time a senior at Vassar, and sowed the seed of a profound, if short-lived, relationship between the two poets.2 Like Millay, de la Selva preferred formal verse in English3-especially the sonnet, iambic meter,...