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distancias / distances

Susana Thénon

Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel

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On February 17, 1968, when Argentine poet Susana Thénon was beginning to write the first poems of this collection, she wrote to critic Ana Maria Barrenechea:

In this letter I am sending you two poems of the "new" series, the only ones so far that I consider finished. The series is called distancias, though I cannot explain clearly why. I only know that these poems are related to alienation, to loneliness, to the tragic and gentle perishability of language, to the "distance" even if minimal that exists between us and ourselves, or between us and the other.

Well-versed in the classics, translator from the ancient Greek, translator of Rilke, artistic photographer, Susana Thénon belongs to what critic Ramón Xirau has called "The New Generation"--the group of post World-War II Latin American poets, born between 1924 and 1940. But Thénon's work, as the translator points out, is completely original. Among her books are Edad sin tregua (1958), Habitante de la nada (1960), de lugares extraños (1967), and Ova completa (1987). distancias/distances was first published in Argentina in 1984. Susana Thénon died in Buenos Aires in April 1990.