FUEL AND FIRE: SELECTED POEMS 1956-76 BY FRANCISCO URONDO, TRANSLATED BY JULIA LEVERONE
Fuel and Fire, the selected works of Francisco Urondo, finds a new voice in Julia Leverone’s well-rendered translations. Poet, journalist, academic, left-wing Peronist, and guerilla fighter, Urondo, was assassinated by the US-backed Argentinian government during the Dirty War. The twenty-years of poetry represented in this collection is built on Urondo’s revolutionary ideals, and serves as a portrait of political injustice faced by the Argentinian people, extending sympathy to those suffering under Argentina’s various regimes. Through their politics, the poems land at a deeply humanist center. They are “enamored of the things of this world,” with frequent dedications to figures important to Urondo: poets, musicians, intellectuals, comrades in the Montoneros, Urondo’s own children. In the tradition of Golden-Era Spanish epics, these poems complicate their stance by extending grace towards Urondo’s political enemies. They seek justice through revolution, but also reconciliation, and “hope bitterness won’t intercept / forgiveness.”
Ultimately, these poems are concerned with the tangible world—a romanticism of the here-and-now. Urondo writes that “Cruelty doesn’t frighten me and I always lived / floored by good alcohol, a well-written book, perfectly done meat.” Such sentiments often risk bravado, but in Fuel and Fire, these small material luxuries represent the spirit and culture of the Argentinian people. His concern for his country is demonstrated again and again. He has grown tired of witnessing this “sad story of a defeated / people, of degraded families.” In his poems, language becomes the people’s weapon in the struggle for justice. “I Want to Report,” a poem that recounts a police raid of Urondo’s residence, demonstrates this idea best: “I file / this report, / especially for the loss / of weapons and poems, since both are unrecoverable. They / have been stolen from the people of the republic, / to whom they naturally belonged.”
—Review by David Brunson
