Jaime Sabines (1926-1999) was born in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas. He was the most influential of Mexico’s modern poets.
The ten volumes of verse he published in his lifetime are:- Horal (1950)
- La señal (1951)
- Adán Y Eva (Adam and Eve) (1952)
- Tarumba (1956)
- Diario semanario y poemas en prosa (Weekly Diary and Poems in Prose) (1961)
- Poemas sueltos (1951-1961)
- Yuria (1967)
- Maltiempo (1972)
- Algo sobre la muerte del mayor Sabines (1973)
- Otros poemas sueltos (1973-1993).
Credited by Elena Poniatowska with “taking poetry into the streets,” this truly popular poet wrote everyday reality and ordinary places, hospitals, playgrounds, brothels and bars into the body of his life’s work, and for many years made his living by means entirely unconnected with literature.
During his lifetime Sabines received numerous honours and awards, including the Xavier Villaurrutia Award (1972), the Chiapas Poetry Prize (1979), the Elias Sourasky Award (1982) and the National Literature Award (1983). His poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages, and ten years after his passing away his work continues to appear in English: Pieces of Shadow: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (trans. W.S. Merwin) appeared in 1995, and my translations of his third and fifth volumes of poetry, Adam and Eve & Weekly Diary and Poems in Prose were published by Exile Editions (Toronto) in 2004.
Nobel laureate Octavio Paz considered him to be “one of the greatest contemporary poets of our language” and the Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti considered him "An indispensible poet, not merely of Mexico but of the whole of Latin America and of the spanish tongue." A heavy smoker all his life, after enduring over thirty-five major operations, on March 19 1999 in Mexico City he succumbed to cancer--the same disease that took his father.
Weekly diary and poems in prose & Adam and Eve
(EXILE EDITIONS, 2004, TORONTO / TRANSLATION BY COLIN CARBERRY )
